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Personal Restructuring
By Skip
Created: Friday, August 15, 2003, 11:47:16 MST"Just Do It!"
With the help of my wife, I've recently come to the realization that I have a very ineffective workspace. This is what I've decided to do about it.
We recently bought some new office furniture. Oh, who am I kidding. We just dropped nigh on $3k for modular wall office furniture to outfit our den in preparation for moving our son out of the nursery and into his own room (the old office). While exciting and fun, spending this much has really made me want to get organized and find a system that will work to help keep it that way.
My old desk looks like a Kansas town after a tornado, just without all the bare spots. It is constantly in a state of burial, either being excavated or being entombed. The amount of paper on it an any one time is enough to fill the small garbage can that we keep for office trash. So, my wife and I decided that the new office would have to be better.
In preparation for the move, we sought out office furniture with lots of storage space. The agreement is that, with all the new office space, some good planning, and my wife's excellent help, that the office will be kept clean and tidy. This is also necessary to prevent the certain disaster that would occur if my, recently mobile, son were to actually move something on my precariously piled desk. So the new space is to be organized, functional, and usable by two (my wife and I).
It just so happened that Slashdot carried an article the week after we bought the furniture about getting work done. In some of the discussion that followed, someone mentioned the excellent set of articles written by Steve Pavlina, CEO of Dexterity Software. You can find links to them in the sidebar and on my Interesting Links page, under Programming > Planning.
The articles and the describe how to be more effective. One, Clean Up That Mess, describes how to break your work area into work spaces. Basically, it can be summarized as effectively encapsulating each type of job or function that you need to perform and creating specialized work spaces for each. The spaces can overlap. In each space, you include all the necessary tools and organizational spaces required to get the work done and keep it neat.
I decided to make this the basis for how to setup my new office. As I started planning how to set things up, my wife pointed out that she had been describing many of the same techniques for years. At this point, I admit that this is true. It has taken awhile and some different influences to get it into my head, but I'm finally listening to her advice. Organization is key to getting things done.
I just now realized, that at work, when my desk is organized and layed out with one job at a time, that I'm more effective. When things are messy, as they are right now, I'm less focused and less able to get things done.
I need to get going. Quickly then, he also advocates organizing your time similarly to be able to accomplish more. Quantize and then stick to your quantums of time for each task. Don't let work overflow into family time, etc. Keep an organized ToDo list for each work/time space so that you always know what to do, where to pick up, and where to best leave off.
Well, it's time to clean up my work "work space" and organize it so I can get my projects back under control and start knocking them off.
One other thing that has helped me is the Painless Software Schedule created by Joel Spolsky. It was an incredible aid in completing some tough scheduling at work and I hope to expand it to home to manage my ToDo lists. We'll see how it works out.
Some other interesting articles from Joel are Painless Bug Tracking and his series on Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother?, Part 2: What's a Spec?, Part 3: But... How?, and Part 4: Tips.
Bye for now.
