« Guest Post: Submit and Get Noticed--Two Tips for Publishing Your Book | Main | Writing Is a Process »

Structuring work. How do you do it?

My hero is Marie Schulz, the VA that Stacy and I share at AssistU.  She's online at 9:00 a.m., and she's pretty much offline by 5 or 6:00 p.m. at the latest. I've NEVER seen her online (or gotten an email or whatever from her) in the evenings or weekends. Sigh.

The way I used to structure my days (ha!) was to have a list of things to do, and then, theoretically, I could stop working when they got done. Uh huh. Well, with scheduling overoptimistically (I'll design this website in one hour) and then adding on a very full workload, I realized that didn't work so well for me. It's not that I worked 20-hour days until I got my to-do list done (I'm not stupid), but I'd feel like I SHOULD be working.

After a while, I got tired of always feeling like I should be working at night to get those straggling to-do's done or feeling guilty that I didn't. While I love, love, love what I do, I don't want it to rule my life.

So, now I'm looking at my to-do's AND a definite stop time. If it doesn't get done today, then it will get done tomorrow. And I'm done for the day.

Like Stacy, I try to schedule everything (tasks, projects) on my calendar as appointments (I have a separate Outlook calendar for this - I don't keep it in my main Outlook calendar. That may seem like duplicating work, but I find taking my week-at-a-glance as far as appointments and then adding them on to my "project/client work" Outlook calendar helps me prepare for the week and see what I need to do).

The big thing that I've had to realize (with the help of Stacy as my coach) is to set expectations with clients. 'Cuz if it's left up to me and my super-high expectations, I'll think it needs to get done RIGHT NOW. (Imagine a superhero disappearing - running so fast - and then coming back with the project completed, panting heavily.) They don't expect or even need that, and it's almost suicide to try to work at that breakneck speed. So, I give my clients (and me) a deadline of when I'll get that to them. And they've always been okay with that. Go figure. What a surprise that I'm harder on myself than anyone.

And I've been scheduling times in my day for other things - like writing and exercise and quiet time when I first get up. I'm also scheduling creative time where I get to work on my business instead of just in it.

We did this as a poll at AssistU, and asked our community of VAs how they structure their work days.  Here were their choices:

  • With definite start and stop times. When the stop time comes around, I stop working no matter what.
  • With a to-do list. When the list is done, my day is done.
  • A mix of both.
  • Some other way. I'll post more about it in the discussion below.

With those as your choices (or any other choices), how do YOU structure your work day?

June 10, 2009 in Business, Live, Laugh, Love |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341bfee053ef011570b68644970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Structuring work. How do you do it?:

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

My Photo

Want Write Well Me all the time?

  • Enter your email address:



    Add to Google
    Add to My AOL
    Subscribe in Bloglines

    Add to Technorati Favorites

About Dawn

Awards

  • VA Networking Blog of the Week

    VA Blog of the Month

Writing Well

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

What I'm Doing With My Life

  • AssistU - Changing Work, Changing Lives
    I'm so thrilled to be Chief Operating Officer of AssistU. I may not be a practicing virtual assistant anymore, but I'm still so passionate about the industry and just the sweet, sweet fact of people working together in collaborative relationships in which the people are key, not the bottom line. Long live AssistU!
  • Out Of Nothing
    All I've ever wanted to do was to write. Well (deep breath), that want has turned out big. It's a book, there's a website, and I must be insane to be this vulnerable.
  • Write Well University
    My first passion has always been words and how we use them. I'm happiest dissecting sentences and seeing how they work (or don't). I've taken that love of words and writing and created Write Well U, a company that offers programs to help people become better writers. What could you do if you wrote well?

What Dawn Is Reading Today

  • Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

    Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

    I finished reading The Princess Bride (more on that next week), and, as always happens when I finish a really great book, I struggle with what to read next.

    For years, I've had Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love on my unread bookshelf.  I've had so many people recommend it to me that I'm right 80% of the time when someone asks, "You know what book you should read?" Let me guess... Eat Pray Love? As a matter of fact, Stacy thought so strongly that I should read it that she bought me a copy back in 2007 when we were vacationing in Massachusetts.

    But I still hadn't read it.  On Thursday, I was chatting with Allison, and she said, "May I highly suggest you read EPL - ASAP?"

    Fine. I can get hit over the head with a hammer and finally get it.

    So I started reading today. And I love it. And I wonder why I didn't read it before. Probably because now was when I really needed to read it.

    A few random thoughts and insights about Eat Pray Love:

    • I so wish I had written this book. Gilbert's writing style is close to my own - but (sigh) better.
    • The first page has this quotation: "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth."
    • I love how she structured the book around the traditional Indian japa malas beads - necklaces with 108 beads. Gilbert wrote 108 stories in her book. There's the whole magic of the number of 108 (it's a multiple of three, and its digits add up to nine, a trinity of threes).
    • Along with the smart structure of the number of stories, I love how Gilbert floats back and forth in time to tell her stories - those of her travels and those of how she got there. It flows, and there's no confusion or awkwardness at all in the shifts in time. So smartly written.
    • Gilbert has an amazing storytelling capability, but she is a magician when it comes to language. 
    • Her explanation of why she wanted to learn Italian (and how the Italian language came to be) soooooo makes me want to learn Italian. Gaelic was top of the list, but Italian might overtake it.
    • She's funny (which goes back to the first bullet point and my style and the quality of writing I strive for).  One of many examples: "Giovanni is my Tandem Exchange Partner.  That sounds like an innuendo, but unfortunately it's not." And an even better example: "After meeting the boys in person, I began to wonder if perhaps I should adjust my rule somewhat about remaining celibate this year.  For instance, perhaps I could remain totally celibate except for keeping a pair of handsome twenty-five-year-old Italian twin brothers as lovers. Which was slightly reminiscent of a friend of mine who is vegetarian except for bacon, but nonetheless..." (Funny enough, it's the friend who's vegetarian except for bacon that sticks in my mind the most.)
    • This last point is what made me close the book (temporarily) and get up to write this post. So many synchronicities. She talks about all she did to be positive and heal from the trauma the separation and divorce left her.  Of all the things she mentions she did (prayer, therapy, Saint John's wort, and so much more), she ends this paragraph with this last example: "...carefully protected myself from sad movies, books and songs (if anyone even mentioned the words Leonard and Cohen in the same sentence, I would have to leave the room)."

  • Kim Harrison: The Outlaw Demon Wails (The Hollows, Book 6)

    Kim Harrison: The Outlaw Demon Wails (The Hollows, Book 6)
    I finished Tad Williams's Shadowplay.  It was much better than the first in the series, Shadowmarch. Not that Shadowmarch was awful - obviously, it wasn't or I wouldn't have gone on to read the second in the series.  By the end of Shadowmarch, the character development was in full bloom and the action sequences were rich.  Those good things came to light fully and completely in Shadowplay.

    In retrospect, it felt like Williams was trying to build history and character development in Shadowmarch before he could get to the "real" stuff.  The story was compelling, but not enough to get me to read it very fast.  Shadowplay, on the other hand, had me reading beyond breakfast and lunch, a true mark of a good book.  :)

    Unfortunately for me, though, Williams isn't finished with the third book in the series.  I hope he doesn't take too long, as I have been known to lose interest while waiting for the next book (see Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series - I got so tired of waiting for the next book, and I didn't want to go back and reread the six or seven HUGE novels to get caught back up.  I abandoned the series).

    So now I'm waiting, but I'm putting that time to good use. My three favorite authors have all come out with new books, and because my SOP is to reread the last one before reading the newest one, I have six books lined up!

    I will confess that I've already read Charlaine Harris's From Dead to Worse immediately followed by Dead and Gone.  Back to back, chain reading last Monday, and I can't tell you the last time I did that.

    Now, I'm on to Kim Harrison and The Outlaw Demon Wails. I'm really glad I'm rereading it because I've forgotten so much, and I'd hate to go into White Witch, Black Curse woefully ignorant.

  • Tad Williams: Shadowplay: Volume II of Shadowmarch

    Tad Williams: Shadowplay: Volume II of Shadowmarch

    I said I wouldn't do it again, but I did.  I said I wouldn't read other books and NOT put them on the blog.  It's just that I hadn't technically finished Shadowmarch yet. See, it's a long book, and I was only reading during breakfast and sometimes lunch.

    And then Kathryn MADE me read the Twilight series after she got them for Christmas.  But as soon as I was done reading all four Twilight books, I went right back to Shadowmarch.  I didn't even read my newest Laurell K. Hamilton OR the Kim Harrison book.

    It took me a while to get into Shadowmarch.  I'm sure it had nothing to do with my hiatus. Nothing at all.  The end was the best.  The plot moved long very quickly, and the characters seemed more alive.

    Luckily, since I had Shadowplay on my unread bookshelf, I was able to close Shadowmarch and open Shadowplay.  The second volume picked right up where volume one left off, so that delicious suspense is still there.

    One note: I don't like the cover art for volume two.  I liked Michael Whelan's art much better.  The cover for Shadowplay looks too futuristic, and it's fantasy, not sci-fi.  (I don't have anything against sci-fi.  It's just fantasy books should like fantasy books and vice versa.)

Blog powered by TypePad
Member since 05/2006