Manic Monday

While I know today is a national holiday, working from home means that there aren't any holidays (or weekends necessarily). Luckily, I am working from home on yarn design projects, so it all feels pretty weekendly.



This morning, I got up and while eating my breakfast began thinking about my priorities for the...well I don't think that I had a timeframe for these priorities. Because after looking over my list, I realized that it is very likely that I can get them all done today! In fact, in the following hour and a half I was able to knock out three of the projects on that list (while scheduling the details of this afternoon's photo shoot).

If I can get this much real work done in only 90 minutes (which also included some technological snafus now that I think of it), then what limits this productivity?

For me, most of it is having too many projects in my mind to be able to get them all down on paper. Let alone make incremental progress on those projects. With this in mind, I have dove into some of the Getting Things Done model. In fact, just implementing the "capture" of this process has helped tremendously. To do this, I have gotten in the habit of taking my planner notebook with me EVERYWHERE. At lunch with my husband, I even pull it out, because typically things come up that have an action required. So when it comes up, I write it down.

Just now, I took a quick break to add q-tips to my shopping list.

Once I write it down, it no longer takes up space in my brain. In fact, before I wrote down the note about q-tips, the idea of buying q-tips kept interrupting my writing. Now they are not interrupting my thoughts like they were.

The point is that interruptions don't always take the form of a phone call, the cat yelling to go outside, water finally starting to boil on the stove, or other things that take on a presence in the physical world. Many times, the interruptions for me are the mental ideas or lists that I want to be remembering. By simply "capturing" them into my planner, they stop pestering my psyche.

I wonder how much additional value adding in the next steps outlined in Getting Things Done will bring to my daily (work) life.