Time management.

Early Last Week, last weekend even, I started thinking more along the lines of practical management and self motivation techniques and tactics to help me at home. With at least 15 years of retail management behind me there are a lot of those things in my personal arsenal of mental tools.

One I had taken a liking to earlier this year was a new to me system of 15-30. I found it on the Down To Earth Forum. The idea being that you work on something for 15 minutes and then take a 30 minute break. I understand the real success in this is that the 15 minutes is a small totally achievable window of time to dedicate to some unpleasant task and 30 minutes is motivation of progressing towards a nice long break ; )
I did have some success with this at the time but if I recall correctly I altered the time frames.

I returned to this method last week and pretty quickly altered my time windows to 20-20 and then as I got further into the day 20-30 and then 20-40 when I was getting into creative leisure time. I found that the small increments of progress in given areas help you with forward momentum and inspiration to progress.
My leisure times or 'breaks' also became more productive. I thought 15 minutes was not quite long enough to get right to the end of quite a few tasks, and 30 minutes was either too long or too short depending on what you were doing in the 'break'.

I tried Googling this method and find it to essentially be a spin off or variation of what is known as the Pomodoro technique which I interpret as a variation of Time Chunking ( as opposed to Multi tasking )
Today I will, though off to a late start, employ the time chinking method to sweep away some of my mental 'to do list'; though first I will write some things down along with some progression windows and I'll also carry it over to tomorrow as my mental to do list is large and while writing it down will help alleviate some of the weight in the actual act itself, being able to cross some things off is the goal.

After my tag bag in the last post I went on and created a very clean and Simple Christmas Card. As a card maker my track record of sending Christmas cards is pitiful. So I am trying for an early start and accumulation method this year.


We have the Mr's eldest Son here for the next week of School hols. A disorganised mental space is not a good thing for a carer of three kiddos to be in possession of, if they wish to retain sanity ... IMHO of course.

Happy Long weekend .

Comments

  1. Good for you Tammy -- a bit at a time helps enormously. I am an avid list writer and find that even writing the list decreases the burden tremendously.

    I love your simple Christmas card -- very appealing.

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  2. That card is very elegant.

    Thanks for the Pomodoro Technique link. I have always worked for long stretches, 1 - 2 hours before a short break, probably because the kind of work I was doing required long unbroken concentration, but obviously that would just encourage me to procrastinate if the task is an unpleasant and boring one. It's a good idea - I will try it out.

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  3. Good luck Tammy. I often find that things we put of doing aren't always that bad or that hard when we finally get around to doing them.
    Lovely card, clean and simple thats me all around.
    Hope your week goes well.
    xx

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