Thursday thoughts: Structure
School started back for our daughter (2nd grade!) this week. After a summer of no schedule, she’s now back on her “normal” routine.
I drive her to school each morning. It’s eight miles, but all city streets with speed limits ranging from 25 to 45 miles per hour (yes, I drive the speed limit), so it takes about 20 minutes each way. That means about an hour each morning is getting her out the door and off to school.
Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time allotted to it. It isn’t that more stuff gets done. It’s that you take longer to do the same thing if you allot more time to it. (This is one reason why I prefer value pricing over time-based billing.)
And the converse can be true too (to a point): if you constrain the time allotted to a task to a lesser (but still reasonable) amount, you’ll figure out how to get the work done more quickly.
So despite a bit of anxiety over losing a productive hour each weekday morning, so far this week I’ve managed to accomplish relatively more than I was over the summer. (At least it feels like it.)
It also helps to build systems to stay focused on the work that needs to get done. Whether you use complex apps like TaxDome or rely on a paper to-do list doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a clear process for capturing, organizing, and reviewing your outstanding commitments. I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. (I also recommend Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, although it’s less tactical than GTD.)
Now for your thoughts…
How do you keep track of your tasks and projects? If you have (or have had) school-aged children, how did their schedules affect your work schedule?