Get Your Ducks in a Row

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It is reasonable to schedule time to take care of life’s administrative tasks, such as handling correspondence, paying bills, straightening up, and keeping things in order. These activities can be as important as anything else in helping you attain your optimal performance level. They can prepare you to best tackle critical tasks and projects. Heck, the grounds crews take time to mow the grass and line the fields before every baseball game, so there has to be some sense in tidying up!

Some people find it advantageous to set aside a whole day solely for taking care of “administrivia.” Thereafter, they have uninterrupted days of highly productive activity. For a specific task, when you know that there are going to be bottlenecks, you have a tendency not to get started. If you marshal your resources and take care of contingencies, you have a far greater chance of starting and staying with the project from the outset. Often it makes sense to handle minor tasks before tackling something larger.

If you know you’re going to need support somewhere down the line, ensure at the outset that it will be forthcoming. This will help you to get started on projects that you otherwise may find yourself lingering over.

You intend to come into the office Saturday (yeah, right) to reorganize your now messy filing system. So, during the week, as you pass by retail stores, or the company supply closet, you accumulate file folders, hanging folders, identification tags, and a waste bin for documents you no longer need. This way, when Saturday arrives, you have no excuse!

By assembling these items in advance – lining up your ducks – you all but ensure that you’ll proceed at a productive pace on Saturday when you tackle the job you have been planning. If you buy too many garbage bags, bring too many folders, don’t worry. You will use them eventually. Garbage happens. And you’ll likely need even more in the near future. You are not likely to use all the glass cleaner either, but it will certainly come in handy for other windows at other times. As far as the bug spray, hopefully you won’t need that again.

To not line up your ducks before starting a big project would ensure inefficiency, excessive downtime, and (need I say it?) further procrastination!

Lining up your ducks doesn’t always equate to buying things. It may be as simple as assembling items that you already have at your disposal, such as that all – important duct tape. For work-related projects, lining up your ducks might entail identifying key resources in advance, such as phone numbers of contact people, URLs of vital Web sites, or a list of usernames and passwords.

Lining up your ducks complements plotting a course. Simply jotting down the items or resources that you might need in advance of tackling the project represents prudent time management, is comforting, and, in retrospect, almost always proves to be rewarding. Then, go have a life, at least for the rest of the day. It’s rumored that time off can be quite enjoyable.

If you’re in need of an effective scheduling system, these days there are software programs across the Web designed to help the organizationally challenged. The time management software for Windows, Achieve Planner, allows you to arrange tasks hierarchically and color-code your priorities. The distributors at www.effexis.com.achieve/planner.htm assert that this program will help increase your productivity. You can also identify others easily. The point is, find something that works for you and stick with it.



Regards,



Timben