Effectively Focused: 6 - Focus

Previous Post - 5: Time Box - identify a length of time you want to accomplish things

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

Principle #6: Focus

One of the key principles in the Agile world is focusing on one thing at a time and finishing it. I read a term on someone's blog that really describes a piece of this method. She called it “Hyper-Focus.”

Hyper Focus

You have a Project Book and put one single sticky note on the front and work that until it’s done. Maybe you decide you can have more than one (as you might have to wait for something from someone else to move forward). The idea is, don’t put too much on your front page. Maybe even decided a maximum number of sticky notes you will allow on your front page (1, 2, maybe even 4), but by limiting and hyper-focusing, your time will be maximized.

Avoid Context Switching (Commonly Known as Multi-Tasking)

As any good administrative assistant, chef, or mom knows, multi-tasking is a critical survival skill. At it's simplest, multi-tasking involves setting a number of tasks in motion that require minimal attention. One task gets the focus. So, in it's most literal form, we only do one task at a time, while other tasks are set in motion behind the scenes. A virtuoso multi-tasker optimizes her workflow so she can seamlessly switch attention between tasks with minimal down time.

The switching attention from one task to another is the problem. The phrase "context switching" more accurately describes the real issues. In the multi-tasking scenario, it's usually switching between tasks that don't necessarily require full concentration. But there are many tasks we do today that require the majority of our concentration.

Knowledge work is something that is high in mental concentration. To be most efficient with your work, it's best to finish the task you are working on before moving on to something else. One way to manage that is to minimize the number of tasks you are focusing on (limit work in progress) before you start working on anything new.

Pomodoro Technique

Additional techniques like the Pomodoro technique can help you focus for short bursts of time (25 minutes with a 5 minute break)

Next Post - 7: Flex - acknowledge changes and adjust

Table of Contents for the Sticky Note PM Program

Effectively Focused: 5 - Timebox

Previous Post - Summary of Principles 1-4

Principle #5: Time-box

What is a Time-Box? A length of time determined by you (or your team) of 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks for getting a group of sticky notes done.

You may need to circle back to steps 1-4 to break your ideas down small enough to fit into a single week. The idea is breaking your work down into smaller, manageable, complete-able chunks of work. The only valuable idea is a finished one, and each step or chunk of work brings you closer to completion.

Bringing Work into the Time Box

Go through your list of priorities and pull into your Time Box the number of stickies you think you can get done. If necessary, you might need to break your stickies down into smaller chunks to fit in the Time Box. It's highly likely you will overestimate the amount of work you can get done. That's okay. As you start, you are learning how much you can do. Keep notes on your stickies as you work and move them to the Complete queue with notes. I find my teams never really get to super accurate estimating. I find I'm also not completely accurate in my personal estimating either. But that's part of a future Principle to Review and see what's working, what isn't and continuously tweak the process until it's a fine tuned machine. The goal is to get to consistent, somewhat predictable productivity over the long term based on past history.

The Progress Queue (Wall System)

You can customize the queue to what works best for you, but I usually have these four categories: Queue (list of work to be done in this Time Box), Pending (items that I started but are waiting on outside factors), In Progress, and Complete.

Progress Queue (Book System)

In the the portable book, I use the progress queue a little differently. I use the pink page as the queue of new work and pending items, the front page is the In Progress queue that I need to focus on immediately. At the back of the book is a Complete page where I collect the completed stickies with the notes on how long everything takes.

Optimal Time Box

I recommend one week as the optimal time box for checking progress and continuous adjustments of your overall process.

Ranges of time boxes: You can go up to two, three or four weeks if that cadence and rhythm just makes sense in your creative world. If you have an intense project and you need to see daily progress, you can even break your time boxes down into daily and measure your progress based on daily completion of tasks. Test out what cadence works best for you.

Regular Work Week 

If you're job is a regular 9-5 workweek, the reflexive action is to base your week on a Monday-Friday cadence. Go ahead and work within this framework if it makes sense. But consider some alternatives.

The Weekend Creative

If you doing your creative work as a side gig to your day job, it might make more sense to start your Time Box on a Friday or Monday. Personally, I've been starting mine on Mondays, allowing me a little work during the week and a big push on the weekend with a wrap-up of what I accomplished for the week on Sunday and prep for the next week on Sunday evening. However, I've been experimenting with starting my creative week on Fridays. Experiment each week with whatever day it makes sense for you to start your Time Box.

Mid-Week Start

Another alternative for when you start your creative week might be in the middle of the week. This is something we did on my corporate teams when we normally had one-two people out on Fridays and Mondays due to flex schedules, holidays, Personal Time Off, etc. If you have a more stable schedule where people aren't out of the office regularly on Friday or Monday, a Monday-Friday Time Box is fine. But, this might also fit your creative schedule.

Schedules

If you notice, there isn't a strict schedule and plan. It's actually a fairly loose weekly plan. In a creative sense, I find this framework is incredibly valuable. I arrange my work around the appointments and find the loose framework is so much more fun and valuable for the way I work in a creative sense.

If you must have a schedule, be careful not to over schedule yourself. Chaos has a tendency to feed creativity than than strict schedules. The beauty of this system is that it allows a lot of flexibility and freedom while still propelling you to completion on tasks. 

With that in mind, only schedule what you must schedule. For example:

• Deadlines for contest submissions. You might have to "plan backward" and figure out pieces of work you must have done by each week. 
• Appointments
• Classes
• Shows
• Editorial schedule for social media - this item might even be a hybrid between scheduling blocks of regular time every week to make sure you get all of this done, while not being overly rigid.

Summary

1. Determine your optimal time box for you (I recommend one week)
2. From the priorities you have set, select a group of stickies you think can fit into your Time Box
3. Break your work down to fit into the time box
4. Start your time box on a day where you can maximize your work

Next Post - 6: Focus - hyper focus on one thing at a time, limit your work in progress and blockers

Table of Contents for the Sticky Note PM Program

Effectively Focused: Summary of Principles 1-4 - The Backlog

Previous Post - 4: Prioritize - focus on work that aligns with your values and learn the art of saying "no"

Congratulations! You have now created, what we call in the Agile software development arena, a Backlog! This is your list of work that you need to accomplish to achieve your goals.

1: Capture - write everything down

2: Categorize - group like items together

3: Summarize - summarize by the end result (not the action / verb)

4: Prioritize - focus on work that aligns with your values and learn the art of saying "no"

Like my coordinated system? If you're sticky note king/queen, get your own Backlog in my shop with coordinating Sticky Notes or get the portable Project Book system that combines the Backlog and Progress Queue.

5: Time Box - identify a length of time you want to accomplish things

Table of Contents for the Sticky Note PM Program

Effectively Focused: 4 - Prioritize

Previous post - 3: Summarize - summarize by the end result (not the action / verb)

Principle #4: Prioritizing

Once you are finished Categorizing and Summarizing your work, you now need to sort it in the order that it needs to be done. Here are some guidelines to the process of prioritizing your work. Some of it is simply sequencing (you can’t put up the framing of a house before you have the foundation) and some of it truly is prioritization. 

Prioritize by Values 

THE core foundation for choosing your priorities is making sure you have your values identified and that the work you are choosing aligns with those values. 

Steven Covey promoted using a values-based approach for prioritizing in his book, First Things First. “Principles provides a "true north" and reference when deciding what activities are most important, so that decisions are guided not merely by the "clock" of scheduling but by the "compass" of purpose and values.”

The art of saying “No”

Another fundamental skill that is key to prioritizing is the art of saying "No." 

I find that many people say, “I/we need to do it all.” Some of the fear behind choosing what to work on is rooted in fear of forgetting what you’re working on. This is solved by capturing all of your ideas. Categorizing and Summarizing the ideas further provides clarity about the path to achieving goals.

Prioritizing is an art in that you are choosing what to work on in a short amount of time toward achieving your overall goal. Most projects are a series of separate steps that lead to a complete whole. Prioritizing breaks things down into the sequence you need to work in order to achieve the overall goal.

Important/Urgent Matrix

With that in mind, the matrix based on the Eisenhower principle of Important or Urgent work helps with a first pass of prioritizing your work and determining what to leave out. 

Strategies for the Creative Mind

Some strategies I use for the creative mind is to bring in a mix of work: some difficult or unpleasant tasks (like bookkeeping or filing), a fun task (the primary art you make), income producing. This may mean sidelining ideas and saying No for right now, but the idea of becoming a self-supporting creative means to focus on income producing activities.

Power of the Sticky Note

This is where the power of the sticky note starts to come into play. You might have created a neat, organized list in each category, but now you need to start rearranging the category by the order in which work needs to be done. 

Next principle: The Time Box

The next principle is the Time Box where you pull in the amount of work you think you can get done in that period of time. This will be a bit of trial and error as you figure out how long it takes to get work done. 

Next Post - Summary of Principles 1-4

Table of Contents for the Sticky Note PM Program

Effectively Organized: KonMari-ing my house

I learned about the Marie Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing from Heather Power's on either her Humblebead's blog or the other blog she hosts called Art Bead Scene. 

I love this book!!! I consider myself really organized. I'm a project manager for my day job and can keep a team of people pretty organized, too. But, I was still missing finer points. 

I came back from living in Hong Kong in 400 square feet of space very determined not to fill my life up with "stuff" and keep things simple. While I have kept things simple relatively speaking to when I moved to HK in 2008, I still collected a lot more stuff than I intended. Even living in a relatively modest space of 1,000 square feet. It's just easier to collect more stuff when you live in a bigger space. Even though I've moved 9 times in 5 years, and keep getting rid of things with every move, I still have too much "stuff." 

Enter The Tidy Lady, Marie Kondo, and her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. 

One of my goals with starting off my new business in Florida was "to get everything organized, without being OCD to the point where I would feel comfortable having guests over at a moment's notice." At about the time I wrote this down on my task list, I read Heather's blog and how she was using this book to tidy her studio.

I downloaded the book to my Kindle app and was totally hooked. SO many good points. Here are the ones that have been the final elements of my personal organizing arsenal. 

1. Keep what brings you joy. This point was a major mental shift for me. We have access to so much more material at prices we can afford than ever before in history. With that, we end up with a lot more clutter than we think, even when we intentionally try to keep things simple. I actually ended up keeping a few small things that I might have discarded simply because they brought me joy. I got rid of a LOT of things that didn't bring me joy, including things I thought I should hold on to. Now I felt liberated to let them go. I also upgraded my kitchen to bring me joy. I had a lot of things in my kitchen that I needed (dishes, pots, pans), but that I didn't like. I took the opportunity to upgrade the kitchen and now find pleasure in keeping my kitchen tidier than I ever have in the past. Ever.
2. Follow her recommended order. Start with your clothes. I did my clothes first as she recommends to get some traction into the process. Now I LOVE my closet. I love looking at the neatly folded items and neatly hanging clothes. I've actually been able to maintain my closet for over a month because it's now beautifully edited and a pleasure to keep neat and tidy.
3. Folding. I love going into my drawers to find things because now I CAN find them. Things don't get lost under flat piles of clothes. I can easily see the items I'm looking for. This method of folding really fits the piece of me that likes efficiency and speed. 
4. Thank the item that no longer serves a useful purpose. Another useful point that touches on the emotional connections we might have with things. I had an emotional attachment to items that had strong memories associated with them, but were no longer being used. Her simple method of holding the item, saying thank you, and sending it on its way provided an emotional catharsis for me. 
5. Keeping like things together. Another major shift going against the current common wisdom of storing things by how you use them. The problem with me was that I had multiple items in multiple places and couldn't find them when I needed them. I sorted my household supplies area (my laundry room where I now store: tools, paint supplies, cleaning supplies) and now I can find the tools and supplies I need when I need them. Not two weeks later when I don't need them any more. It's fabulous.



Office purge

6. Gather, purge, and organize like things together. This is another aspect of #5, but when you are organizing your house, organize them in the specific categories she recommends. It made a huge difference for me to categorize all the like items together. If one category is too big (like my art studio) break them down into smaller categories. I'm getting ready to do my studio now but just putting the items together that were related is proving to be a huge improvement over the way I've tried to organize, re-organize, and re-re-organize. I never made really good sense of my art studio organization. Now, things are broken down into: Surface Pattern Design, Polymer Clay, Lamp Work, Metalwork, Chain Maille, Seed Beads, Sewing, Painting. I'll probably re-organize as it makes sense, but now I can actually find things, even piled in boxes. It's amazing.

Studio purge

One thing to note: she recommends doing all the purging in one go. I tried this and was able to do each category in 2-4 days. I spent usually a week on each major category. One big purge at one time and then tweaking for the rest of the week. I thought she meant to purge my entire house in one go, but this isn't realistic with the large American houses. But, I finally found the comment in one section where she says it will take about 6 months to purge everything. "From my experience with private individual lessons, 'quickly' means about half a year. That may seem like a long time, but it is only six months out of your entire life." I'm so motivated, I got my whole house done in less than two months. I still have my car and garage to go after the studio, so I'll include all of that in this process. 

KonMari-ed Office!!!

KonMari-ed Living Area!!!

So, if you start using the KonMari system, remember to give yourself a break and plan for about 6 months of tidying until you get through everything. Do one category per weekend. It's a little bit draining (a lot of decisions happen with purging), but it's exciting when you get to the end of a category and then it gets motivating to keep going. 

The effort and the time is SOOOO worth it. I've finally been able to achieve that elusive feeling I've wanted to achieve for many years of "home tidy and organized so that I could have company at a moment's notice." 

Effectively Focused: 3 - Summarize

Previous Post - 2: Categorize - group like items together

Principle #3: Summarize

Objective:  Summarize the end goal or tell a story that will help reach your goal. This week will introduce the basics what you should write down on your sticky notes and when to expand and break out your ideas into small pieces.

Summary

The sticky note real estate of 3 inches by 3 inches insists on brevity. So, what to write?

The very simple summary I encourage you to write:

• Write the idea or end result of what you hope to achieve

You can add a qualifying adjective to give you even more clarity. I don't encourage using the verbs. This will come later in the Principle #5: Time Box phase as you are planning out your week. In short, use the noun to identify the end result you are hoping to achieve and summarize it. Actions (the verbs) can be endless. A final end result puts clarity and definition about what actions you need to take (or not take) in order to achieve there result.

And since examples are better than more words, here are some samples of how I use my sticky notes. 

Examples:

In thise case there are no verbs, even in the detail section.  

The pink sticky note below is from my Home Energy Drain project of reviewing all items, purging, organizing and storing them for use. The blue sticky note is from my weekly cleaning list. I recycle this list for each week instead of checking it off and tossing it. I identified the tasks I needed to do in the task section.

A note on the sticky notes: depending on whether I use the sticky notes in my project book or on the wall version of the Backlog and Queue, I use the dividing line on each sticky note to help organize the information I put on the sticky note. The smaller side is where the Summary goes, the side with more room contains details or tasks.

One other little detail is that I like to stack the stickies in neat little "lists" and by utilizing this section, I can stack them neater. 

For the wall version, I put the Summary on the bottom of the sticky note so it will stack neater and the sticky notes won't fall over. 

For the book version, this is how I write the summary.

You will likely circle between categorizing and summarizing your work. You may end up making an entire category out of one of your stickies after you are able to get more clear about what you are trying to accomplish.

Again, keep your summaries as simple as possible.

Next Post - Principle 4: Prioritize - focus on work that aligns with your values and learn the art of saying "no"

Table of Contents for the Sticky Note PM Program