Rethinking it a bit

In the last two days following my daily plans was a disaster! On the first day, I had to take care of so many emergent tasks that I hardly started on anything I actually planned to do. However, throughout the day I guided an intern through a code troubleshooting and by the end of the day she found the mistake and all of her analysis look immensely better now. That was very gratifying experience for me.

Today I had meetings back-to-back all day long, with maybe an hour total of being at my desk. On the other hand, that’s all I planned for today: have efficient meetings with specific conclusions. It was successful in this regard. Ok, so the plan failed only on one of the two days.

On a bigger scale though, I’m not sure I’m tackling organization of chaos at work in a FlyLady style. She builds habits, you know. Like clean a hot spot for 2 minutes daily. It can be a different spot every day. What could be a similar habit at work? Check/respond to your emails for 5 minutes each hour? I mean, while I respond to most of my emails, there are always some which I postpone and so the sit in my inbox for days until I go through a major cleaning. You know, now that I’m writing about it… It really is similar to a hot spot!

Going back to the habit at hand: creating a plan for each day. I’m not entirely convinced that it is a bad or unrealistic idea, but something is missing in the way I’m doing it. Is it too detailed and narrow-focused? I catch myself stressing out about other important projects which didn’t make it on my list for today, but they really-really need to get done…

Ok so this is my task for Friday:

Write down the names of all big important projects I have on my plate.

It’s big if it will take more than an hour to do. It is important if it gives me butterflies in the chest and stomach. It is a project if it has a well-defined goal.

A thought for the future: write down my random daily activities, like gym, reading articles, responding to emails, etc.