On a Friday I made a list of things I needed to do over the weekend. It just kept getting longer and longer. It felt daunting. Thanks to COVID-19 I didn’t have many social activities. I had the time but not the desire. And certainly not the energy. After a full week of teaching in a 4 year old classroom I was tired. Something had to give.
I rewrote my list. Instead of writing all the things I needed to get done, I wrote what I wanted to make progress on and how long I would spend on it. That felt doable.
I started with the garage on Saturday. It was a mess. I had done some painting and my supplies were all over the place. The Goodwill pile had been sitting there a while and was starting to fall out the bags. Tools were strewn about and some things just needed to have a home. I decided to devote one hour to the garage. I started at one side and picked up as I went. I put things back in their places, put all my painting supplies together and made a pile of tools and put them back. My husband made the Goodwill trip. I was out there a little longer than the hour and got enough done to have felt like I had made good progress.
The basement was on my list too. On Sunday morning I put on some workout clothes, started an hourlong podcast and got busy. I sorted, purged and cleaned. After one hour I could see more of the floor and I felt good when I went down to do laundry.
Later that morning I saw a post on Medium about things productive people do. And one of those things was to manage projects by sprints instead of marathons. It’s a more interesting way of saying of saying – break your projects down into small parts and make mad progress for a short amount of time. I can do that. So, this is now my new time management technique. Many small projects with time limits – and now l’m sprinting because I know when I will get to stop, and I want to feel like I have made progress.
