One of the problems you can run into when you have so much to do, is actually doing anything! There is so much to focus on what you have to do, you don’t know where to start and so don’t achieve anything. I have certainly been guilty of that in the past, and it is a funny thing but it seems that since I left paid employment outside the home I have tended to achieve less rather than more than when I was working part time. I needed to come up with a strategy to get me off my bum and getting things done again.
We discussed this at the Choko Tree yearly directors meeting last October and decided we needed to come up with something quickly. Consequently we started working on it and came up with this idea –
We would get hold of a piece of A2 thick cardboard, draw it up so that there were 8 columns across the top (one for each day of the week plus 1 ). The extra column when allowed us to divide the sheet into 15 lines down the sheet, each one corresponding with to an hour of our waking day, with allowance for lunch and tea.
This gave us a series of approximately 60mm x 35mm squares covering all hours of the week. The idea was then to draw up a series of cards covering the activities we wanted to program in for the week and stick them onto the appropriate squares with blutack, thus allowing us to get the most out of each day.. The cards might read “washing” or “sowing planting and potting on” or whatever other activities we had going. It was a great idea in theory so we put it together and pressed it into service by sticking it on the side of the fridge, which we walk past regularly.
Unfortunately a great theory didn’t translate that well into practice. If we were to program our following week each Sunday, half of Sunday would be taken up just working out the program, because the process was pretty complicated. There was also a certain amount of guesswork because we could not be exactly sure how long a given activity might last and a setback early in the week could put everything else out. It also did not really allow for unexpected issue or time taken to do something on the spur of the moment.
Rather than succumb to analysis paralysis, we needed a simpler idea.
In the end what I came up with was elegantly simple, flexible and seems to work for us. I put down a list of the tasks which I wish to complete. Some are short term and some are longer term which will need to be worked on over time to be able to complete them. I type them onto an A4 sheet in fairly large font (20 calibri) with a hollow square bullet at the front of each entry. This gets printed off and placed on the side of the fridge and there is a pen nearby so that we can tick off activities which have been completed.
On Sunday afternoon we review the lists, delete any completed items and then add any new actions to be carried out the following week. This list is then placed on the side of the fridge again. Some items for the weekly list are extracted from the website to do list so that I can chip away at those and some are more short term stuff. It is surprisingly satisfying to tick a completed item off the list!
If you want a copy of the list you can modify yourself it can be downloaded from here.
