Tag: time management

All The Things [en]

I’m writing this blog post thanks to Jeffrey. Because I kind of said I’d be able to blog today, and it’s just a bit past 8.30pm, the dishes are done, the cat has had his meds and insulin (so have I – the meds, not the insulin), even the clean laundry is in the cupboard. So instead of clumsily playing through practice deals on Funbridge or hanging out on the socials, I’m here writing.

I’ve been sick most of the last week. Two days down under a post-vaccine ton of bricks (I’d kind of wilfully forgotten how nasty my 2nd and 3rd Covid boosters had been when I decided to start getting the shots again), but a sore throat before that, and after that, and a lost voice because I talked too much on said sore throat, some lingering fever, and now a nasty cough. Anyway. It’s getting better but my friend codeine and I have had to start hanging out again.

I’ve been back to work, three half-days a week, since mid-October. It’s going pretty much as expected, meaning OK, but tiring. Work, but also “just life”. Even before my accident, I struggled with the fact that I had too many wants for the time life gives us. Having less energy all these last months has put this issue on the front of the scene – in addition to the fact it is tightly linked to the complications I developed after my accident. And now that most of the symptoms have abated, and that I’m feeling more “back to normal” each month, my expectations of what I should be able to do are rising fast beyond where they should be remaining.

So, I’m trying to tackle the issue. A few things are becoming clear. One is that everybody seems to be struggling to stay on top of their lives, not only us hyperactives. There is something about the world we live in that drags us along: so many opportunities and temptations, the incentive to be happy, live a meaningful life, take care of oneself but also of others, pursue success but also slow down. But there is also the increasing administrative complexity of our lives. Technology has made it easier for me to pay my bills (in Switzerland at least: open letter, whip out phone, scan QR code, confirm, done), but it has also contributed (hand in hand with runaway capitalism applied to everything, from private companies to public services) to irrevocably breaking the processes that make things happen in our organisations. Any interaction becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. And it’s not just because the person on the phone (if there is one) is a script-fed robot (they aren’t always, by far, at least here), but because the systems are broken, tasks get lost, not mentioning bugs in the software, and nobody knows how the whole machine is supposed to work anymore so it can be fixed.

So when I want to move my insurance 3rd pillar into a normal one, it takes me 4 phone calls and e-mails over 3 months to make it happen. And each time the person on the end of the line is listening well, taking the issue seriously, looking for traces of my last contact (gone), asking for some information again, promising me that they are on it and that this time, the order is underway and will be dealt with.

This is just one example. You have yours, too, I’m sure. I remember a time when I could call customer service, wait on hold for a bit, and have my problem solved. Now I call customer service with a question, they actually create an additional problem on top of the one I was trying to solve, I spend an hour on the phone with them first in disbelief trying to clarify that they actually did do the stupid thing I feared they would do but they assured me they wouldn’t, getting them to admit it was a mistake, escalate me to somebody who actually can’t do anything for me that I couldn’t do myself.

This, of course, is a separate problem from the fact I want to Do All The Things, but it doesn’t help. Because on top of working to earn a living, we need to spend hours managing the Admin of Life. Those hours are not available for other stuff.

You should listen to the podcast episode Your Call Is Important to Us by 99% Invisible. Years ago I tried launching the World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day. And I can totally see myself doing Admin Nights at my coworking space (listen to the podcast). Amongst all the other things I want to organise there: board game afternoons, puzzle days, drop-in tea parties…

All The Things, see.

I realised, recently, that my expectation that I should be able to find a way to manage my life and feel reasonably on top of things was most certainly an illusion. It’s not me who is failing, it’s the objective that’s out of touch with reality. You know, just like we realised at one point that it wasn’t fair to make women believe they could have a full-time work life (“like men”), be great invested parents, manage the household and have hobbies and take care of themselves, oh yeah, and social life. So, I’m trying to accept that there will always be something falling through the cracks. Instead of building a system without any cracks, I need to shift into building a system that allows for them.

Maybe I can officially decide that I’m not checking that the reimbursements from the insurance for the cats‘ medical bills are correct. I don’t do it, but it’s always on my to-do list, because one should check this kind of thing to run personal finances well, right? So, a type of management that is less airtight, but with safety nets. Which takes into account that of all the balls we are juggling, some are glass and cannot be dropped, whilst others are rubber and will bounce back up if we let them escape.

One of the ways I’ve tried to tackle my “activity overload” issue is by readjusting my expectations. How many hikes in a year? How many times can I actually manage to go to judo per month? How many stays at the chalet? How many blog posts a month? Using historical data seemed a good place to start. My calendar is not very reliable for that, because I sometimes make plans I don’t follow, and they stay in the calendar – or go off on a hike with a friend on the week-end and hadn’t written it down. But my Google Timeline know where I was, and when. I exported it, chopped it up so I had just the couple of years I was interested in in a file (the whole thing is massive), and fed it to Gemini along with an export of my calendar. I usually use ChatGPT, but I had the hope that Gemini might be able to plug into my Google Photos and get some extra data from there – but no luck, not for me. I stuck with Gemini because it clearly did a way better job than ChatGPT analysing my data. Of course, as usual with LLMs, what seemed like a straightforward missing turned into a long series of prompts and reprompts, but I’m happy to say I did get somewhere, with less anguish and more fun (if not less time) than if I had painstakingly done it by hand.

All the while I had the nagging feeling that maybe I was tackling this wrong. A feeling that I was hovering around the entrance of a rabbit-hole signposted “over-engineering”. I confess, I’m no stranger to this flaw.

I know I need to set priorities. Priorities is the issue on a daily basis. Do I take time to write, or rest? Do I spend time with the cat outside or do a puzzle? Do I see a friend or write a blog post? Do I deal with my taxes next week-end or pick up the future of blogging/socials ball and write about that? Or spend some time volunteering in the diabetic cat community? Or…? Or…? And so on.

So far it’s become clear to me that as long as my life priorities are not sorted, it’s going to make choosing between writing a blog post, sorting through my boxes of stuff, hiking or seeing a friend pretty tricky. People keep telling me that I have too much on my plate and I need to drop something, but there is nothing there I feel like I can drop. I’m not going to stop judo. I’m not going to shut down the diabetic cat community. I’m not going to stop writing, or skiing, or hiking, or sailing. I’m not going to stop having friends. And so on… again.

Priorities. What is most important? What is less important? What is more meaningful to me? It hit me today that beyond the pervasive Life Overwhelm of our times, the way this difficulty to choose and prioritise expresses itself in my life is that I am interested in too many things. It may sound trivial said like this, but it’s not. I suffer from too much “want”, too much “oh, how exciting”, “love this”. It’s as if my threshold for something to be interesting was very very low. It doesn’t take much to get me interested! Just like I’m an easy customer when it comes to food, I’m an easy customer for many things. This feels like it must be related to the “ADHD weak filter” which makes it difficult to distinguish between signal and noise amongst the available information. Maybe I’m stretching things a bit, but for me, it’s as if my “filter” for what is something I want to do or am interested in is letting pretty much everything through, resulting in this deluge of “wants”, projects, interests, etc. (The “weak filter” has advantages when it comes to thinking outside the box or being creative, but that’s another story). So, maybe in addition to setting some guidelines and realistic expectations for the operational management of my time (e.g. max n social activities in a given week), it would make sense to work on that filter a bit, and make it a little more discriminating.

I can’t make my ADHD go away. However, what I can do is identify which core needs these various activities satisfy, or not, for example. Maybe, when I then look at my overall activity schedule (hi Gemini), I will notice that it is lopsided, in terms of which needs are met or underrepresented. This would be a way of tightening my filter a bit. Another angle that is important is if a given activity or interest requires regularity to be feasible. This is easy, with physical activities: if I’m doing judo, I need to train regularly enough. I can’t just “go and do judo” twice a year – my body won’t let me. Same with hiking and skiing, they require a certain level of fitness that comes from regular practice. Blogging, however, can be neglected for months or years and then come back to. Not surprisingly, activities that don’t require regular practice might be more likely to be deprioritised, although they might actually be important.

I’m a firm believer in tracking things. Get that feedback loop going first, rather than just set objectives and despair trying to reach them. How things are now is a great starting point for introducing incremental changes in the desired direction. So, for example, this last week or so I’ve been thinking I should track my hours of intense interaction (because although I enjoy it, it exhausts me) and also, how much time I write, when I do write. I know I already blogged (more than once probably) about the problem of monster blog posts like this one, versus shorter writing. See, I’ve been writing for two hours now. Crazy, right, when you think it took you about 10 minutes or so to get down to here if you’re reading everything. I’m hungry (yes I had dinner, I’m hungry again/already) and tired.

So, although I would have many more things to say (see, another filter thing: each day brings at least 2-3 blog post ideas – keeping up is just not possible unless I spend all my time writing…), I will wrap up this blog post, pick a title for it, publish, and go to bed.

With a bit of luck I’ll blog again soon.

80% Capacity [en]

These last weeks I’ve been obsessing over queuing theory. Well, actually, about how queuing theory can help me deal with my hyperactive calendar. Want to read up? link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4. I’ll read them too – when I have time (haha).

Seriously, what I have no understood is that I need to keep at least 20% of “unallocated” time. The queue is in my head and in my to-do list. Get back to such-and-such about having lunch together. Plan this or that activity. Buffer time means flexibility and higher reactivity. Does it mean I will have to do less? Maybe. Or not. Because time is what time is. I’m using it up anyway, whatever I do with it. So: I’ll probably be doing as much, but differently.

Which brings me to the fundamental question of what I want to spend my time doing. What’s important? What gets priority? In this episode of Hidden Brain, there was mention of an exercise in which the subject counted how many times they had done a certain valuable activity, and how many times were left in their lifetime. In this example, it was eating with their parents. Realising there was a finite number of opportunities for this valuable moment helped them prioritise this commitment.

As I was trying to figure out how to do deal with my ever-longer list of interests and activities, I stumbled upon this article (this was before the queuing theory lightbulb) which lead me to a “needs assessment” tool. That was interesting: what are my core needs, and how does the stuff I do fit in fulfilling them? Am I spending a lot of energy on stuff that doesn’t fulfil them? That was good food for thought.

Anyway, I’ve now understood I need to make space in my calendar. At least a “me time” evening per week. (Not that easy when I already have judo on Monday and Friday, and singing on Wednesday.) Also, how about keeping a Saturday a month to deal with domestic affairs? That’s not free time, but it’s a class of activities I should reserve time for. And maybe I should have a week-end a month without any plans? Does being at the chalet count as a plan? (I’m afraid it probably does…)

I’ve been reconnecting with my desire to “design” my living space so it can serve me better. I’ve two weeks set aside for that in October, and enough ideas to keep my busy two whole months. I’ve started doing a little planning so I can adjust my expectations and have a chance of seeing them squeeze into reality.

I have a very hard time with the concrete step of keeping time free in my calendar. Each empty evening, each free week-end day is courted by a long list of candidates who would like to make good use of this time. I struggle. I try to resist. Sometimes I manage.

Example: this week-end, I had a plan with a friend. A two-day plan. It was fun and exciting and we were looking forward to it. Unfortunately we miscommunicated and it fell through (no hard feelings on either side). My initial impulse was to recycle the plan with somebody else. Who would I extend the invitation to? I managed to stop and breathe before sending out messages. I have been over-busy these last weeks, I haven’t cleaned my flat since I got back from holidays, I am like butter stretched over too much bread, as Bilbo Baggins would say.

I decided to wait, digest the disappointment of the canceled plan. Maybe I could still do something Saturday – not a two-day thing, but something on my list of fun activities to do with people? I sent out feelers.

I started thinking about what would be reasonable. Oh, reasonable! Of course, have a quiet week-end at home. I have a big pile of admin tasks screaming at me (I’ve been putting my hands over my ears for the last few weeks), and did I mention how dirty my flat was? Oh, and maybe just having some downtime would be nice.

I realised that one of the reasons I was tempted to organise a “fun activity” to make up for the cancelled one was that I wasn’t certain that I would be able to give myself “off time” if I stayed home. My whole week-end could disappear in tasks like cleaning, laundry, tidying, shopping, doing the dishes, paying bills, getting back to people, ordering stuff, planning the next weeks and my holidays…

I finally managed to go the “quiet week-end” route. The more I thought about it, the more the prospect of being able to clean my flat felt attractive. I made a deal with myself: do my “stuff” in the morning, and take time off in the afternoon. I managed (made good progress on the puzzle you can see – finished it tonight).

It felt really good to have time to tidy things up. It’s nice to be in a place that is at least minimally clean. My conscience is lighter, having knocked off a couple of admin emergencies from my list (there are more). I’m hanging on to this feeling so that when comes the time to decide what I’m doing with my next weeks and week-ends, I remember that this is also something I want to do – not just wandering around mountains, hanging out on the lake, being with people, putting together jigsaw puzzles or reading a book. (And I could go on.)

Layer one: remember “domestic time” and “me time”.
Layer two: add in “buffer time”.

This feels stressful. It feels like I won’t be able to do everything I want to do and enjoy doing. But I’m hanging in there and trying to ignore that feeling.

Bien utiliser son temps hors de l'urgence [fr]

[en] How do you deal with making good use of your time when there is no urgency or looming deadlines?

Ça, c’est mon challenge de l’été. Il n’y a pas d’urgence, pas d’huile sur le feu. C’est le moment de penser un peu long terme (et je le fais) et donc de s’attaquer à des choses comme:

  • cette série de ebooks que je pourrais écrire
  • me lancer dans la production de contenus e-learning (dieu sait qu’il y a de la matière)
  • bosser sur mon site web “pro” (je suis en train de le faire, mais en-dehors de mes séances avec Fabienne je suis un peu molle du genou, par exemple pour la version anglaise)
  • préparer des formations de base et les proposer à gauche et à droite
  • réfléchir à mon positionnement…

Et côté perso:

  • trier mes photos (argh!)
  • faire les nettoyages de printemps (je fais, suivant l’impulsion que m’a donnée la visite de Natacha d’adndeco)

You want me to do something? Really?L’été, c’est aussi:

  • regarder pousser les tomates sur mon balcon
  • faire de la voile
  • décrocher et déconnecter en partant en vacances
  • prendre le temps… pour vivre.

Alors là au milieu, je peine un poil à être aussi efficace que je le voudrais. Surtout qu’il y a beaucoup de choses qui flottent un peu dans mon paysage professionnel.

Comment je fais, du coup? J’ai des trucs. Reste à penser à les utiliser, à trouver celui qui va marcher dans cette situation précise, et… le faire.

Limiter mon temps de travail

Ça paraît paradoxal mais c’est un truc qui marche. Plus j’ai de temps, en général, moins je suis efficace. (Ça va avec mon côté un peu procrastinatrice, qui a besoin d’avoir un délai dans le viseur pour se bouger.)

Donc je bloque 2h ou 3h pour travailler. Le reste du temps j’ai congé.

Planifier à plus long terme

S’il n’y a pas d’urgences urgentes, essayer de planifier un peu quand je vais faire “toutes ces choses” que j’ai enfin le temps de faire me montre qu’en fait il n’y a pas tant de temps que ça à disposition.

Je commence par faire une liste de tout ce qui me trotte dans la tête “à faire”, j’organise un peu tout ça en projets/next actions, je sors mon calendrier et je pose des choses. OK, demain je fais ça, après-demain ça… Purée puis ça en fait ça devrait être fait dans 10 jours, donc entre les 5 autres trucs ça va être chaud… Idéalement, sur quelques semaines (plus j’ai un peu de peine encore).

Mettre des délais internes

La brochure pour la nouvelle formation, elle sera faite d’ici mercredi. Hop. Comme ça. Le problème avec ça c’est si on n’a pas tendance à tenir ses engagements avec soi-même. Impliquer une autre personne peut aider (par exemple, je dis à la chef de projet “mercredi prochain je te donne les textes”).

Ça va avec la planification à long terme, parce qu’on commence à placer des choses au moment où on se dit: “OK, je veux lancer les formations e-learning en janvier, donc…”

Tomates du balconFaire des tomates

Histoire de ne pas glander durant son temps de travail, la méthode pomodoro peut aider à rester concentré. “Je fais 4 pomodoro par jour” par exemple.

Rendre tout ça ludique

La “gamification”, c’est pas que pour les applications sociales. On peut aussi l’utiliser pour rendre certaines tâches moins ennuyeuses. Je me souviens de cet exemple que j’avais lu quelque part étant ado: pour faire le ménage, un couple se répartissait les tâches. Je fais l’aspi, tu nettoies la salle de bains. Une alarme est réglé sur 20 minutes (par exemple). Chaque fois qu’elle sonne, c’est la course pour l’éteindre, car le premier arrivé choisit s’il veut garder la même tâche pour le prochain round ou bien échanger.

Quand j’ai du mal à décider par quoi commencer, je mets mes différentes tâches sur des petits cartons. J’utilise une minuterie (15, 20, 30 minutes selon l’humeur et le genre de tâche). Je tire au sort un carton pour la première tranche — quand ça sonne, j’arrête et je tire un nouveau carton. J’ai aussi trouvé de l’inspiration pour cette idée dans le “Weekly Home Blessing” de Flylady.

Vous avez des trucs, vous? Là, ce que je m’en vais faire c’est un peu de planification “long terme” — je crois que c’est ça qu’il me faut juste maintenant.

Cockerel, Anybody? [en]

[fr] Plein de nouvelles!

So, what’s up?

I’m in the UK. I’m helping Aleika find a new home for one of her cockerels, Hercule Poirot. He’s a super-good-looking guy, and he takes his job with the hens very seriously.

Hercule Poirot Head Shots 4

Do you know anybody in the UK who has chickens (hens!) and would like a stunning rooster to look over them? Do let me know.

I have had a week of holiday planned here for months, and in between Safran’s death and Somak’s appointment as Professor of Physics at Presidency University, Kolkata (so… back to India for the three of them!), we decided I would be taking Quintus back with me.

Quintus in Birmingham 6

Do you know any good people in Calcutta/Kolkata? I’m particularly interested in getting in touch with

  • people who are into organic farming/gardening in the area
  • expats who have done the move from the UK sometime during the last three years or so (moving companies! shipping! organisation!)

For those who may not know, Bagha was also initially Aleika’s cat, and I adopted him when they moved from India to the UK, coming back home from India with him in my luggage. So, a little sense of déjà vu here 😉

On the work front, the OrangeCinema Official Bloggers project is underway. I spent a few days grading final reports for the course on social media and online communities I co-direct in Lausanne (some excellent, I have to say) and we’re preparing to welcome students for the third year of the course in September. I am looking for more writers for the ebookers.ch travel blog, and eclau is looking forward to everyone in Lausanne hearing more about coworking through the opening of a second space there, La Muse (which started out in Geneva). I will by the way be attending the Coworking Europe Conference 2012 in Paris (and probably speaking, will confirm in a couple of weeks). I have rekindled my enthusiasm for organising Bloggy Friday meetups (please do come to the next one, July 6th!) There’s more to say, but this is becoming a long paragraph 😉

What else should I tell you? I’m reading Drive, by Dan Pink, a fascinating book on motivation — and you should too, whether you’re interested in how your own motivation works, or in how to keep other people motivated (I’m thinking of taking a Sagmeister). I’ve started a group on Facebook for people in and around my area (and a bit further out) who like growing stuff on their balcony and elsewhere. I’m in the process of figuring out how to continue juggling judo, sailing, and singing (answer: be super organized). On the way to Birmingham, I stopped by for a day to stay with Steph and meet Emile The Cat.

Emile The Cat 1

I might not have told you, but Steph is my organisation inspiration (amongst many other things, which include being a very good friend!) and so I seized the occasion to face my calendar head-on and get a few holiday/travel dates sorted out. Short version: I don’t have a week-end available until June 2013 (don’t panic for me: it includes week-ends I have blocked out as “must stay at home and relax”).

I’ve also been realizing what a long way I’ve come regarding my organisational and time-management skills. Oh, I still fall in the pit every now and again, but a few discussions lately with people who seem to share the same core issues I have (had?) with time management, procrastination, perfectionism made me realize how far I have traveled.

I’m sure there was other stuff I wanted to say/blog about, but that’s the lovely thing about a blog, right? I can just write about it tomorrow, or the day after, or when I think of it. “Just.”

The Freelancer and The Open-Ended Projects [en]

[fr] Les projets à long terme et assez ouverts peuvent être un piège pour l'indépendant, quand la charge de travail augmente soudainement pour plusieurs projets menés en parallèle.

Business has been good this year. 2007-2008 was pretty disastrous, 2009 saw me get back on my feet, and 2010 is really taking off. I’m happy.

With business taking off come more challenges for the freelancer. One of them is open-ended projects, which are especially tricky for the time-management-challenged soloist.

Often, these projects are exciting in nature, having a wider scope than more time-limited projects like “give a talk” or “a day of training”. They’re also interesting financially because they allow the freelancer to secure larger sums of money with a single client, or offer a monthly retainer (something anybody with monthly bills can appreciate).

But they can contain a trap — trap I’ve found myself caught in. The trap is double.

They go on and on

By definition, open-ended projects are open. They might have an end, but if it’s many months in the future, they might as well not have one. This means there is always something to do. They don’t have the comforting “after date X in the near future (next week), this is over”. It’s not a bad thing as such, but it can be stress-inducing.

They have variable workload

The workload for open-ended projects is spread over weeks or months, but it is not always constant. It might be light for a few weeks, and then suddenly require 30 hours of work in a week. This can easily conflict with other work engagements, especially if they are also open-ended, unless the freelancer plans very carefully.

A third trap?

I almost want to add a third trap to these projects: they are often ill-defined and subject to scope creep. Again, careful planning can limit those problems, but is your typical freelancer in love with careful planning?

I’ve discovered that having one or two open-ended projects going on at the same time is roughly as much as I can handle. Maybe three, depending on the degree of open-endedness. At one point this year, I had five in parallel, and that was just impossible.

So, with more work opportunities comes the obligation to start choosing better, and managing a balance between regular gigs, which give some financial security, and short-term ones, which are usually more interesting from a return-on-time-invested perspective.

L'importance du temps structuré [fr]

[en] I've realised that I feel better when my time is at least somewhat structured, so I need to figure out how to manage my "free time" (when there is lots of it, like during this staycation/holistay) a bit differently than "not plan anything and see what I feel like doing".

Ces derniers mois, et je dirais même cette dernière année, j’ai fait des progrès énormes en ce qui concerne la gestion de mon temps. Par cela, je veux dire que j’ai cessé de courir, cessé d’être aussi stressée, cessé de jouer toujours toujours toujours les pompiers. J’ai une vision assez claire, sur le court terme, de ce que je dois faire, je le fais, et en grande partie grâce au fait que j’ai maintenant un bureau séparé de mon appartement, j’ai aussi récupéré mes soirées, mes week-ends, et même des mini-vacances au chalet.

Bref, ça va plutôt bien et je suis très contente de moi.

Par contre, je remarque pendant cette période des fêtes, où j’ai décidé de lever le pied et de prendre des “vacances à la maison”, que si j’ai bien réussi à trouver un équilibre durant ma vie “travaillée”, ce n’est pas si simple pour le temps de loisir. J’avais d’ailleurs déjà constaté ça, à plus petite échelle, lors d’un ou deux week-ends très très tranquilles.

Je me rends donc compte que j’ai besoin de structurer mon temps (jusqu’à un certain point!) pour me sentir bien. Ça ne veut pas dire que je dois faire en sorte d’avoir un “programme” qui remplit ma vie du début à la fin, mais les longues journées de “libre” qui se suivent, ce n’est pas top non plus.

Tiens, c’était déjà pas top durant les longues vacances d’été interminables quand j’étais enfant.

J’ai aussi appris à quel point il est important pour moi d’avoir un minimum de routine dans mes journées.

Du coup, je réalise que j’ai besoin de gérer légèrement autrement mon temps de loisir, et de m’éloigner un peu du “je ne planifie rien et regarde d’un moment à l’autre ce que j’ai ‘envie’ de faire” — ça marche pour une journée (le week-end) mais pas pour bien plus longtemps que ça.

Solution? Pas encore tout à fait trouvée, mais j’y réfléchis, c’est la première étape!

Income Map Template [en]

[fr] J'ai préparé un tableau pour m'aider à avoir une meilleure visibilité de quand je gagne de l'argent, par semaine et par mois. Il est à disposition si jamais quelqu'un d'autre le trouve utile.

One of the things I want to start doing in 2010 (now that my accounting is in order for 2009, thanks to Buxfer and my brother) is start tracking when I spend time doing “paid work”. Accounting helps me track when I get paid, but not when I am actually spending time doing the work — and in the light of my weekly planning experiments, I want to gain more visibility about how my weeks and months are structured.

After torturing my brain quite a bit, I’ve come up with this Income Map Template for 2010. I’ve made it publicly available as a Google Spreadsheet so you may copy it and use it if you wish (feel free to adapt it and let us know what works for you in the comments).

Income Map Template 2010

The challenge here is that some of my income arrives monthly (retainers), some of it is a project package (one price for a certain amount of work spread over a certain time) and some of it is one-off (giving a talk, or half a day of WordPress training). What I’m really interested in is seeing when I’m doing work that I get paid for, weekly.

This is not about cash flow, although it deals with money (Buxfer takes care of the cash flow), but about time management.

With the help of this spreadsheet, I hope to be able to easily answer the following kinds of questions in 2010:

  • how much paid work do I do in a given month?
  • how much of my income is one-off gigs, compared to regular clients (retainers or long-term projects)?
  • does my weekly income (one-off gigs, aside from retainers and long-term projects) vary a lot from week to week?
  • where should I set the limit to the number of engagements I take in a given week/month?

So, to freelancers out there, who are not clocking time all week: are these questions also interesting to you? Does this make sense? Do you do this kind of “money-earning time-tracking”?

Weekly Planning: Third Week (Learning Steps) [en]

Here we are — I’ve completed my third “planned” week since I started looking a bit further ahead than the current day (first week, second week, passing thoughts). Gosh, it was a busy week. I had only two office days, and I realize that it is not quite enough.

Around me, I’m faced either with people who are used to planning their weeks and find it normal, or people who could never dream of doing it, so busy are they putting out fires day after day.

I was like that for a long time. How did I get where I am now? I’ve been thinking a lot about which were the “first steps” on the road from chaos to “planning”.

Oh, before I forget: when I say I plan my week, I mean that I have a rough outline of what I am going to accomplish during the week, and on what day. It doesn’t go any further than that. Like when I “plan” my day, I don’t decide “I’m going to spend between 9 and 9.30 doing this, then do that for 20 minutes”. I know what I want to accomplish in the day, and go from there.

So, back to what brought me here, let me mention a few landmarks or “important steps” you might want to meditate upon if you are currently too busy putting out fires to even dream of planning your week. They’re in no particular order, because I think I haven’t quite finished figuring this out yet. If you spot one that seems doable, then start with that one.

  • Protect yourself. Set a very high priority on keeping “downtime” aside for yourself. Of course there are very busy periods where you won’t get much, but this shouldn’t be your “normal” week. Don’t answer the phone during lunch break, for example. Book an evening a week for yourself, and tell people who want to see you then that you “already have something planned”. Learn to become more comfortable about making people wait. If you always put others first you’ll just burn in the fire.
  • Set maker days and manager days. Yesterday evening, Claude pointed out to me that this was one of my first obvious steps towards weekly planning, back in April. It’s obvious: once you start having a clearer plan of how much actual time you’re going to have in the office to work on projects, it helps you not overcommit.
  • Under-promise, over-deliver. I can’t remember who recommended this, but it stuck with me. It helps me fight against my natural tendancy to underestimate the amount of time I need to deliver something. So I figure out a reasonable estimate, and then add a lot of security padding to give myself space for bad planning and other emergencies.
  • Everything takes more time than you think. I think David Allen says this somewhere in Getting Things Done, but I could be misquoting. It could be Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan, too. Or Merlin Mann. Anyway: the unexpected almost always adds time to things. And in the cases where it doesn’t and actually reduces the time you need for something, it’s no big disaster (OMG! I have too much time to do this! I’m going to die!). So, add a lot of padding to any estimation of how much time something is going to take you. It’s always more than you think. Try doubling your initial estimate, for starters, and see if that improves things.
  • End your day by looking at tomorrow. This is something I got from FlyLady when I realised it was important for me to have a “getting started” (=morning) and a “winding down” (=evening) routine. She recommends including 10 minutes in your evening routine to prepare the next day: check the train timetable, know what appointments you have, etc. It’s easy to do, and it means you’re not diving blind into tomorrow anymore.
  • Learn to say no. This is the really hard one for most people. I’ve become pretty good at saying no, but I’ve come a long way: initially, I was somebody who said yes to almost everything. I was both enthusiastic about all sorts of things and terrified of hurting people by refusing their requests. So I didn’t say no. I’ll probably blog about this more extensively at some point (I already did in French), but the important thing to remember is that as long as you have trouble saying no, you will not escape fire fighting. One thing that really helped me learn to say no was to start by never immediately accepting anything. Say you’ll answer in 24 hours. Then I used that time to have a long hard think about how I keep saying yes to stuff I want to do to help out, and then end up procrastinating, not doing it, feeling horrible because deadlines slip, etc. That usually gave me enough courage to say no.
  • Have a list. You can go all GTD or only part-way, like I have, but you need some kind of system or list to capture the things you need to take care of. Learn the difference between a project and a next action, and list only the latter. To start your list, just write/type down all the stuff that’s bubbling at the top of your brain and stressing you out. If you think of something you need to do while you’re working, add it to the list. Ask a friend to hold your hand (it can be through IM) if your list gets too scary. Trust me, it’ll be better when it’s written down — anything is better than being an ostrich.
  • Learn to prioritize. I have huge problems with this (in other areas of my life too). When it comes to work-related stuff, here are a few rules of thumb I use. Invoicing is high priority, because it’s what brings in the money and it’s not very long to do. Anything really time-sensitive is also high priority (if I don’t announce tomorrow’s meetup today, it won’t be any use, will it?) Responding to potential clients. Paid work for clients with deadlines, of course. Asking questions like “what is the worst thing that will happen if I don’t do this today?” or “on this list, is there any item which is going to cause somebody to die if I don’t do it?” (start with “to die” and then work down on the ladder of bad things — thanks Delphine for that tip) also helps. This doesn’t mean you need to order your lists. It’s just to help you figure out where to start.
  • Admit when you’re in over your head. If you over-promised, said yes when you really should have said no, and basically find yourself incapable of keeping up with your commitments, tell the people involved. And use that safety padding again. If you told the client it would be done by Wednesday, and on Monday you already have that sinking feeling that it won’t be possible, tell the client. Apologize. Say you messed up if you have. If you’re pretty certain you can get it done by Friday, tell them that it’ll be done Monday. See? Safety padding. Under-promising. Of course this doesn’t work in all situations, but you might simply not have a choice — and it’s better to be upfront about a deadline slipping than keeping it silent. Not just for the relationship with the client, but for your learning and growing process. Same with money: if you need invoices paid earlier than you initially asked because you have cashflow issues, ask. If you can’t pay the bill, ask for a payment plan. Somebody might say yes.
  • You can only do so much in a day. At some point, you reach the end of the day. Either it’s time, or you’re tired, but at some point, the day is done. Pack up and go home. Watch TV. Eat. (Maybe not in that order.) Do something nice. Take a bath. First of all, it’s no use working yourself silly until ungodly hours, you just won’t get up the next morning, or if you do, you won’t be productive. Second, doing this will help you “grow” a feel for what can be done in a day.
  • Plan your day. At the beginning of the day, look at your list, and think about the 2-3 important things that you want to accomplish today. Rocks and pebbles might help. Forget all the rest and get cracking on those. You’ll be interrupted, you’ll have emergencies, of course. That’s why it’s important not to plan to do too much — or you’re setting yourself up for failure. I started doing this regularly this spring, first with index cards, then with a list in Evernote. At the beginning you’ll be crap at it, but after months of practice, you get better. And this is one of the building stones you’ll need to be able to plan your weeks at some point.
  • Save time for the unexpected. When I was teaching, I did quite a bit of time planning — I knew when I was in class and when I had “downtime” to prepare courses and mark tests. Doing that, I realized that I could not perfectly plan my time. There was always “unexpected” stuff coming up. So I started making sure I had empty time slots of “surprises”. At some point during the last year, I calculated that roughly half my time was taken up by “unexpected” things and “emergencies”. Now, it’s less, because I’m better at planning. So, depending on how deep in chaos you are, you want to make sure you leave enough “free time” in whatever planning you’re doing to accomodate everything you didn’t know about or hadn’t thought about. As organisation increases and stress goes down, the “things to do” will get more under control and there will be less and less emergencies — but it’s still important to leave “breathing space”.

This is more or less all I can think of for the moment. Is it useful to anybody? I like to think it would have been useful to me, but one can never know… would I have listened?

More Thoughts on Weekly Planning [en]

[fr] Planifier mon travail sur la semaine me rassure sur le fait que je vais faire le travail "obligatoire" qui est sur ma liste durant la semaine, et que je peux donc me permettre de prendre du temps en cours de route pour des tâches qui me paraissent moins cruciales (mais qui, au fond, sont tout aussi importantes à mon activité professionnelle que le travail payé).

So, enter my second week with a weekly planning, after the first. I spent a good part of my Monday morning getting organized.

I’ve understood how having a weekly planning is helping me make progress in the neglected departments of my “work”: bizdev, research, more writing, etc.

When I work as I normally do, day-by-day, I am only digging into the pile of “things I must do for others”, or “urgent things”. I do not feel I can afford to devote time to less urgent tasks, because there is always this feeling that I should be doing more important things.

With a weekly planning, laying out my week means that I have an overview which reassures me that the “urgent/important” stuff can and will get done, and that it is in fact OK for me to stop and read an interesting publication for an hour or two even though I still need to upgrade some WordPress installations for a client or write a blog post for another. That’s why it works.

The challenge, for the moment, is that I still overestimate what I can do in a day. Or I underestimate the amount of time I need to set aside for the unexpected. And I still have trouble prioritizing, which means that I spent yesterday morning agonizing in front of the rather long list of client work which absolutely had to be done this week.

Yesterday worked out well, but today is being a disaster. Too many rocks, and one task in particular that I completely underestimated: it took me the better part of the morning (granted, there were interruptions and emergencies) to sort through my 350 photographs of Troyes — which I needed to do as I’ll be using some in an article I’ll be writing for a client.

I’m starting to see how longer-term planning (it’s not for straight away, mind you) will come in to help me be better at determining how many projects or how much client work I can take on for a given time period without getting “swamped” in the end.

Maker Days and Manager Days [en]

A few months ago I wrote an article called Office vs. Errand Days, where I explained that I had started grouping my errands on certain days and making sure that I had meeting-free office days on others.

I’ve just finished reading Paul Graham’s excellent essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, and realized that what I have been doing is separating my days into “manager’s schedule days” and “maker’s schedule days”.

As a freelancer, I am both: I’m the manager who meets people, has speculative meetings, receives new clients or gets interviewed by journalists. But I’m also the maker: a whole bunch of what I get paid for has to be done quietly in the office. And a whole bunch of what I need to do to get paid work also happens in the office.

So, if I’m not careful, I let the manager’s schedule take over my week, I’m super-busy but I don’t really get any paid work done, or proper prospecting.

So, here’s to grabbing my calendar again and making sure I put enough “maker days” into each of my weeks. And here’s to saying “no” firmly but gently when asked to interrupt one of my “maker days”. Even if I’m the person I need to say no to.