A, one of my readers and a face-to-face friend, asked me recently to talk about how I was able to get so much done. She was particularly impressed with the fact that I was able to get the 31 days of magic project completed.
For better or worse, a good deal of the success of this kind of project depends on organizational techniques. For 2016, I’ve pretty much abandoned online and digital planning tools. They don’t work for me, they’re not as fast as pen and paper, and it often takes longer to commit the digital work-plan to the computer system’s tracking tool than it does to do the task.
Accordingly, I keep everything in bullet journal formal in a gridded Moleskine notebook. The back page is an index — something like twenty different squares help me index the book as I go, marking one or more grid squares on the edge of the page so that I can see at a glance where in the book something might be: poetry, design thinking, meeting notes, druidry diary entries, and more… everything receives a rough index as I go along.
The second piece is the bullet journal for the day. This was today. Now, today was a pretty productive day. I was home due to the snowstorm, and I was up early getting things crossed off.
At the same time, I was checking things off and completing them. Fair warning. I checked off as completed the “pants in living room” and really that has to be shifted to another day… because the cut pieces for those pants are still here, and not sewn together.
On the other hand, there’s a stack of Latin quizzes done, there’s an apprentice program planned, a druidry path working completed, a basket of clean laundry, a whole bunch of emails sent out, two after school events planned for, two gifts dealt with, and a whole bunch of smaller tasks finished that didn’t even make the list. A very productive day, all around.
More could be said. Much more. But I’m trying to practice not saying everything; silence has its own rewards of a sort; and sometimes it’s enough to say, if you want to manage your life well, then learn to manage your life’s works well. My mother says, “you are your projects”, and while there is something overly reductionist about that, it’s also true that getting the little things done makes room for larger successes.
