My Project Planning Dilemma
I talked a few months ago, as part of the Getting Organized series, about having a format for project planning. Although I have tried – again and again – this is a portion of my organizational system that has consistently eluded me. I set up systems, but they tend not to work well for me.
See, here’s my issue: I have ideas coming out my ears. (Not literally, of course. Although that could make for an interesting piece of art!) So if I put together a whole full-fledged step-by-step plan for each idea, the result is huge. It’s not really my style, either, to step-by-step plan everything. And some things don’t need a lot of paperwork. But others do.
So what happens is I get an idea and I jot it down. Usually, it’s not more than a page’s worth of something. (I might brainstorm a list of chapters for a book, for instance, or notes on elements I want for a new planner cover I need to make.) This paper gets left lying around – or stuck someplace – and when I want to work on the project again, I can’t find the paper so I have to either start over or spend forever looking for it.
But it’s too much work to get it all set up in a full-fledged system when it’s just a fledgling idea.
Now, maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but I suddenly had an “aha” moment today (while thinking about the most newly-misplaced project list). What I really need is a system that is inherently designed to only use a single list for a project unless and until it needs further development, but which will also accommodate that further development for those that do.
The Basic Idea of the System
It’s probably easiest to clarify by showing you what initiated this “aha” in the first place. This year, we set up writing notebooks for my two older girls, based on some writing notebooks we found through Pinterest. It suddenly occurred to me that what I need is one of those notebooks, except adapted for projects instead of stories.
See, these writing notebooks are set up to walk students through the process of writing a story, from the scrawling of the first draft through publication. It also acknowledges that not every story will ultimately be published. So what happens is that every new story gets written into the same notebook, beginning on the sheet of paper immediately following the last. That’s it. You write it in the notebook, and it’s there where you can find it. If you never go further with the story, it never moves.
But…
If you decide you want to work on that story, you tear it out and move it into the next section for the next step of the process.
Adapting the Format for Project Planning
So what I really need is a notebook where I can write down all my ideas. Each idea will get its own page so it can potentially be moved later, but I don’t have to make any particular attempt to break it down. Every single idea will get written into the same notebook. A notebook is relatively small, and only one thing to keep up with. It’s also not complicated to get something into a notebook. (I do suspect a few things will get glued in because the notebook wasn’t around when I first had the idea and needed to get it onto paper.)
Then when I want to work on something and it needs more planning, it can be torn out and moved into a binder that’s set up to allow it more space. Kind of like moving a story from the first-draft notebook to the revising space.
I’ll update you after I’ve gotten this set up, but I wanted to go ahead and share it in case any of you, like me, find the concept of allowing for projects that don’t require further development clarifying. Until I suddenly “pictured” them this way, it just had never “clicked.”
This post is being shared at Works for Me Wednesday.
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