In this new year (2021) I'm re-thinking how I organize and process tasks due to ineffective productivity last year. I did a lot of deep thinking got stuff done, but that I wasn't enjoying it along the way and the results were not where I wanted them to be.
The solve for both of these issues lies in being part of a team vs working solo - because the nature of the work is building community and team. So far I've been building a community of 1.
To recap my previous organization:
- Things 3 uses Areas, projects, and tasks
- Areas are Work, Upkeep, and Meta
- Work is active projects
- Upkeep is projects that will never end
- Meta is organizing and refining tools and processes
After thinking through exactly where my time was going and why I was less effective I found I'd been putting a ton of time into personal growth, learning, development, etc. And a reasonable amount of time into meta. But needed to be hard prioritizing non-growth related projects first to see the implementation results of all the thinking and growing.
So I started by taking some notes thinking through the categories of where I want my time to go. I found I could put everything into these buckets:
- Work
- Growth
- Hobbies
- Fun
- Family
While there is some grey area between these, they give a good structure to deciding what I should be doing at any moment. I won't go into it here but it also helped to write down how each of these interact with each other because they ALL do.
So without further adieu... my new things3 areas are:
- Work
- Work Upkeep
- Growth
- Growth Upkeep
- Meta
This lets me to prioritize and keep focus primarily on what drives direct results.
Now, to fill the work bucket, I needed to get the team and my PM involved so I was not working on side projects but rather working with the team to a common goal. I'm now setting out to merge any work I was doing with the team's roadmap and picking up work from the team backlog. I'm already feeling 1000x better about working with the team rather than beside the team and the quality of the work has also gone way up.
Final note, I've also had these Areas in the background that didn't change:
- Lists and ideas
- Project Queue
- Archive (won't do)
- Archive (done)
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