The personal disquiet of
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
For quite a while now, I’ve been struggling with how to cope with everything on my plate at work. I run a small business, starting a new publishing business, I’m an art director, project manager, sales director. And so the list goes on. And I know I’m not alone, we’re all busy, right? We’re all pulled in every which way.
Thing is, I have a couple of designers and developers here who need my help every day. They need to run things by me, get feedback on work, resolve issues. And so the list goes on. What I was struggling with was the interruption to my flow. It meant that, quite often, I’d end a day feeling I hadn’t accomplished anything other than fight other people’s fires. Of course this is the wrong way to think about things, and I was actually doing my job by doing all that. But I still needed to apply more structure to this activity, so that I could have available time to spend on designing and all the other stuff.
So, a couple of weeks ago, Emma introduced the idea of a bi-daily 30 minute triage. This is time for everyone to have a bunch of things they want to go through with me. At 10am and 2pm everyday, I keep that time free and available for whoever needs me. And, so far, it’s working a treat.
There we have it: timeboxed triage. Give it a go.