the day planner, pt. one

Since I have been keeping this blog, people have come to think of me as a scheduling pro.  Whether or not this is true, I have tried to answer all the questions posed to me, as I do think I have some insight on related topics.  One question that seems to keep coming up, and sometimes it is not so much a question as a frustrated comment, is how to start keeping and how to maintain a day planner.  I hear all the time that it is hard to make a habit of writing in and looking at a planner, that it becomes more of a hassle than a help, and that many people just give up after a few days or weeks. 

In an attempt to redeem the scheduling tool I hold most dear to my heart, I plan on devoting the next three posts to this very subject.  In this first installment we will look at a very common struggle most people have with their planners.  This is mostly a problem with developing the habits needed to make a planner worth while, and they can be quite circular.  When just starting to use a planner there with be nothing written in it.  Because there’s nothing in the planner, most people think it is useless to reference the planner at all during the day.  Because these people forget to look at their planners, they also forget to write in them.  Thus there is nothing in the planner, and the cycle continues.

Before we start it is important to realize that when you first start using a planner, there will be an awkward few days or even weeks when there is nothing really written in it, nothing worth checking, nothing really to schedule.  Because many people do not persist through this phase, they end up giving up on their planner too soon and before it can become useful.  To overcome this very common problem, it is first important to understand that this is a temporary state.  After a few weeks or even a month your planner will become an integral part of your day-to-day activities.  Your planner will keep you on schedule, let you know of upcoming events, and prevent scheduling conflicts.  You just need to push through the initial feeling that your planner is not helpful.  Believe me, this will change.

Next, it is important to get in the habit of writing things down.  If you have nothing written in your planner, it is of no real help to you.  In the beginning it is helpful to just write everything down that you think is at all relevant.  As time goes on, you will learn what types of things you need to incorporate and which things need not be included. 

Lastly, make it a rule (with no exceptions) to look at your planner twice a day: when you get up in the morning and before bed at night.  In the beginning there may not be much relevant information to look through, but as time progresses it will become important to keep track of what is getting written down.  Making a point to read about upcoming events, tasks, and projects is crucial in coming to see the importance of your planner, and thus ultimately crucial to maintaining it.

This week give your new years resolution to be more organized and on top of things another try.  Buy a day planner, and commit yourself to really trying to make it work.  Start out by trying this week’s tips, and stay tuned for better ones to come.  Click here for your two minutes of procrastination.

plays well with others

Since you all are scheduling professionals by now (that is if you have been reading religiously), I thought it might be a good idea to talk about some of the more technical scheduling situations through which I navigate.  Now you might think that finals week would be the epitome of a tough scheduling scenario for a college student working two jobs, but I would be inclined to disagree.  I would argue that scheduling meetings can be more of a challenge.

Think about it.  During the week leading up to and the actual week of finals you can manage your time by secluding yourself away to study every free minute you get.  The train ride to school, the twenty minutes you take at work for lunch, or an hour before bedtime can all be turned into mini study sessions.  You have the capacity, in this case, to make time for your studying. 

Does this ring true for scheduling meetings, as well?  If you are trying to meet with someone who is just as busy as you are, the glaring answer here is no.  If you and the person with which you wish to meet each only have free time in increments of thirty minutes, scheduling can be impossible, particularly when you need to account for commuting time as well.  How often, you might ask, does a situation like this arise though.  For the working college student, this scenario can play out quite often in preparing for a group project or presentation, planning an important meeting at work, or trying to make plans with friends for lunch. 

When coordinating your schedule with someone who is less busy that you are, the task at hand is much less complicated.  If others are more flexible, it is quite easy to fit a meeting into your own busy schedule.  The real trouble arises when you need to meet with someone who is as busy, or even busier, than you.  In situations like these there are three easy ways to help streamline the scheduling process and enable yourself to plan a meeting without a stressful re-scheduling of your entire week.

1. Know what you want.  Think of planning a meeting, as if you were participating in a hostage negotiation.  When you enter into this discussion know what times you are most free, the times that would work best for you, and the times that would least inconvenince you.  Being able to make suggestions that fit your schedule best makes it all the more likely that you will end up with a time that does not upset your schedule.
2. Be flexible, but do not concede.  In addition to knowing the times that work best for you, you also want to know the times that will absolutely not work.  Committing to a meeting that you cannot realistically make will only inconvenience you and your partner.  While you want to make sure that you are flexible about times that you can make, you also need to be clear about those times which have to be blacked out.  This streamlines the process by disregarding all times that are non-options.
3. Make note of the times that do work.  If you are meeting with someone with whom you have to meet on a regular basis (or even a semi-regular basis), keep in mind what times work well for the two of you.  Keeping a standing-date is always helpful when you are busy, because it means not having to constantly discuss when to meet next.  For example, it can get quite difficult to schedule board meetings for Phi Eta Sigma, the honors society for which I am the treasurer, because there are six of us that must meet monthly.  I should also mention that the majority of us are honors students, who also work and keep addition commitments.  Trying to find a time when we are all free is extremely tough, but we have found that Monday mornings work well for us.  Thus every time we need to schedule a meeting, we just reaffirm that this time will work for everyone and skip the process of finding a time that fits everyone’s schedules.

Very few people schedule meetings on a daily basis, but it is something that becomes an integral part of scheduling as you take on more responsibilities.  Instead of a “how to” approach to a useful technique or scheduling method, tonight’s post is designed to be referenced.  That is, when you are having trouble scheduling a meeting sometime in the future, you may find it helpful to reference these three tips.  Click here for your two minutes of procrastination.

post-its

As I write this post from my blackberry (because my computer has gotten a virus), I can’t help but think that there is a joke to be made about how much technical difficulties bother Type A personalities.  Unfortunately, it appears I am too annoyed to be making any jokes.  Perhaps, that in itself is the punch line.

Thankfully this post tonight is a short one, the topic of which is also small: post-its.  People love post-its, but schedulers love them more.  Sticky little pieces of paper you can scribble notes on are like scheduler nirvana.  Using post-it’s effectively, however, takes practice.  After all, if you are putting a million little post-its all over the place you might as well just write on one piece of loose leaf and save a tree in the process.

The key to using post-it’s effectively is threefold.  First, make sure to use them sparringly.  The less you use, the more helpful the ones you do use will be.  Secondly, use the stickiness of your post-its to your advantage.  If you can’t see them, they’re not useful!  Stick them to your bathroom mirror, to your planner, to your alarm clock, or to any place you’ll see them.  And lastly, be brief in your notes.  As a general rule, I don’t allow myself to write more than three sentences or seven bullets per post-it.  If you’re writing more than that much, you shouldn’t be using a post-it anyway.

When using post-it’s it is quite easy to get out of hand and end up with a rainbow array of sticky paper covering your room.  Resist the temptation, stay aware of theor true purpose, and try your best to use them efficently.  So, that’s all this week.  Unfortunately since I am posting from my blackberry, there is no video aka two minutes of procrastination.  However, I am sure you can find plenty to do (probably more than two minutes worth of procrastination) by clicking here.  Happy post-iting!

complacency

This post is some four months in the making, and this topic has been on my mind for quite a while.  Though I wanted to blog about it earlier I thought it best to let the situation play out, to gain some perspective, and then to post about it.  So here I am at the end of some of the hardest months of my life - after some of the hardest decisions of my life – and I feel ready to reflect on them. 

If you were to ask me three years ago as I was graduating high school where I would be now, I would have confidently responded that I would be applying to law school; planning to attend the FBI training facility at Quantico, VA; and studying forensic psychology to become a profiler.  Better yet, if you were to ask me one year ago where I would be now, I would have the same answer.  I never had a problem with direction or motivation; I just was not that kind of kid.  I have known what I wanted to do with the rest of my life since I was 16, and that was to be an FBI agent.

Let’s fast forward now to the beginning of 2010 – the year I made the new years resolution to be more pro-active and apply for more scholarship money.  In February I applied for the Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship, I accepted an invitation to blog for the Office of First Year Experience at John Jay, and I decided to take up a minor in history.  Through these experiences I started to think differently, to feel more outgoing, and to desire more life experiences.

By August of 2010 I was finishing up an internship at Echoing Green, a non-profit at which I now work at part-time.  By August of 2010 I was a completely different person, bearing very little resemblance to the person I was at the start of the year.  I did not realize yet, however, how enormous this change was or that it would change my life forever.  This realization took some three months.  I was standing in the bakery at which I still work, helping a very rude customer, thinking, “What am I doing here?”  I didn’t want to deal with rude customers.  For that matter, I didn’t want to help any customers; I wanted to being doing work that had an impact.  I wanted to help people.

It would be easy to say that my work at Echoing Green has created this change in me, and in many ways it has.  After interning and working there for nine months, I feel that my calling is in the non-profit sector (or in the for-profit sector of social enterprise).  I know now that at whatever job I end up, I want to be helping people and having a real, measurable impact.  While I can attribute this change of heart to my experience at EG, it seems much more likely that the bigger change in me was caused not by one single thing, but rather by a perfect storm.  Over the past year I have been exposed to so many new ideas through my Watson Fellowship, I have been pushed to write and edit and think critically about my day-to-day habits through this blog, and I have been forced to take charge and initiate change through Phi Eta Sigma.  Over the past year I have been inspired, made to feel passionate, been empowered, made to feel capable, made to feel driven, made to feel like I must be the change I wish to see in the world (to paraphrase Gandhi).  Over the past year I realized that my complacency is my biggest flaw, that within me there was a disconnect between what I wanted to do and what I was currently pursuing.  About a month ago I reached the point where I had to choose. 

We all reach a point in our lives when we turn into the version of ourselves that the past version of us would hate.  We grow up, we conform, we realize our parents were right.  For some of us, and I would argue that this includes mostly busy people who don’t have much time to really look at the bigger picture, this is one of the hardest things we will ever experience.  It’s hard because you have to let go of some old goals and dreams you had of being a rock star or an FBI agent.  It’s immobilizing because it means saying goodbye to the things in your life that stand between you and your new goals.  It’s heartbreaking because it sometimes means losing people who you love.

What is my point in this excessively long post tonight?  The busier we are the more we get caught up in what we are doing.  We skate through life too busy to realize that time is passing.  We turn around and our world has changed; we have changed.  Complacency is like quicksand for regular people, but for busy people it is like a vacuum.  If you are not careful you can get sucked in, and ten years later you will turn around realizing you never went after your dreams.  My message is this: It is only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything.  Sometimes to follow your dreams you have to let go of what you already have.

One of the hardest things to do is to step back and look at your life genuinely critically, to look at where you want to go versus where you are headed.  The only thing harder than doing this is correcting your path once you’ve realized you’ve gone off course.  This week try to step back and think about your dreams.  After all, no one wants to look back on their lives and think, “What if?”  Click here for your two minutes of procrastination.

post #56: enumeration

A to do list is a common scheduling technique that I am sure you have all heard of, and probably have even employed at one time or another.  They are a very basic organization tool, and they are great for remembering large quantities of tasks.  The truth about to do lists, however, is that most people uses them at their most fundamental level.  There are so many ways to make to do lists more helpful and useful, as well as accessible and user-friendly. 

A to do list at its most basic form, as I am sure you all know, is just a list of tasks.  They are used mostly as a memory tool to ensure that no tasks are forgotten.  In this sense they do not have the capacity to be very helpful in scheduling.  After all if it is just for memory’s sake, a to do list does not have much to do with scheduling.   A to do list being used to its full potential, however, is not only a scheduling tool – it is a scheduling streamliner.

The trick to making your to do list into a useful tool is enumeration.  A list of tasks is inherently disorganized if it has no numbers, no order, no structure.  A to do list without organization might as well be a sea of tasks, because it is inaccessible in this form and thus is not helpful to the scheduler.  However once you have organized, ordered, and/or enumerated your to do list, there is immediate structure to it.  Once a list is numbered, you can see a plan of attack, a course of action, a schedule.

Enumeration, however magical I may make it out to be, is useless in its most basic form, specifically the order in which a list is written.  When you write a to do list, things to not come to mind in order of action required or priority.  Rather, tasks come to mind in a chaotic way through free association.  There is no natural order to this kind of list; it is random.  Thus, numbering a sheet of loose leaf from one to ten and then filling in some tasks is just as useless as a sheet of loose leaf without numbers.  

For enumeration of a to do list to be done right each task on the list needs to have two numbers aside from its position on the list, which as we have already said is random.  These two numbers refer to two very different and equally important concepts.  The first, and easier of the two, is enumeration according to priority.  This refers to how important a given task is, is it time sensitive, is there a deadline, or is there a time limit.  Setting a prior level for each task immediately morphs a list from being random to being organized and well thought-out.  The second enumeration is more connected to the scheduling aspect of the list.  This number pertains to when the task will be taken underway.  While this number relates to priority, the two are not synonymous.  The numbers given to tasks signifying their order to be accomplished are more specific than the numbers signifying their priority.  For instance, if you have a huge project due for a class at the end of the week, that would have high priority.  However, if you have to pick up your dry cleaning the night before the project is due, that task (while of lower priority) would be put before the project in the second set of enumerations.  This second set of numbers, and not the priority numbers, are the ones to be used when it comes time add the tasks from your to do list into your schedule.

To do lists are so widely used because they are easy.  Making them work better for you is easy, too.  With some practice you can turn an ordinary to do list into a scheduling tool that will cut in half the time it take you to make up a schedule for the week.  I find that it helps me to number my to do lists with the priority numbers on the right side of the paper and the “attack numbers” on the left.  Try it out, and see what works for you!  Click here for your two minutes of procrastination.