Techniques for time management have a tendency to make us focus on doing things one at a time. That may work for many, if not most.  It may, very well, be a necessary approach at times.  But there are alternatives…

What if you were to start a project, then suddenly get inspired to take on another project?  Let’s call those projects One and Two, respectively.  Then, as you start to work on Project Two, you feel overwhelmingly compelled to work on yet another project you’ve been meaning to work on, hereinafter referred to as Project Three.  Now, as you’ve started to make some serious progress on Project Three, Project One raises its ugly head and demands your attention.

This sounds like a great big mess, now doesn’t it?  Oddly enough, some people actually work that way.  While they may or may not manage to complete their intended projects the moment they set out to, there is an effective way to approach things in this manner — but in a somewhat more purposeful fashion.  By doing so, you can actually get a lot done, completing all three projects eventually.

How does something like this work?

Here are four concepts to bear in mind to make the serial workflow method work:

1) Stop beating yourself up over it

Stop feeling the guilt and sham about your perceived lack of organization.  Just the worrying and negative emotions alone rob you of your ability to get things done by depleting your energy in a direction other than accomplishment.

2) Stop losing work you’ve already done

The biggest difficulty with the serial workflow method is when we forget where left off on the project.  That just kills productivity.  It can take quite a bit of discipline to keep things organized, but it’s fairly easy to make it happen when the reward is that you can complete the project and move onto other things.

In order to to this, make sure to leave the project in a place that you can pick up right where you left off.  So make sure you a) find your project again, and b) close up any open work and ideas in an obvious way, like writing down what you did, where you left off, and what the next order of business should be.

3) Benefit of your brain’s weird wanderings

I am not kidding.  Our brain is designed in weird and wonderful ways.  It does its thing even — and especially — while we’re doing something else.  So while you’ve put project A aside for the time being, you may get a brilliant idea for it right when you’re supposedly doing something else.  Write it down!  Accept that your brain works that way.  In fact, embrace it.  And schedule maybe 3 projects together that you can alternate between until you’re done.  If you finish one of them, phase in another project in its slot.

4) Keep things interesting and fast paced

Arranging projects into this serial pattern can keep otherwise boring tasks quite interesting since you’ll be switching back and forth between them and won’t have to do any of them for longer than you feel like it.

So instead of beating yourself up, harness your brain’s unique ability to do things in a serial rather than an all-at-once way.  Many projects are too big to be completed in one session anyway.  You might as well break them down, and split tasks up.  One task for project One, another for Project Two, then a little work for project Three, and so on.  You will be amazed at how much work you can actually get done this way.  While it’s not the most conventional time management technique, it may very well work for you and help accomplish the most tedious of jobs.

By Elisabeth Kuhn

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