Personal organization part 2
After watching Barbara Oakley’s lesson from Learning How to Learn [1], and after my prior write up about personal organization [2], I came up with the following adjust to my agenda planning:
Weekly agenda planning journal
The planning journal idea is an attempt to compare the progress of the agenda across weeks. I need to be able to write up about my agenda in terms of the mechanics of it.
- The execution of the agenda — the planning of weekly activities have goals. These specific goals may add to business goals.
- The design of the agenda— I need to be able to look at the efficiency of the agenda, the performance of it.
Strategic planning to my agenda
Mental real state, energy for planning and execution
Planning the day is important. The agenda planning effort can be done a day before, or maybe a few days before, or perhaps early in the morning.
Nevertheless, it’s important to reflect about the energy that can be consumed in this kind of planning activity. We need to pay attention to this because the amount of energy can be correlated with what is the subject of each specific agenda item — this will happen because we need to be aware about what is to happen in order for us to put in right place and time.
To illustrate my point I will use the setting between a psychologist and her patients. Imagine that a psychologist have 20 patient sessions per week. Some of them are difficult cases, and some of them are easy cases. At the beginning, she didn’t see the difficulties related to each cases — they were all patients. Over time, however, she started to notice that each patient is a case, and that she may react differently. The good news is that she does not have to move them — because each patient have a fixed time. But this does not relief her from feeling overwhelmed.
Now imagine that all of her patients wanted to change their agenda out of the sudden. And that she could change everything in whatever time she wanted. In this situation, would she be strategic about the arrangement of different patients? Or would she just place them randomly. With lack of strategic thinking, it would be certainly better to put them randomly.
Now, if you are an entrepreneur and you have to execute many activities in parallel, you are certainly going to reflect about “your patients” or sub-projects. You are the one responsible for the choreography of events of your upcoming week. The point here is that you will take time and energy as you read and reflect about each item, and as you try to put them in place.
A key notion here is that you may end up consuming mental energy to think about each agenda item. This notion is referred as mental real state in the course from Barbara Oakley [1]. This consumption of energy will be applicable if you find yourself in front of an agenda planning effort.
Therefore, the conclusion is — if you are to engage in an agenda planning effort, and if your agenda consumes too much, be aware about this, feel the cost of the effort. This can be valuable because it may help you do the agenda planning separated from the actual work doing component.
A critical situation would be something like this: you spend 1–2 hour planning your agenda, it was consuming in terms of mental energy. Then you are good to go, to do about 4–6 sessions; but it turns out that some of the next sessions would be better performed if you didn’t use much energy at the planning. The conclusion is simple: if this is the case, separate the moments.
Disassociate from the product, focus in the process
Try to minimize emotional charge associated with outcomes, the expected outcome of the activity. Well, you will need to eventually review, and judge, how is your progress, or the completion, against goals. But try to not judge much as you do each task.
Therefore, and in alignment with [3], we may want to separate the fears, and tensions related with the outcome; and focus in the process that helps to get there.
Planning quit time
Along with beginning time for efforts, so to allow space for Diffuse Activities, Next projects, Rewards, etc. [No idea what I said here, correct this.]
Diffuse Mode Activities Relaxing
- To consider inserting Diffuse Mode Relaxation events in the agenda, to create a strategic balance to the day — it can be walking, exercising, video chunks (maybe grabbing videos out of a queue), cleaning the room, etc.
Setup Good Habits working out the Habits Structure
- Replace with good cues — Non procrastination cues, zero-Whatsapp alarms, delete TV noise, etc;
- Replace with good routine — replace with pomodoro, good ergonomic seat, silence room
- Replace good rewards — insert new rewards based on progress;
- Replace beliefs — insert new trust systems, talk with others, engage with others in courses, read something to prove the right path etc.
[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/lecture/QuZsE/juggling-life-and-learning
