Weekly Planning System-Week One

How’s it going?

My experience tells me that simple ideas have the most powerful impact. That is why I got so excited about the weekly planning system. I was having difficulty translating a daily planner into long term progress. Important but not urgent tasks kept slipping out of my vision and I wasn’t making the kind of movement that I wanted.

Stepping up my committments

Add to that the headstrong decision to join the PreWriting Challenge and I faced a big time management problem. To honor my commitments would take all the time and organizational skill I had to give. So, one week in, how is it going? I’m pretty pleased.

Making some adjustments

I reported on the first week of the Challenge earlier. I give myself a B+- good but it could be better. The weekly plan kept me on track and I expect to do better as the weeks pass. Steve uses his system to reflect time blocks of 45 minutes. He doesn’t apply specific tasks to those blocks, just groups them in general categories like post wiring, etc. This is helpful in making sure that I have enough time committed to each task but doesn’t help me track progress on specific posts. Since I don’t know how long a post will take to draft, I can’t relate a specific time slice to a post topic but I can add a list of planned posts topics to complete during the week as a side panel on the weekly plan so that I can track post completion. This way I will dedicate sufficient time for the tasks but will also know that I am getting the specific posts and other activities done.

Daily Time Committments

Another area where I want to improve is tracking time commitment during each day. I need to relate my weekly plan to daily activity and commit action for scheduled blocks of time. Without the daily time planning, I won’t commit to dedication of blocks of time and I will certainly get diverted to less important activities.

It seems controlled and anal

I confess that I don’t like this kind of time management. It seems rigid and constrained. I want to be spontaneous and creative and instead I feel controlled and anal. I will not let myself slack off.  I know that this is just a mind trick to get out of work. So far my spontaneous, creative side has not made the progress I need.

Moving Right Along

This week I will be tightening up the connections between my weekly plan of time slices and activities and my daily time commitments. In addition I will be working with a task list of blog topics and other specific tasks to check off and measure progress. Right now all this effort seems like a burden. It is extra work that keeps me from my real commitments and goals. Long term, I believe that as I continue to use and refine this system, it will become part of my daily routine and start to increase my productivity.