In a perfect world, I would save every file that I am working on, every project I have going on into nicely labeled and organized file folders on my computer or cloud and to do so in nice little categories in the tree structure. However, that is not the case for me. Instead my desktop of my computer symbolizes my life. Disorganized, chaotic, haphazard, wild, slightly crazy and cluttered. Well, no more!
It is so bad that I have important documents and project files everywhere. I have things stored on a NAS in my house, a file server I setup in the garage, a spare computer that I am now using to park some stuff, a instance of a workstation in AWS that I use for a few things and remote into, dropbox, google, and microsoft file storage as well. Not to mention the 5 spare portable hard drives that I have sitting here on my desk. One of them, I kid you not, has folders in it called – Guy’s desktop from X date. That is right, in a moment of frustration – I copied the entire desktop to a folder and started over with a clean slate. By the looks of that, I do that every 6 months or so.
So I am going hard core now. I am picking one solution for each major thing that I do and I am sticking to it. Part of that is to build into my day a wrap up. When I work on a project, have a conference call, or do an activity for a period of time – I MUST build in wrap up time. This is what I am missing. What taught me this lesson this last week was cooking.
I am not on week 2 of planning, preparing and cooking all three meals of the day. I am getting better, albeit slowly. My shopping experience this weekend only took me slightly less than 6 hours. Last week was 8, so I have made some improvement! However, when I am cooking it is absolutely critical to build in wrap up time. You must clean, store, put away things in an organized fashion or your next meal preparation experience will be very frustrating.
This is what I experience in projects that I am working on. Most of them are not the kind of projects that you can finish in one day, they take repeated effort over a long period of time. What is really frustrating to me is that when I am ready to work on that project again, I have to find everything, get it all organized again and then I find myself spending almost the entire time allocated getting myself reacquainted. I need to manage my work-streams better and it starts with building in quality wrap up time.
We never consider the time it takes to close down what you are doing and transition to the next activity. We just smash them up against each other and then we wonder why we forget things or cannot remember what we committed to do. We are suffering because we need to consider actually scheduling the time for wrap up.
Guy Reams
Love it. So elaborate on how you schedule the wrap up time please?
I am automatically including 15 minutes at the end of every engagement for wrap up. I am also telling people that I have to leave the call a few minutes early, because I do. I need time to wrap up. I am also thinking about forcing myself to do this naturally in everything I do. Always give myself a 15 minute window, between tasks.