SUMMARY: Working through today’s morning hump by writing about the experience. Covers my morning routine, planning tools I’m using, and identifies sources of anxiety to be quashed with better process.

This morning, I stayed home to see I could still be productive, and found that this wasn’t the case. When I caught myself checking Facebook twice in five minutes to see what was new, I closed the browser completely and tried to think of something more useful to do. My head was fuzzy, and my body was tired, so I boiled a couple of eggs to get some protein into the system and drank some water. I’m still feeling tired, and I’m not sure if it’s entirely physical or not.

As a freelancer, I think the advantage of getting out of the house first thing in the morning is that it puts me into a busy environment. I like going to my local Starbucks because everyone there is either working on on the move, and being immersed in this energy gets me into the right frame of mind. When I’m at home, it’s up to me to generate the energy, and apparently I’m not up to it first thing in the morning.

The other advantage of getting out of the house is that I have a ritual planning in the beginning of my work session. At the very least, I bring out my big 9×12 hardbound notebook and open it to a blank page, which is the trigger to start scribbling down what’s on my mind. When I’m at home, I rarely pull out that notebook because it’s in my computer bag.

Overcoming the resistance of wanting to leave my bag ready-to-go for later, I have retrieved my notebook and opened it up to the last entry. It’s from two days ago, and it shows a picture of a distant mountain range under which I’d written “The Journey is Mysterious and Unknowable Except in Hindsight!” And then under that I had written down five things that were foremost on my mind: financial (bringing in the bacon), development topics, money making activities (selling goods, that is), blogging/identity (always on my mind) and packaging (as in how to make benefits more tangible). As you can see, I am very preoccupied these days with making my life work, by my own design.

Tucked next to this list was a printout of a mini-poster I’d made that outlined my content strategy. This website is the umbrella sheltering all my activities. Not because it’s a vehicle for self-promotion, but because I don’t make progress unless I am writing about what I’m doing. I’m writing about the process I’m going through right now because this is helping me get unstuck.

There are three main areas currently under the umbrella, other than writing and blog improvement. Those three things are mastering software development (a new task, necessary for finally digitizing the Printable CEO work and dipping back into game development), client projects (several very interesting ones ongoing, related to custom form design and personalized workflow), and money making activities (learning how to bring new products to market). These are, I think, all very worthwhile goals, and by starting at this mini-poster every day I’m encouraged to think of something that will move any of them forward.

Each of these three tasks has its own context and continuity-maintaining mechanism.

• Software Development is in the earliest stages, and it consists of notes I’m keeping in the private areas of my blog. I’ll be moving this into its own blog under the new multisite organization, so I can maintain momentum by sharing what I’m discovering. I also have several subprojects defined in my Wunderlist (see right) to help me maintain action-to-action continuity. For example, I have a folder called “PRJ: Productivity App”, which is a test project for exploring how to use Windows Presentation Foundation, a programming framework that I’ve had my eye on.

• Client Projects are maintained in Basecamp and Google Calendar, and are organized by numeric jobcode. Basecamp is used to capture client communication and to maintain “development journals”; I write my on-the-fly analysis of the challenges as I’m thinking them. This way, I have a written record of what I’m thinking and why, and the client gets to see what is ordinarily an invisible process. This does mean that my clients need to enjoy reading and process, otherwise the sheer amount of text is overwhelming. Google Calendar is used to schedule meetings and phone calls only. For big-picture prioritization and context management, I again use Wunderlist. With the folders set up listing the steps of what I can be doing, I don’t have to recall what I did last and therefore resuming where I left off is much quicker.

• Money Making Activities are maintained in Wunderlist as projects. The work itself is stored in my project jobcode directory. It occurs to me that I don’t really have a system in place to actually help me push out more of these, so I’ll have to think of something.

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p> So that’s what’s in place, but what’s missing is the clarity on what to do first. A-HA, that is where I am stuck! I haven’t done an overall review of what’s on-deck, so I feel a vague sense of anxiety. Am I forgetting something? Am I leaving any clients hanging? Am I forgetting a critical delivery?

Given what I have in place now, there’s just three things I need to look at: Scan my Google Calendar (10 seconds), scan BaseCamp for project status (2-3 minutes), and then scan/update Wunderlist with the new priority (10 minutes). That takes care of what I’m responsible for.

But what about making progress on the things that will improve my lot in life? That’s the blogging, the book writing, the software development, the money making activities, and so forth. The easy answer, which is somewhat difficult to do at first, is to scheduled one of those projects in as equal in stature to a regular client project. In other words, pick one and cycle it in like any other project, and make sure it’s getting at least 15 minutes of time every day or so.

To make sure I remember this, I’ve added it to the bottom of my mini-poster where I will see it tomorrow. And now, I feel actually much clearer. My scanning process takes no more than 15 minutes, which is nothing. I am not afraid of 15 minutes. This does presume I’m keeping everything else up-to-date and processing directly from email (that’s another rule I need to tackle: how frequently to process email). Likewise, I know I’m making good progress on my personal projects if I devote 15 minutes to it every day or two. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, it has two critically-important side-effects:

• I’m keeping the project top-of-mind, which is good for continuity.
• Fifteen minutes is enough time to just get something ready to look at, which for me is the hard part because I can get distracted in the process. In all likelihood, after the first fifteen minutes I’ll want to keep going.

This took about an hour to work through, and now I am getting sleepy from the mental effort (probably should eat something too). But this is a good place to leave off for now.