Your Personal Production Line

For a lot of us, our work days are a fast moving target, with shifting priorities, last minute changes, and all kinds of variability moves into the picture and messes up our best laid plans. We end up with two very distinct and conflicting streams of work: what you plan to do and what pops up. But there's a problem: there's a third stream.

Most of Us Are Incredibly Good at Forgetting Ongoing Work

We can work on projects with deadlines. We obviously have to work on whatever fire drills people put on our plate, but then there are projects that are more your "steady state" work, the things you're supposed to do as part of your role. For whatever reason, those are the tasks we tend to work on the least. Unless we make a method for it. I'll tell you mine.

The: "Work On This" List

I've spoken before about lists. They make up a lot of my solutions, because I think that any time we ask our brain to remember things, it's not the best use of a brain. We just have to remember where to find the lists where the things we have to remember are stored, and life works so much better.

To that end, I've got a "Work on This" list. I'll share some of it, heavily redacted, but you'll get a sense of things:

• Continue with [two important meetings] improvements
• Get an Allhands cadence schedule back on track
• Tune up [person] to train in [a new skill]
• Schedule meetings with [person] for ongoing coaching on [stuff]
• Check in with [person] weekly
• 10 COS 1:1 meetings a week minimum
• Checkin on [person] every 3 weeks about [person] support
• Checkin with [person] weekly

A lot of my "ongoing" projects involve executive coaching (easy to figure that from my list). The contents of my list are useless to you. Here's the two steps you need to make this work.

1. Stick this list wherever you keep your second brain (here's a 15 minute book club talk of the book this comes from).
2. Put EVENT reminders in your calendar that point to that list.

If you tend to ignore your calendar (look, people do), you can also throw this onto a sticky note. Put a note up in your work area that says: Work On This. It can either be the actual list, or just a reminder to open that little list wherever you stored it. (This is what I do. I have a sticky that says "Work on this.")

This method helps me keep checkins with my boss going in the right direction. It also means that when I do find those brief 10-20 minute pockets of time, I don't squander them by sifting through my email or jumping on LinkedIn or checking texts. I pluck something off the pile and tackle it. Most of my tasks on this list don't take a lot of time in and of themselves. They're mostly reminders to work on projects that are a bit more ongoing. (Most of mine are either coaching or communications related, at the moment.)

Remember: these aren't your main projects. You don't need reminders for those. These aren't your "Oh hey, we've gotta get this to Barbara by 9pm tonight. It's a rush!" Those handle themselves. This is for those ongoing gigs and more "rolling along" projects.

What do you think? Want to try it out? Or do you have an even better method?

Chris...