Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
The Art of the Little Project
The organizational equivalent of “death by a thousand cuts” is not paper-cuts, though I have those too. No, it is small projects. “Oh, sure, I can be on the PTA, it’s only one meeting a month and few e-mails.” “My job is totally under control, and the kids are coming home by themselves, so sure I can do that…[volunteer gig/board/committee/whatever].” And while I can lecture about how you shouldn’t take on too much, and how it doesn’t always have to be you, sometimes you, and I, are just going to take on too much.
Maybe someday we’ll learn to say no—but until that day comes, we might as well be as efficient as possible. So here are some strategies for dealing with your small projects. You can pick and choose—and if you have strategies too, please share them on my Facebook page.
Dedicated notebook:
While I am generally an advocate of one notebook for everything, if you are on several committees or boards where a bunch of what you do is go to meetings, it’s useful to keep a dedicated notebook for each one. That way you can easily grab it on your way to the meetings and all your notes stay together (without ripping out pages) until the project ends. If you are keeping notes digitally, good for you. Make sure you label your digital file appropriately so everything stays together on your hard drive or in the cloud.
Chunk your time:
Keep in mind that part of what makes juggling multiple projects harder is that it’s a mental drain to keep switching back and forth between things. In order to both save your mental energy and also track how much time you are actually spending on your projects, I suggest spending a chunk of time on one project or task. For example, don’t sit down to do e-mails for an hour, think: “I’m going to do e-mails for the co-op board for ½ hour.” Then do e-mails for another small project for another ½ hour or 15 minutes. You might think that it’s more efficient to go through your e-mails in the order that they came in, but you might be surprised by how much you look back and forth between old e-mails. I find it much simpler to sort by sender or subject and deal with one project at a time. Some people like to have different e-mail addresses, but that only means more things to check, so I prefer it all to come to one place, and then I can deal with it in an orderly fashion.
Files/Envelopes
Again, if you are able to go paperless, great, but if you get papers—budgets or agendas for example, that you want to keep (maybe you took notes on them) it’s good to have a file. Some people prefer plastic envelopes because they are easy to carry in a tote bag. Binders can be useful in some cases, but generally they are cumbersome and take up a lot of space.
And of course, you can practice saying No.