Great news! I’ve managed to build a dashboard that shows me all my creative project activity over the past 90 days. This helps me see what I’ve given lots of attention to and what I’ve ignored for far too long. It helps me see this at a glance to make it immediately clear where the imbalances might be.
In general, I tend to obsess and hyperfocus on just one main project for a big chunk of time. This can be a long, full day of effort or even a week or two straight of constantly pushing it forward. While this kind of dedication can be good at times, it ignores everything else, and that’s the problem because other projects are quickly forgotten.
This all stacks up into a huge backlog of projects I wish were more complete. While I’ve had moments of clarity enough to realize I am not distributing my time effectively, it has been quite the challenge to wrap my head around how to resolve this problem in a sustainable manner and undergirded by a clear perspective.
So this week, after rolling a vague idea around my head for days if not weeks, I finally took some time to crystalize the concept into something I can see and use. I knew I wanted it to be visual and tell me a lot with a single glance. I knew I wanted it to be automated so it can process a lot of data and I don’t have to fiddle with carefully copying every day. The final piece of the puzzle was that I wanted it to tell me each day that I worked on or ignored a project.
To my own surprise, I succeeded and it turned out much better than I had expected. It took the form of a spreadsheet. Technically there is more than one sheet that helps process my daily log of creative work. All I have to do is continue my daily habit of logging the start and stop times of what I’m working on, so no additional work on part. It grabs all of that data, allows me to filter it which is important since I have a single time tracking log for both personal and professional work, and it essentially charts activity along a timeline.
One big list of projects is displayed based on all the data for the entire year and for each day in the timeline it tells me how many hours I put into that project. To help see more clearly, I have the sheet color in the spots where work occurred and let the zero values fade into the background. From here it also gives me combined hours per day and per project, it tells me what percentage of my creative time each project is getting, and the total visualization quickly reveals huge gaps and my rhythm of work.
Right away, I was able to translate the extreme imbalance into an idea for a weekly schedule that would help me move all the projects I care about most forward at a steady pace. If I manage to implement that schedule on the regular, I should see my new chart distribute time across many projects. Right now, because of the tendency to hyperfocus and ignore the rest, there are straight lines of work surrounded by emptiness. The sign of success in changing this habit should reveal a pattern that resembles the cylinder of a music box playing a dynamic melody up and down all the notes of a scale.
More planning is still needed to form a truly robust schedule, but I can immediately dive into this first iteration of it knowing my productivity should leap up to 10 times what it was. In fact, drafting out good news like this about my creative journey is on the schedule for today. Mission accomplished. We’re off to a good start.
What do you think is the most effective approach when you wish to make progress on a variety of projects consistently?