How do I effectively manage myself when I have well over 50 projects to do?

[simon]

Dear All

It's been a while since I've last posted on StevePavlina's Forums but I've today hit upon a revelation and wanted to get some good honest advice. Essentially, life is going extremely well at the moment; I'm definitely in an upward spiral - all those years of struggle that I went through were purely a struggle to accumulate the correct information with which to achieve the goals and principles by which I live. Now I feel I have the correct information in my personal and business life; I'm inwardly happy

Anywho, today I decided that I needed to get myself PROPERLY ORGANISED. I've got lots of ideas that I want to start converting into reality and so I listed all the projects that immediately sprung to mind. I split them into the following categories:

'All Projects with Currently paying clients'
- These are day to day projects that I've committed to helping people out with

'All Potential Projects with Interested clients'
- These are projects were I have legwork and proposals to do for people who are looking to employ my services

'Internal Company Projects'
- i.e. accounting, tax returns, invoicing, networking and getting my email marketing stuff together

'Personal Projects'
'Fun, Social, Life & Personal Development Projects'
- diet, dating, writing, family, etc

Within fifteen minutes I'd listed about 48 projects and I know that this brief list does not represent every single goal I've ever had for myself, so i will be adding to this list.

When looking at this list, a feeling of calm came over me because it explained what I'd been feeling this week - mentally overwhelmed! I mean, in a weeks worth of time, if I attended to each project without sleep I could only attend to each one for three hours! So, once I realised it is totally unrealistic to have so many projects that I want to start going ahead with, I was pretty happy about having taken the time to assess this.

We're all pretty proactive on this blog, so lots of people must have the same situation as myself. If you need further clarification on anything, please ask.

How would anyone recommend that I go forward with this situation?

I have the following ideas about it so far:

1 - Bin some of these projects and resolve to not worry about doing any of them

2 - If not bin, put some of these on the backburner for review sometime next year

3 - Assess the ones that definately HAVE to be done, and the ones that I need to ACT on

4 - Form some sort of prioritisation on the projects

And then I'd also like to know how people fit so many tasks into just one small day - I don't find that I can work 16 hours day consistently because I'll eventually just burn out. You watch some of the super successful entrepreneurs and they all work around the clock. What are people's thoughts on this>

[simon]

I've been working on this since I posted this morning. I stumbled across Steve's discipline series - which I've read before but until this morning, discovered that I hadn't PROPERLY read it!

I hope you don't mind me posting here - since it's very self-centered as it's all about me - but in a way it's just a form of self-teaching by the very act of posting. If you find this thread boring, there are thousands of other ones on here

Having written down all the projects this morning, I didn't feel at all motivated to get started on any of them today. I do have a cold today and feel a bit groggy so that doesn't help, but i'll still soldier on. Monday to Wednesday went very well and I'll come back to that when I go through the Willpower section. But yesterday and today I really haven't achieved anything.

I decided that perhaps my mental frame of mind is the thing that stops me from just getting work done; so I looked for some inspiration on the site and started reading the self-discipline articles...

My self discipline is my ability to get me to take action regardless; I imagined being able to sit down with a list in front of me and churn through the tasks in a positive and quick manner. That is what self discipline is visually to me - looking at a list of tasks, knowing that's what i have to get done, and then doing it. Rarely do I do work in such an organised way of course. Therefore I realised my major problem is actually my self-discipline. I looked back at my life and realised there were only a few moments were I was taught self-discipline, and these were probably less than 1% of my current living life. My parents would solider on regardless, so industry was their prime factor. At school I was disciplined enough to work many hours int the evening getting my homework done. At college, this was less so, and then at university it was even worse. So, having looked back at my life I've realised that although I had a good start in life, I gradually took extremely lazy mindsets from others and my environment, and I'm now living through them now- which are making things difficult for me sometimes. If I was a force of nature, the amount I could acheive would be awesome - and I think it's the same for everyone.

Which led me to believe that self-discipline is far more important that what Steve intimates it to be - 'it's only one tool in your toolbox.' I believe that fundamentally self-discipline is a psychological state of how much belief you have within yourself to get it done, and then enough of a mind-body connection to actually get the physical actions to start and consistently continue.

But in the real world, what Steve has said has really resonated with me. It's about consciously choosing to improve my self discipline, and consistently reminding myself of this fact. From this, it's a weekly thing; I want to eventually achieve five days a week of 12 hour days, that is five sets of 12 reps.

Accepting where I am right now was also an eye opener, I've very rarely even completed five working days in a row where I can say I'm truly satisfied with my effort. So I realised that five sets of five reps (concentrated enthusiastic hours of work) is a realistic challenge for me. It sounds ridiculously simple to achieve, but I'm sure that in practice it's going to be a lot harder; else why haven't I been doing it on a regular basis already?

The willpower analogy was also very important since I realised that I've been using willpower in the incorrect way - to tackle my tasks head on day in and day out - which is possibly why I've never been able to achieve consistently high levels of work week in and week out. It's almost stop-start, stop-start. I'm a tiny bit confused as to how I can apply this concept of willpower in the real world - as in, what environmental or social changes can I make that will enable me to achieve my further goals. The steps:

1) Choose my objective
2) Create a plan
3) Execute the plan

I guess the immediate objective for me is to get entirely organised with every task written down in one single place, and I also want to listen to 'Getting Things Done' at least three times to really ram it home again. But I'm still feeling pretty tired - so maybe my willpower for this week has gone - does willpower really work that way? As in, it's actually like a battery that needs recharging through rest? Any thoughts?

The hard work and industry pillars seemed very similar and appeal to me most. I've always been interested in going the extra mile on extremely difficult tasks that my peers would not necessarily be doing - it makes sense that hard work completed will eventually produce a greater result than something that was easy to do. The industrious side of me is something I've lacked and almost forgotten about. At the start of 2008, I set myself hourly targets for each week and this worked well for the first three months, but then I sort of stopped doing it! Maybe at that point I should have taken a holiday to recharge- isn't it true that most successful people take the most vacations?

I think I'm getting somewhere with this topic at the moment; so I'm going to continue posting to it to see where it gets me, and if it's of use to anyone else... for now my brain needs time to rest!

[RichC]

in short a big help will be adopting Pareto's principle - 80/20

Pick the top 20% of projects that give you the 80% of value. You should have your main objectives in mind when you do this. Work to your key objectives then apply the 80/20 rule to your projects.

It all starts with objectives. Set you key goals then look at which are the most important/critical. Work backwards from there to shape your year/month/week/day.

Look at the lines of least float on each project i.e. what are entirely time dependent and must get done by a particular point in time e.g. tax return, etc. Put these in the neccessary objectives (day/week/month/year).

Once this is all organised it will be much easier to work towards than just spreading yourself across so many different things.

good luck.

[{aspiring_to_clarity}]

I'm wondering if you have the option of hiring an admin assistant to help keep your schedule and handle the smaller, less important projects? I'm infering from your post that you work for yourself? I'm an admin and I can tell you that two whole categories of projects from your OP are handled by me in our small office.

A good admin would take a lot of the stress away by helping with organization, being a buffer between you and clients so you are able to spend your time more wisely, handling those important tasks that usually get lost in the shuffle and completely taking over the more mundane daily items that suck your valuable time away. If you get a good admin, you can completely delegate the 80% of less crucial projects right off the bat, and your organization for those important 20% of projects will be much more efficient.

Just a thought.

[Chris Cade]

Outsource! I use these two sites depending on what I need done:

Elance | Connect with Qualified Professionals

Rent A Coder: How Software Gets Done -- Home of the worlds' largest number of completed software projects

[nick pagan]

There's good advice here already. You must definitely apply the 80/20 rule. Buy Richard Koch's definitive book on the subject. There's even a 5/50 rule that 50% of your income comes from 5% of your customer base. These are your raving fans who buy everything that you offer. Focus on them first. Look after your other remaining clients after that and leave the new customer generation until last.

Use outsourcing if you can. It does take some extra effort in the beginning and you do have to go through a learning curve to assess people and instruct them properly. The book 'The Four Hour Work Week' gives a good introduction to finding and using outsourcing.