Get Your Project Started
how to turn a $2.79 folder into a Portable Home Office
I recently attended a lovely get together on a patio with two of my lady friends, and I took the opportunity to test-pitch the Portable Home Office.
I pulled out my Staples 3-Hole Punched 4-Pocket Paper Presentation Folder, and went to town, detailing the Kanban Board, the Post-It Note system, the Notebook Storage Space and the Payday concept, all of which they found interesting, but when I got around to the Achievement Register they each leaned forward in their rattan chairs for closer scrutiny.
“Are you giving yourself stars?” one of them asked, and they both burst out laughing.
(The answer to that question is “yes”.)
My project is The Roughhousing Website. I’ve been working on it for a few months now, but only formalized the process as of last week, when I set up the Portable Home Office.
The Portable Home Office is a home for:
one or two notebooks
Post-It Notes in various colors
a Kanban Board
a sheet of star stickers
a pencil
It is a heavy-duty, glossy, four-pocket folder from Staples, that starts out looking like this:
The first step is to fold it inside-out
which will put the pockets on the outside. The pockets hold the fresh Post-It Notes, one or two notebooks, star stickers and a pencil and the inside becomes a smooth, double-wide surface for the Kanban Board, which will look something like this:
The masking tape delineates sections:
NOT STARTED
IN PROCESS, A (beginning phase) and B (more developed phase)
COMPLETE
I use the colored Post-It Notes to represent categories.
For example, the orange ones are the time-sensitive work that I have to do this week: the Friday Article is in the “not started” section, Tuesday (today’s) Article is in the “in process” section, and last week’s Saturday Article is still in the Complete section (but will soon be moved back into “not started”). The longer-term projects, such as Start Website, will spend more time “in process”, at some point progressing from A to B, and once the Post-It Notes make it to “complete”, they earn me:
color-coded stars, in the Achievement Register. The red and blue stars are for weekly articles, videos and podcasts. Silver and gold stars are reserved for completing larger projects. These stars themselves don’t translate into any particular rewards, but they are a visual representation of completed work - which can be a valuable record when one is feeling stalled or overwhelmed in a project. I marked the date, 6/5, to indicate when I started “starring” the work. I will probably insert the date each week, to get a rough sense of progress over time.
The notebooks hold ideas, sketches and anything else that I need to record and keep track of. For example, I am putting together a series of videos and classes for simple carpentry projects. Here, I sketched out some project ideas, trying out various permutations to work out how to make them as simple as possible, while still having good lines and proportions.
on another page I took out the markers to play around with colors for the homepage of the website, and ideas for a garden course:
The Portable Home Office creates a home for my self-created job. Prior to this, it existed in my mind, on the web, and scattered among various notebooks around the house. In last week’s article on the challenge of being your own boss I talk about the difficulty of seeing projects through, when you are the only one to whom you are accountable. This could apply to a fitness regimen, an impending novel, a new business - anything that you wish to achieve, but have the dubious freedom to abandon at will.
It may seem a bit silly - a paper folder, a sheet of star stickers and some Post-It Notes, but these provide:
an area to see, at a glance, what you need to be working on at the moment
a record of what you have accomplished
a place to record new ideas and review old ones
a reminder to pay yourself (even very minimally) for your work
It provides a space for you-as-employee to meet with you-as-boss, where you are reminded of what the job involves, and where you can see how well (or poorly) you are doing that job. It is a platform that requires honesty (unearned stars shall NOT be stuck onto the Register!) and that honesty is rewarded with an accurate representation of your performance.
And what if the Portable Home Office reveals that you are a big old work-shirking, unmotivated fart face? That is valuable information, as it tells you that either:
the boss has set up an unreasonable project, and thus the project needs to be adjusted, or
the employee is in a state in which even a reasonable job is unmanageable, and thus needs to do some internal and external housekeeping before attempting the job once again
More about the second scenario next week.