Hello! A slightly unusual series of posts from me this week, because as we head into 2021, several people have made intrigued noises when I talk about my planning and productivity tools.
So here’s a set of four posts talking about those things:
- This post (an overview of what my goals are with this)
- Long-term planning (how I approach it)
- Doing things (task management)
- Tracking (keeping track of what I’ve done)
First, let me be really clear: I am writing this up in case any piece of it might be useful to you. While it’s less actual work than it looks like, I suspect this is a lot more fussy than most people want to do.
However (based on previous conversations), I also bet that some specific pieces of it might be handy to others. Since I can’t tell which, you get me talking about them all!
Why I think about this so much
I have to. For a bunch of reasons.
Once upon a time, my executive function worked really well. I was the sort of person who could keep my next month of things I had to do (and their dependent tasks) in my brain. I did that when I was in my Dedicant year as a witch, when I was in library school, when I was helping plan a convention. (Which is to say, it’s not like there weren’t things going on in my life)
And then I had my health crash in 2009 and 2010, and I lost my ability to executive function or make decisions without a lot of scaffolding for about 2 years. I suddenly needed a whole bunch of structure to make that work that I hadn’t really needed for most of my life. (And I also had really limited stamina, which meant I could do many fewer things.)
I could be really annoyed about that. (I was. Or at least I was when I could work up the energy to be annoyed, which I couldn’t for a long while.) Or I could go “Okay, new skill set”. I’ve always been a person interested in productivity planning even when I didn’t desperately need it, which helped. A lot.
(Also a bunch of my chronic stuff works a lot better when I’m careful not to overschedule myself, and make sure I have time and recovery time for necessary stuff like household chores.)
One of my biggest issues is starting inertia, which is why the following process is designed to
a) reduce start up energy required (by making it clear what the next relevant thing is and/or making some decisions in advance so I don’t have to think about them when they’re harder)
and
b) make sure I don’t lose pieces of the more complex process or, you know, forget they take me time to do.
One of my big goals for 2021 is to figure out ways to simplify or cut down time on making decisions that I make routinely (or do it once and then just do what I decided unless there’s a good reason to change that).
This is part of why I’ve been working on building up some routine decisions (“It’s Monday, my evening work time is the witchy stuff” or “I do my planning for the week on Saturdays.”)
How long does this take?
There’s a certain amount of yearly set-up: getting the astrology information into Todoist and the spreadsheet takes me 6-8 hours total (done while watching something fun on a streaming service over the course of a week or two).
Doing the “What do I want to do with myself this year” larger goal planning takes me 3-5 hours of active time (and some more random thinking time) over the course of a month or so.
The HB90 process takes some setup each quarter. (See that bit for details.)
However, once that’s done, the weekly planning takes me under an hour a week, plus 5-10 minutes during the day to update things, including the massive spreadsheet.
Parts of my life
These days, I’m juggling a bunch of things, and they have often competing demands, so I need a way to sort through that. My current list includes:
1) My day job
I’m a librarian at an unusual research library. Part my job is ‘be available when people have questions’ but not knowing exactly when those will arrive or how complex they’ll be. For me, those range from ‘I can answer that in 5 minutes’ to “let me take 6 months to demonstrate that our field is Really Horrific At Keeping Stats, round 3257.” It’s not always easy to tell which is which right away.
Along with that I have ongoing projects that we plug away on regularly, where I ought to make steady progress. However, a lot of these tasks are the kinds of thing where you can’t work on it for hours at a time (you will want to throw things at some point).
Others need a chunk of time to open a bunch of tabs and look at them before everything times out (It’s not great to open everything up if I have a meeting in half an hour, I will lose a ton of time when I get back trying to remember what I’ve already looked at, what I was thinking of for the next search, reloading logins that have timed out, etc.)
Sometimes I have meetings or other obligations.
Basically, this means I look at my email in the morning and make a game plan from there, but I also have to keep in mind the longer-term stuff, or knowing that right now might be quiet but in two weeks this other thing is going to start taking more time.
The good part is that very few of these tasks are super urgent. We occasionally get an urgent question, but 95%. of the time that’s because someone notable in our field has died and various people want confirmation of dates and other info we have on hand. (Sad, and sometimes complicated to figure out what we can lay hands on fast, but the basic process of where we look and what we sort of expect to be able to find is the same most of the time. it takes time but not a ton of innovative thought.)
Most of the time, I can spend a bit of time moving stuff to a day when I can focus on a longer task, or give myself a day to think about how to approach something.
2) Coven
I’m a witch who is a high priestess in a small religious witchcraft tradition, with a small coven. I’m the one making the majority of things go as other people learn the tradition practices/get experience in doing other parts. (I’ve been doing this witch thing for about 20 years depending where you count from, though only about 5 of those running my own coven.)
This is the next most complicated thing for scheduling, because it has a lot of dependencies. If we are doing ritual on December 19th, then I need to figure out what the ritual is at least two weeks in advance, probably longer if there are things I might need to order, have on hand for groceries, cook, or otherwise prepare. Sometimes we do planning discussions, which mean additional scheduling.
The same thing is true for classes. I mostly have my Dedicant class teaching notes sorted now (this is the third time through teaching my own Dedicants, students in the tradition), but I do go through them and add or edit things. I also have to do my own prep for coven discussions, which varies depending on what we’re talking about.
The other coven complexity is that I’m not good for complex thought after coven events (I can do my regular writing at the end of the day time, but I’m not up for thinking through something complicated, editing, etc. Rote tasks only. Not all time is created equal.)
Finally, I need to leave a certain amount of time and energy for stuff that comes up – emails from people with questions, mostly, but sometimes an urgent need will come up.
3) Writing
As well as the day job and the coven, I write and self-publish romance novels (mostly 1920s with magic, with a few earlier bits.) I publish four books a year, and have been since late 2018.
I write every day. (Lots of people don’t! I discovered that if I don’t, I don’t write much at all. Do what works for you.)
I’ve been doing that since the beginning of 2018 so the time is basically baked into my daily schedule (I only think about whether I need to fuss with that if I have some kind of all-evening plans, or am travelling or something.)
For example, I have a role playing game night every other Monday (so much fun) and that means I need to do my writing for the day before that starts at 8:30pm.
(Right now, I write from around 10pm to midnight. When I presumably go back to commuting sometime in 2021, that will have to move forward a fair bit again.)
However, that doesn’t cover all the other things that go into indie publishing – editing, sorting out cover stuff, doing all the uploads, marketing, despairing over blurb writing and marketing copy, etc.
A lot of that gets has been getting stuck on Sunday afternoons and vacation time, because I can’t stack them on either work days or coven days. Figuring out some better options for this for 2021 is one of my goals. I don’t mind the work, but I would like less existential angst about scheduling in my life. (Also, there’s only so much Sunday afternoon available.)
4) Embodied life
Somewhere in there I need to deal with getting groceries, cook food, have a shower, get some exercise, and do other things. When we’re not in a pandemic, I have a couple of regular (more or less monthly) things I do with friends. There are errands and car maintenance and keeping up with my budget and my med refills and doctor appointments and all the other stuff that goes with daily life.
I live by myself (well, with the cat, but she doesn’t do housework…) so if I don’t do the thing, it’s not getting done.
5) My personal magical work
This is last on the list because it’s the most flexible. I do a shortish daily offering practice every morning, a longer one on Sunday mornings, and I set aside a bit of other time during the week for study/book of shadows/other time. I’m more or less okay with the current balance here when I don’t get stuck on “what should I focus on next” decision fatigue.
Now you’ve had the intro, let’s move on to the longer term planning.
Here’s the parts of this series if you want to jump around:
- This post (an overview of what my goals are with this)
- Long-term planning (how I approach it)
- Doing things (task management)
- Tracking (keeping track of what I’ve done)
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