I'm back at work now, but the students aren't back yet, which means it's time for my annual attempt to figure out the best possible system to manage everything I'm doing at the same time!
Yay!
I think I've talked about before that. I regularly review and modify my work schedules and methodologies. However, this time I'm trying something very very different. And it was inspired by all the traveling I did.
Checklists.
When you travel with four small children and you're bringing all of your clothes, food, and in the case of one trip nearly all of your kitchen appliances, you can't get anywhere without checklists. Between the sheer volume of things to remember, and constant interruptions from children, I would undoubtedly forget something important. So I have persistent checklist that I have saved for any time we travel. In preparation for these trips, my wife and I also made a bunch of task checklists to make sure we didn't forget to do something before we left either.
During the second trip, I realized that all of those checklists made the entire process a lot less stressful. I wasn't constantly trying to rack my brain through everything, because I had offloaded it onto literal pieces of paper.
So I got to wondering: what if I had a checklist for every day of my life?
And I don't mean a to-do list, of which I've used and have had various iterations of in the past. I mean more like a pre-flight checklist, routines written down that I want to accomplish every single day. After all, one of the barriers to getting a lot of creative work done is mental fatigue. And there are a bunch of studies that show that that mental, decision fatigue wears down throughout the day as you have to make decision after decision. Decision. By creating a routine with a physical checklist that I had to check every day, I could offload a lot of the mental stress of decision making.
So I drafted a version while I was on vacation, and then two days ago I printed them out: for evening and one for morning. I'm back on an early morning routine where I get up extra early to give myself time to work on writing and podcasting etc. So the evening checklist is all about preparing for the next day: packing my lunch, making sure my keys and wallet are in the right place, deciding on what I'm going to be working on the next morning, that sort of thing.
The morning checklist is pretty sparse since most of the time is reserved for the created task that I decided the evening before. But it does include things like walking the dog and making sure I have time to make and eat breakfast.
It's gone decently well. So far. There are glitches in the system, particularly in trying to get to bed on time. It's waking up super early. Means I have to go to bed earlier that I'm used to, and my body hasn't quite adjusted to that yet. I also think the checklist need a little bit of tweaking still. But, I do feel like it has already made a vast improvement in getting myself to do what I want without added stress.
I'll keep you all updated on how it goes, but if you try it out or have ideas that could improve my checklist system, let me know in the comments!
PS: I dictated this blog post while walking the dog, so please excuse any weird typos, transpositions, or odd word choices.