First published: 2021-04-22 Last updated: 2024-02-28
I'm really excited about how I currently manage my projects, it's been a long time in building.
I do "too many" things at once, and am always coming up with cool ideas that I'd love to work on, but historically I don't do the work to get them done. This has often lead me to believing that I don't have a good "work ethic" despite the fact that I'll binge work on a project and get tons done over a few days. As I've already written about in some other places, I've been recently really coming to terms with the idea that I have limited amounts of executive function on any given day, and that the amount of executive function I have available to me varies to the extreme day to day. I have finally settled on the idea that "high executive function days" need to be focused on building systems built for "low executive function days".
In the past I have felt the rush of energy of high executive function, and convinced myself that I was done with whatever had "put me in a funk" and that the future would be different. I'd develop a system that worked perfectly for a week or so, while I was still running on the enthusiasm for something new and exciting. And then I'd have what I considered an "off day", and "fail" my metrics, and then maybe I'd shake it off for a day or two, then I'd "fail" again.. and again.. and again.. Eventually I'd give up the system as a failure. And I'd feel like a failure.
But since learning more about how my brain works, I'm now building FOR what I can typically handle on days when I can't make a decision for love nor money, and considering days when I can do more a bonus! There's a solid argument that without the good days the system wouldn't work at all, but I also know that they do happen, and it's not dependant on them happening on any specific frequency.
I started with a video from How to ADHD on youtube, about how to manage projects. She has a nice worksheet that walks you though clarifying What the project is, why you want to do it, what it's going to "cost" you in time/ materials etc, and then how are you going to "pay" for it, aka scheduling the steps. The goal as she states it is that you've got the whole thing scheduled out before you agree to do something, so you know you can actually get things done within the time limit, (if there is one) before you commit to a thing.
I started building these worksheets for myself. Originally I was scheduling out blocks on my non-gym days, making plans for how long they would take to accomplish, and listing "due dates" for myself, staggering projects out so I was working on things, but trying to keep things moving quickly.
Eventually this got overwhelming, I couldn't keep up with scheduling out which things I was working on every week, I fell behind in my "deadlines" and spent a lot of days working on projects when I wasn't excited about them, and not working on the projects I was excited on until a point where my enthusiasm had been dampened and I was once again, working on projects I wasn't excited about.
But after I fell apart, I noticed it was much easier to pick up the projects I'd written the steps out on than it had been in the past. So I decided the write ups themselves were beneficial. I decided to ditch the "payment planning" part, since very few of the projects I ever pick up have external deadlines, and just write up what I wanted to achieve, why, and what the steps were. And then when I was planning out just the next day in my bullet journal the night before, I could brief through the collection of write ups and find something I wanted to do. This wasn't as taxing as trying to plan out a week or two in advance, and started working pretty well.
Eventually I noticed when I was having an exceptionally low spoon day, digging through the accordion file full of paper clipped groups of notes was a challenge, and I'd sometimes give up on writing up my expectations for the next day because of it, I realized I needed some more help.
I have a small dry erase board in my bedroom, and I'd been using it as a capture device for new ideas, and as a list of projects that were under the heading of "soldering" because of where the board ended up in my last re-organization of my room, which was directly over where I store my soldering tools.
I decided what I really needed to know at any given time, was just the next step on each project that I'm working on. If it's something small, it'd be easy to do it when I had some free time, if it's something bigger, it seemed likely to be a pretty obvious thing to schedule in for focus on a non gym day. So on a"high executive function" day, I made a list of every project that I considered "current" out of my accordion file, with a name for each project and then the next step that needed to be taken on each one. I figured at any given time I could start working on a project, fish out the notes for it if I needed to, and end each work session with a note of what step needed to happen next, erasing the existing one on the board.
I got the board up and running a little over two weeks ago as of the time of this writing, so it's a bit early to know for sure whether it's going to work long term, and I've since updated it so it now has "date project was last worked on" in front of the name of the project, then the next step after. Thus far though, it's working like a dream. It's super simple to look for something to schedule for myself to do the next day, it's easy to check in on what I might want to do with spare time when it shows up, and I've had at least a couple of days when I had almost no executive function really, but managed to move forward with not just one, but more than one project, because the decision making was already done.
I also have discovered that getting to write the current date next to a project, and reset the next step seems to be triggering the "task completion" dopamine boost even better than checking something off in by bullet journal does! This isn't replacing anything, but is doing a great job at what it's there for.
I have found myself wrangling with one particular "should" ghost, though. I often feel like redundancies should be eliminated, because they're potentially time consuming and theoretically unnecessary. This board is entirely redundant, the steps in question are available written down elsewhere, the statement of when a project was worked on is also available elsewhere. So there's a loud voice in my head that says "this is redundant, and you shouldn't need it, get rid of it". But I'm trying my best to become friends with the redundancies that help me when my brain fails at a task. Identifying next steps, recalling what projects I'm working on, remembering when the last time I worked on something was; these are all things that I do not to well. If I'd have had to make a guess on how many projects I had going when I went to look and write them up, I'd have said somewhere between 5 and 10. I've got 16 currently written down on my board, and this week realized there are at least two that I forgot about, because I haven't done a proper write up on them yet.
Thus far this has been hugely successful, and I'm going to do my best to let you know whether that continues to be true!
update 2021-05-11:
I've been keeping a "to-do ..Eventually" list in my bullet journal, and this month when I (belatedly) did my review and pushed things forward, almost everything on that list had turned into "write up -Idea of thing I want to do- project". Which I think might be absolutely perfect. That means I won't lose new ideas that I haven't had the time to do a write up on, I can do those write ups when I'm having a high executive function day, and put them in my file folder, and then add them to my projects board when I'm actually ready to begin working on them! OMG! It's WORKING!
update 2021-06-25:
This month I've had some realizations about my sense of time and scope with in regards to my projects. When I started listing the 'last worked on' notation on my projects board, I promised myself that I wouldn't allow it to be a guilt trigger, but also had the idea that when a project had not been worked on for a certain amount of time, that I'd remove it, and place the paperwork for it in the back of my files to be brought out again when it once again became an "active" project. I resisted the urge to create a rule and designate when too long was then and there. But in the back of my head, I reasoned it was probably when I hadn't worked on a particular project for more than a month. But it turns out, I often have projects that I definitely consider to be "active" that I haven't worked on in a month or two. They're low priority projects, and/or projects that require input from others and/or a dedicated day for their next step. But they're still things I am working on. Disallowing myself to beat me up about how long it's been since I worked on a project has been exceptionally good for my mental health. I'm no longer harassing myself about how I "never finish anything" because "I can't even remember when the last time I touched that idea was". I now know exactly when the last time was, and I know all of the other things that I have been filling my time with, and don't feel nearly as bad as I did. As a bonus though, I have found that seeing a different month-number in the column of "last worked on" is aesthetically jarring. And that, independently of the time span it represents, pushes me to want to do something on that project so that I can "pretty up" my board. I've also actually started finishing projects! I'm still planning on doing write ups of those projects to publish here, but I've actually tracked multi-month projects from start to finish! As soon as I have the write up done, I'll link here to the giant Nauga I created. It is a full representation of the kinds of things I've always considered doing, got half way through planning, and then just.. didn't do.
I did it this time.
I can do it again.
I was invited to participate in a month long, once a day, draw a picture project (I'll link to it once I do that write up), and I realized I didn't have physical space to put it on my projects board. I considered briefly moving a project to 'inactive' but then realized I had a couple of projects that were very nearly done. I moved one of those projects as far forward as I could, but then found myself waiting for paint to dry, so knocked out another project that had only digital steps left to take. Once I finished that project, I erased it from the board, and added the project I was excited to do with friends! And I managed to do it before the official start date!
update: 2023-04-26
So... I haven't been using this particular method of project management for a few months now, because I've been diving very deeply into single, larger scope projects. But I fully expect to be picking it back up in the future! So.. to be continued!
Update: 2024-02-28
New home, and I'm very much back into a "I have so many projects to work on head space. We're renovating an old building to eventually house a clown school in! Renovation is essentially a pile of projects, and I also am trying to balance my life so that I'm doing things that feed my creative side at the same time.
We built a vimwiki to track things related to the building, shared between those of us working on it. I've also been working in vimwiki to organize thoughts for upcoming blog posts, my morning pages, and some other general note-taking. Having packed up my office, and not truly had a place to unpack it in to for months, I found myself shifting to a digital form of the same style of project tracking. I stopped having migraines when I went on testosterone, so I no longer feel like I need my system to be physical, as I don't have "screens pain my brain" days anymore. When I found myself making this shift, I realized that once I had step lists in a wiki for each project, that there was no reason I couldn't automate the population of a page in the wiki to replace my "next steps" board. The code for that can be found here: https://codeberg.org/socialgaff/NextStepsGen This resulted in losing the "last step" timing tracking component, and it doesn't hit quite the same dopamine boost as erasing the physical board, but it does make it very easy for me to check in, find something to do, and keep my next steps for both personal projects and building projects visible on the same page. I'm still using my bullet journal for my daily to-dos, and that's working really well. I have found that I will go sometimes weeks, often many steps of a project, without checking in on the system, but it never takes much to update it, and it's still there whenever I lose track, it helps me focus in and remember where I'm at, even if it's not where the page says I left it. I suppose we'll see how well it keeps up in the long term, but the amount I've been able to drop it and pick it back up tells me that it's got some real potential. Oh, I forgot to mention another major benefit to the switch to digital notes on my projects! In theory it may make it easier for me to share my process on my blog after projects are completed! My old project write ups I really tried to focus on not using up too much paper with random thoughts, but there's no reason I have to do that in this method, I can put any notes I want to in there, they don't take up space in a way that makes it harder for me to figure out what's next. They can just live attached to the steps list. Heck, they can be in and among the steps list, ..probably not the best plan for readability, but it won't make it harder for the script I wrote to work, so that feels really freeing to me. I haven't yet finished out a project and done a write up on it in a way that uses that possibility yet, but I could and that's exciting. I'll put more updates here as I have 'em!