Remember exam season, when creating a neat, colour-coordinated exam timetable was the only way to start any form of revision? I’ve taken this philosophy that organisation will make or break a project wholeheartedly into my adult life.
I will happily spend a full morning creating a spreadsheet planning out every single minutia of a project, building custom formulas to track data, and colour-coding as many columns as possible. I am the queen of to-do lists, with ongoing weekly calendars for both my personal and professional life. On top of this, I have a mini desk pad with Power Hour tasks when I need to focus. See below for evidence.
At the end of last year, however, I was still finding myself working late into the night. Despite my meticulous planning for almost every second of my day, something in my schedule was going wrong.
I began to push tasks into the next day, then repeating it the next day, and the next, until I ended up working weekends to cram everything in. When I realised I had worked fourteen days in a row and had to delay my Christmas break by two days, I told myself that enough was enough.
Going back to my copious to-do lists, I saw that I was allocating my time all wrong. There may be an equal number of points to do each day, but there was no rhythm to my tasks. I had a habit of stacking up big projects at the beginning of the week, so I would have space to push them back if I needed to. But because I put so many all on one day, they inevitably did get pushed back, until I was constantly working close to deadlines.
Come the new year, I switched everything around. I’ve got different symbols to mark tasks that will take different amounts of time. I only schedule one long task per day, with smaller ones slotted in around the big ones so I don’t get overwhelmed.
If I have too many big ones, I know that I need to renegotiate deadlines or trade some domestic tasks with my partner to buy myself more time. Being able to see in advance when a week is going to be too busy means I’m not running into unexpected deadlines.
It’s like I’m looking at my weekly planner with new eyes. Before, I thought a to-do list was enough to organise my time. But for freelancers who hold themselves to their own schedule, sometimes we need to put in a little bit more effort to make our daily schedules work for us.
If you find that your to-do list is turning into more of a chaotic enemy than an organisational friend, don’t say goodbye to it completely. Maybe you just need to switch up how you look at it, rather than close the notebook completely.
I for one won’t be getting rid of any of my planners anytime soon, but I’m certainly glad I’ve found a way to use them that doesn’t end with me drowning under a colour-coded stream of projects.
Speaking of organisational tools…
I’ve been working on polishing up the spreadsheet I use to track journalism pitches so that I can share it with other people to make copies of and use. It’s been a huge help to me in tracking my progress and knowing when to follow up. Feel free to reply to this email if you would like to be given a working copy this week, in exchange for your constructive feedback!
Next week, I’ll be featuring another Freelancing Fail sent in by a subscriber. If you’ve got a past FF that you would also like to share, this is your opportunity to share it with the class. It can be anonymous if you prefer and it also does not have to have a shining lesson of redemption. Sometimes, we just do stupid things - and that’s okay!
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