For a couple of days, I hemmed and hawed about signing up. I've been through these types of classes before and came away with virtually nothing that worked for me and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the money on something that would probably not help me anyway.
Finally, though, I thought what's one more organization/time management class in the grand scheme of things? And maybe, just maybe, this one might have something I could use.
It did! And I'm glad I signed up. It was an intense three days and it was a good thing my story was with my editor and I had no writing to do because all I did when I wasn't at my day job from Thursday night through Sunday night was exercises for the boot camp.
It required a lot of thinking and a lot of writing and I also had to reconfigure my brain because I'd always heard goals shouldn't revolve around anything you couldn't completely control and this author was saying the exact opposite. This was actually one of the hardest aspects of the boot camp for me--getting my head wrapped around this very foreign-to-me concept.
I believe it was a very good exercise and I'm glad I took the class, but one of my favorite things was creating my own kanban board. This is a board for To Do, Doing, Done tasks. We used an electronic kanban board at my day job for about a year and I really liked it, but the online version had a big limitation--I had to make an effort to see it. Every morning, I had to make it a point to pull up our department's board on the internet and I generally left it open in my browser all day.
My home kanban board is on my wall. I marked off the board with washi tape (thanks to a suggestion from another author) and while the lines aren't straight, it'll work. BTW, the OCD part of me is appalled by the crooked washi tape lines, but so far I'm living with it.
The two super good things about this is the board is located in my office where I write/work and it's right in my face every time I walk out the door. I can't forget what I'm supposed to be doing.
Since I took this picture, I have moved a number of items to the Done section on the bottom and I have two in the Doing section in the middle.
I'm liking this so far. A lot. If it works for me and makes me more productive, I'm going to invest in an actual white board and take down the washi tape. But for now, as I take this method for a test drive, I don't want to invest a lot of money.
Now to finish some of these tasks/projects.
