On Monday I shared my thoughts about a a new system I had stumbled up (invented?) to become unstuck and get more things done. Now, at the end of a full week at work using it, I thought I would look back on how things have panned out and make an initial judgement on whether the system has actually helped at all.
The first thing I should note is that I don’t recall working so hard (just in case anyone important is reading this I should point out that, obviously, I always work hard). I feel tired and I am looking forward to some downtime this weekend. But I also feel satisfied that I have got a lot done, more than I would have done if I had just come to work and tried to do some stuff. I have also taken less breaks, partly because I want to save money by not buying coffee so much, partly because a lot of colleagues are not in work at the moment so I have eaten lunch on the go, but also because I have had a singular focus on wanting to make progress.
I have named my system the Action Grid. This week it has had 10 columns (projects) which I think is perhaps one or two too many. For each project I planned a next action for each day (either in advance or from one day to the next). I have made progress on all of these projects, just missing a couple of actions on a couple of projects on Monday and finding myself running out of time for three actions today, although I could probably achieve these if I hadn’t also decided to spend the last couple of hours of the week reviewing everything, catching up on email and setting things up for next week instead. Here is a picture of my Action Grid as at the middle of Friday afternoon:
Through the week I have completed quite a lot of tasks that I KNOW I would not have completed if I hadn’t been trialing my Action Grid system. I have written to two old friends, something I have been meaning to do since Christmas in one case and since last summer(!) in the other. I have finished sorting out my research-paper archive in my filing cabinets (which I started doing last summer). I have phoned the media company to cancel my Sky Movies subscription, thereby saving ~£12 per month (so if I had done this a year ago like I could have done I would be almost £150 richer…). I have made substantial progress in completing my database of Marine Science degree alumni (adding 2017, 2008, 2007 and 2006 – just 2005 and 2004 to go now). I have spent at least an hour each day working through some Matlab workshops to brush up my Matlab programming skills. I have moved forward a worthwhile amount on a couple of work (School management) projects.
I think that it was particularly useful to decide on the projects that were going to get my focus this week and to adopt a strategy of trying to nudge each of these forwards a little bit every day. Some days I made a fairly substantial step, other days I just printed a document or sent an email, but every day I moved forwards on each project. One week is not enough to judge the usefulness of this system for me, especially as this is a summer week when there are few distractions in terms of teaching sessions, meetings etc. and when the university is generally pretty quiet. But I know that in previous years I have struggled to be very productive during such weeks so this one has been quite a revelation. Suffice it to say that I will certainly be giving my Action Grid system another go next week.
Tim O'Hare 