Getting Things Done?

Yesterday, as I was about to pick up on the coding work I had been doing the previous day, I thought about my rule of thumb regarding milestones. The rule is that to do something well it should be considered early and often. So if you have a deadline on Friday, and are sure you can get it done in a few hours on Thursday - you shouldn't count on that. Instead, it often helps to take a tiny chunk of time - say even 5 minutes - to review the work earlier. Ideally, you look at the stuff and move it ahead a bit every day leading up to the slot where you'll do the work.

So if the project is writing a document, you can create the empty document and give it a name, on Monday. Tuesday you might write a rough bullet point outline for 5min. Wednesday, fill in the introduction that sets the stage for the rest of the doc, and on Thursday do the big job of writing it.

What that does for you is two things:

a) it gets your brain working in the background on the task. Scoping it out, even if a bit means your brain will already have some structure thought out when you launch into it later
b) Often your attempt at spending 5min on Monday will turn into doing a bit more. What the heck, I'll do the outline too. Pretty soon you have a rough draft, and you polish it a bit on Wednesday. The result is your Thursday has less pressure, and you end up with a better document as you've had a chance to both write and refine the draft before finalizing.

So yesterday I was going to take a five minute review through my biz plan and pitch slides in preparation for a conversation on Friday, and ended up spending most of the day repositioning some stuff in the business plan. My thinking had evolved since the last review, and I really wanted to capture the adjusted course, so I jumped in.

I have a 5 point portfolio of product opportunities, and the intent was to focus on the first two elements. Now, however, I see that the first two are demonstrators for achieving the third, so I've repositioned that stuff, and it reads more interestingly like focus on number 3, with 1 and 2 being addressed on the way there. Much happier with that.

Nothing focusses strategy like the lens of time.

Researchinator basks in the warmth of the adjusted focus...