How to plan and organise your work – Part 1
I have always been a little all over the place when it comes to organising my work. I remember sitting in team meetings when colleagues would precisely set out what they were going to do that week, while I’d come out with vague descriptions of projects I needed to do some work on, always conscious that I mostly repeated the same thing every time.
This is not to say that I don’t get work done. I just do it in a much more chaotic way. I flit between tasks. I set out what I’ll do each day but then immediately rebel and switch things around. And of course I procrastinate, especially when something feels a little scary or unpleasant to do.
It’s nearly a year since I started working on my business full-time, and the same issues I had in my job have definitely cropped up, if less painfully. But after a lot of experimenting I have found a way to organise both my tasks and my days which seems to be working for me.
I’ll write about my daily schedule in the next post, but I want to start with how I have reframed my tasks to make them feel more joyful.
I am always happy to spend time bookbinding, or taking photos, or writing, or learning something new. So much so that they feel like indulgences, and not really like work at all. But I’d look at my marketing to-do list and dread doing anything on it: pitching, working on SEO, doing markets… They all either scared or bored me.
There’s a little trick I love, when I remember to use it. When I catch myself thinking I ‘need to’ or ‘must’ do something, I’ll correct it to ‘I want to’. It’s surprisingly effective. Thinking ‘I want to hoover’ (because I want my house to be clean) feels a lot better than ‘I must hoover’. So what if I reclassified my tasks to make them fit what I naturally enjoy doing?
My lists used to be ‘making’, ‘marketing’ and ‘business’. Now they are ‘making’, ‘photography’, ‘writing’ and ‘learning’. Pitching comes under writing, and photography if I need some extra product shots. Working on SEO comes under learning and writing. Getting ready for markets came under learning (researching what I needed to have in place) and making (signs, extra stock), with a little writing thrown in (the applications).
I can’t fit absolutely everything very neatly, especially some admin tasks, but it’s my concept, so I stretch it as needed. Checking and ordering supplies counts as part of making. Anything I’m not entirely comfortable doing goes into learning. It forces me to look at them under a different light. Paper stock is essential to making more books. My tax return will be a learning opportunity.
It also helps take the emphasis away from the aspect I would naturally want to avoid. Breaking down a pitch into learning about a publication, doing a little writing and taking some photos makes it much more approachable, and even enjoyable, than thinking of it as a marketing task.
Separating items into what would be different functions in a business is largely senseless when there is only one person doing all the jobs. I don’t need to organise my time into business departments. I just need to get the tasks done, using the skills I have: making, photography, writing, learning.
Questions to ask yourself
What parts of my work do I find easy and/or enjoyable?
What do those activities have in common? Which categories can they be organised into?
What other skills do I have that I find enjoyable? Could they be additional categories?
How can I look at the tasks I don’t enjoy differently? Which of my new categories can they fit in?
