This article is the 4th in a series related to completion:

1. The Magic of Completion
2. A Quest for Completion – introducing a plan on how to get there
3. Creating an Incomplete Project List – it was harder than expected
4. More on the Incomplete Project List – categorizing, prioritizing and more – this post

More to come as I work through my plan for tackling my incomplete projects

1. Create a list of incomplete projects (spending about a week to do this)
2. Categorize them – complete vs. let go (I might have a “I’ll revisit this in a year” pile also but maybe not – I like to be clear and make decisions as it gives me momentum.)
3. Create and hold some type of ritual to let go of the projects that don’t make the cut.
4. Prioritize the projects I do want to complete
5. Work through the incomplete projects one at a time as the year goes by
6. Celebrate each completion

7. Repeat as needed when I feel my energy being drained – complete completion isn’t something I believe I will ever achieve, instead I think it is a process to be enjoyed (hence the celebration step).

The Backlog

In my day job, I work as a project manager for a large software team. To keep track of all of the work the team needs to complete, we create a long list of things that need done. This long list of things is called the backlog. It’s a todo list.

When the team finishes up their current work, they go to the backlog and get the next thing to do off of the list. Which indicates this list of items is kept in priority order, the most important thing at the top of the list.

The incomplete project list that I created the last few weeks for my art business is essentially part of my backlog – all the stuff I need to do for my art business. (The other part of my backlog for my art business are all the future projects I want to complete.)

I’ve made a decision to prioritize the unfinished projects at the top of my to do list for my art business and life. The goal being achieving some completion as too many projects have gone unfinished the last few years).

Categorize

This week I went through my unfinished project list and categorized the incomplete projects. The choices were

1) complete this year
2) complete next year
3) toss it and forget about it
4) put it on my future project list and worry about it later

You can see my categorized list here: Incomplete Project List.

It was a fairly simple task to categorize this list. I had a pretty good idea of what I did and did not want to complete.

There was 1 item that required a bit more work, and that was dealing with my draft blog posts. I had to look through them all and decide which ones were worth keeping and which I could toss.

Most didn’t have much meat to them so I tossed them and added the topic to my ongoing blog post ideas list (which I maintain on tadalists.com as it is accessible anytime I’m online).

Prioritize

After deciding which projects I wanted to complete, I put them in priority order. So when it comes time to work on a some new art or a home project, I can just go to the list and take the first item from the top.

When prioritizing these items I considered several things:

1) Duration - How long will it take to complete. Putting a few of the quicker items at the top of the list makes for some fast completion and sets up good momentum.

2) The business value. Doing the most valuable things first is usually a good idea, leaving the less important stuff for later.

3) Resources required. Some times the resources required to complete a project aren’t yet ready. For example my come as you will be party requires that I have some landscaping in my yard and more importantly, a sidewalk up to my front door, before I throw the party. So this is put fairly low down my list as it will take a while for the landscaping to be completed.

Using my Incomplete Project List

In many time management disciplines, it is recommended that a single list to kept for all outstanding projects. I don’t do this. I like to organize my list into multiple lists as creating art isn’t the same thing as working on my house.

If I put those items on a single list and tried to prioritize them, I’d personally find it near impossible, as it is like comparing apples to oranges.

I make time each week for art, art business, personal and my home. I keep a separate todo list for each of these areas so when I complete a project in one area I can move on to the next item on that list. When I complete a piece of art, I don’t want to move on to organizing my basement, I want to make more art.

By having 1 project (and at most 2 projects) current in each of these areas, I can maintain some balance in the different areas of my life.

Not that each project will get equal attention at all times, but having something to work on in each area allows me to move each forward at a speed that is appropriate at that time.

For example, my current project list at the moment is:

Art: create new artwork to enter into a big international juried show
Art Business: planning for the fall and entering fall juried shows
Home: Landscaping my yard
Personal: Helping my son prepare to leave for college

At the moment the last item on the list is getting most of my attention, as my son leaves in just a few more days. Much shopping, packing, talking and soaking in as much time with him as possible is my priority. Once he his gone I’ll turn my attention to the other areas and a new project (the one at the top of my unfinished project list for personal).

Wrap Up

How do you manage your backlog of items you want to complete? Do you even have a list?

 
I invite you to become a fan of MakeBigArt on social media where I’ll be sharing additional tips and comments.
MakeBigArt fanpage
MakeBigArt on Twitter

In addition you can also find me here:

My Blog
On Twitter
Facebook Profile
Lisa Call – Textile Paintings Fan Page

 
—lisa

Thinking Big about Art

In my last post, I wrote about my desire to wrap up some loose ends from the last few years. Things that drain my energy every time I think about them not being finished. It’s my quest for completion.

This is my plan for tackling my incomplete projects

1. Create a list of incomplete projects (spending about a week to do this)
2. Categorize them – complete vs. let go (I might have a “I’ll revisit this in a year” pile also but maybe not – I like to be clear and make decisions as it gives me momentum.)
3. Create and hold some type of ritual to let go of the projects that don’t make the cut.
4. Prioritize the projects I do want to complete
5. Work through the incomplete projects one at a time as the year goes by
6. Celebrate each completion

7. Repeat as needed when I feel my energy being drained – complete completion isn’t something I believe I will ever achieve, instead I think it is a process to be enjoyed (hence the celebration step).

What is an Incomplete Project?

I figured step 1 would be easy given all of the todo lists I have made in my life.

Turns out it wasn’t that simple. I started to ponder “what exactly was an incomplete project?”

• Is fixing the headlight on my car an incomplete project or is it just an errand I’ve put off for a while?
• What about all those projects I want to do, have thought about, but haven’t really started yet – do they count?
• What about things I’m actively working on now but haven’t yet finished? Should I list them?

Clearly I was procrastinating and seriously over thinking this list. It’s just a list, whatever I put there and get finished will be excellent and move me forward.

Yet those questions still nagged at me, so I decided to answer them for myself.

• I grouped all the little things (like making copies of my car key) into Overdue Errands and list them as a single item. I didn’t want to clutter the list with small items.
• I only listed projects that I made a substantial start on. I started a different list for future projects I want to do. My goal is to finish some older projects so I have the space and energy to start new things. If I put new projects on the list I figured I’d just end up with a longer list of unfinished things to do.
• I didn’t list projects I’m actively working on – such as the long todo list to get my son ready for college, or landscaping my yard. I already include these things in my daily and weekly activities and I know they will get done. If not I’ll add them to the list later.

Order

After sorting through these thoughts and defining what I meant by incomplete project, it was a lot easier to make my list. Took just a few days.

I suspect not everyone would need such clarification to make a todo list, but for me it really helped. Artists are stereotypically free spirited and this sort of exercise definitely doesn’t fit into that personality. Such folks probably would never think to make an incomplete project list.

I used to think I wasn’t an artist because of my organization skills. I’m good at, I like order. I like clean, spare rooms. Disorganization and clutter don’t work for me. Even when it comes down to an unfinished project list.

I’ve gotten over thinking I should be more like the stereotype. I’m an artist – and I like order. And over the last 5 1/2 years of blogging, I’ve met a lot of artists with similar mindsets.

Next Step

My list of incomplete projects is here: Projects to Complete.

Next up, I will categorize and prioritize the list.

In the meantime I’ve been tackling that long list of errands and the piles of paper in my office is slowly diminishing. As the paper is filed, processed, tossed – the office feels lighter and full of great energy. I love it!

Wrap Up

What projects do you want to finish up this year?

 
I invite you to become a fan of MakeBigArt on social media where I’ll be sharing additional tips and comments.
MakeBigArt fanpage
MakeBigArt on Twitter

In addition you can also find me here:

My Blog
On Twitter
Facebook Profile
Lisa Call – Textile Paintings Fan Page

 
—lisa

Thinking Big about Art

Yesterday I gave a workshop/talk at the Create Denver Expo on Time Management and the Internet. A black sink hole of time for many of us.

Much of the talk centered around goals and systems as a way to structure our time on the internet. The rest of the talk was tips and tools to help.

I’ve uploaded the power point from my talk as a pdf and you can down load it here: Time Management: The Artist and the Internet

Wrap Up

As these are just the slides and not the rest of the content, which I delivered verbally, those that weren’t in attendance will miss some of the information.

I’m working out plans on how to deliver the entire content to those on the internet, in a fun way, so stay tuned for more details.

 
I invite you to become a fan of MakeBigArt on social media where I’ll be sharing additional tips and comments.
MakeBigArt fanpage
MakeBigArt on Twitter

In addition you can also find me here:

My Blog
On Twitter
Facebook Profile
Lisa Call – Textile Paintings Fan Page

 
—lisa

Thinking Big about Art

I’m leaving for South African in a couple days and have a todo list a mile long of things I think I need to do before I go. I’ve found myself getting very little done on that list over the last week even though I had plenty of free time in which to do things. A typical hour might look like this:

- “I need to get my new netbook set up – hm – where is it”. Hunt for netbook, get it started up, realize that it’s a netbook, ie slow so look for something else to do in the meantime. Like…
- “I need to write my studio newsletter, let see – where is that file”. Find the file, get it opened up which reminds me I’m to the section where I need to finish those 2 ACEOs first, so off to the studio I go. A few minutes later…
- “Oh yeah, I was doing my netbook, I’ll just kick off a download then come back to the studio.” So back down to the office where the netbook has to be restarted meanwhile I think…
- “I need to buy a memory stick so I can get files off my laptop onto this little thing before I go – I need to make a shopping list”. So hunt down a piece of paper where the first list was started, and I come across my partial todo list that I’m trying to work on, which reminds me…
- “I need a ride to the airport next week, I bet I can schedule that online”

Which then took almost 2 hours because I’d get only part way through and get distracted with something else and then the session would time out and I’d have to start over. But I did get the super shuttle scheduled, so hurray.

Ack, this is no way to get things done. It’s mostly a way to drive myself crazy. I needed a new plan.

A Bit of Geekiness

I love using computer concepts to describe real life situations. It’s the result of an undergraduate degree plus an additional 4 years of graduate school in computer science. All that time surrounded by geeks, talking about theory, and just surviving school. Or maybe it’s how my brain works, being a geek myself at times.

I’ve always loved the term Thrashing and think it perfectly describes what I was doing.

From wikipedia:

In computer science, thrash (verb), is the term used to describe a degenerate situation on a computer where increasing resources are used to do a decreasing amount of work. In this situation the system is said to be thrashing.

This is usually because the computer is switching back and forth between different jobs it needs to do and by the time it loads back up all the stuff it needs to work on a job, the time allocated to do that work is over and it moves onto a new job, where again it has to load back up all the stuff that job was using. In the end all the computer ends up doing is loading stuff into memory and it never gets any real work done.

Exactly what I was doing. I had plenty of resources to get stuff done. I was just switching back and forth between them too often and never really got going on anything because I never got past the set up. Multitasking gone wild.

Algorithms to Get Back on Track

Algorithm: a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem.

The solutions to handle thrashing in a computer system can also apply to getting more done for us humans.

1. Prioritize

In the computer world, a system where jobs are run one at a time, in priority order, does not thrash. Each job has the full use of the entire computer so it is able to complete with no problem.

If you want to get things done, prioritizing your list and work through the tasks one at a time. Put on your blinders and focus. Soon things will start getting crossed off the list.

When I realized I was just spinning my wheels, I stopped what I was doing and relaxed. Then I sat down and wrote down everything I needed to do before I left and lumped them into 3 groups:

- Absolutely must get done
- I really really want to do these things
- Would be nice

Within each group I identified priorities between the different tasks and noted any deadlines. I then started to work on the highest priority items on my Absolutely must get done list one at a time without interruption and made some forward progress.

Multitasking

What I’ve just described is the different between multitasking and doing things one at a time, which is no surprise because thrashing is a direct result of multitasking (and virtual memory but you probably don’t want to know about that). The term multitaksing came from the computer world, although we humans have been doing it long before we invented machines that could do it much better.

The down side to not multitasking is there are a lot of wasted resources when a job is waiting for something, the computer (and the human) just sit around twiddling their thumbs. The other problem is that really big and very high priority jobs can “starve” the rest of the jobs in the system by hogging up all the resources and the lower priority stuff never gets a chance happen.

This is one reason why we multitask, both in real life and on the computer – we want to fill up the down time with stuff and, therefore, get more done. We also have some lower priority stuff that we want to do and so we interrupt that super important high priority thing before it finishes cause we need to attend to other things also.

Much has been written about the horrors of multitasking and how we need to not do this. Sure, there are times when slowing down and doing things one at a time is what’s called for. There are other times when going for maximum throughput is the goal, and hence multitasking is the answer.

So let’s go for healthy multitasking vs. thrashing.

2. Increase Resources

According wikipedia the best long term solution to thrashing is to increase the amount of memory in the computer. I certainly agree, if your computer is slow, toss more memory at it and that should definitely help. What happens is less time is needed to reload all of a job’s stuff into memory when it starts up because it’s mostly still in memory when that job gets a turn to run again.

So of what use is this advice for humans? I don’t seem to have any extra spaces for memory.

What you do have is the ability to delegate. Give the cleaning to someone else to do so you don’t get interrupted when marketing or creating art to go do the dishes or vacuum the carpet.

You can also hire someone to do some of the work inside your business also. Someone to do the bookkeeping, someone to do the packaging, someone to put the hangers on the paintings, etc. You are then free to work on the highest value jobs in your business.

3. Decrease the number of jobs

Another solution to thrashing is to decrease the number of jobs that the computer switches between. This leaves more resources for the jobs that are still getting to run. And it means faster context switches, the amount of time a computer needs to load up everything needed to run a job.

This is how I handled my todo list for my trip preparation. I decided to switch between at most 2 different jobs. So when one became blocked I’d go to a second one, but only between these 2 until one finished. I’d then add in the next highest priority task. I was able to switch between jobs much quicker.

When you are trying to do a million things at once and getting no where, try to do just 3 or 4 or maybe 2 things at once and see if that helps. Your brain will remember better what you’ve been working on when you work on just 2 jobs instead of 18 at once. The result is faster context switches as it’s easier to remember where you left off.

4. Replace programs that are memory-heavy with equivalents that use less memory.

In other words, find more efficient ways of doing things.

- Do you always forget how you do things? Write some notes with your step by step process so you don’t have to relearn it every time you decide to crack open the books.
- Do you forget where you’ve stored things? Maybe you need to revamp your storage systems.
- Are the tools you need scattered through your house? Maybe you can keep them all in 1 place for quicker access.
- Do you forget what you were working on the day before and have to puzzle through it for a while to get started? Try jotting down a few notes before you leave the studio to jog your memory. Some people also stop in the middle of something that is very easy to start back up and doesn’t require a lot of analyzing.

5. Handling Distractions

This isn’t a problem for computers. They pretty much just keep doing what they are supposed to over and over again. Well that is, unless there is a bug (something that makes the computer do something that wasn’t intended).

It’s pretty unlikely that when you click on the Word icon in window that the computer is going to get distracted and open up firefox instead because it would rather go check facebook.

As humans it’s not so easy. Because facebooks sounds like so much more fun than excel some days. And we think “oh just for a minute I’ll check my wall then I’ll come back and work” and next thing we know 2 hours have gone by.

This is where responsibility comes in, as I wrote about a few weeks back. If you take full responsibility for your actions you realize that only you can decide where you put you attention. Do you want to get your next painting finished tonight, or do you want to write witty comments to your friends. Your choice – and also your responsibility.

6. Having Fun

This has nothing to do with computers either. They don’t get bummed out if something that sounds fun but is a lower priority never happens. Creating art and writing a business plan are all the same to a computer.

When I made my todo lists there weren’t a lot of “fun” things on the must do list. To keep from getting burned out on all the work, I’ve been adding in some fun activities from the Would-Be-Nice list. Yesterday I made the time to visit the Denver Art museum for an hour, taking a break from travel preparations.

When you are feeling overwhelmed and feeling you aren’t getting anything done, try just dropping everything and relaxing for a while, or take a walk to clear your mind, watch a movie, have dinner with a friend. Have some fun also.

Wrap Up

Do you have any tips for dealing with thrashing? How do you handle the pitfalls of multitasking? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

 
I invite you to become a fan of MakeBigArt on facebook:
MakeBigArt.com fanpage – I’ll be sharing additional tips and comments on facebook throughout the week and writing longer articles on the blog.

In addition you can also find me here:

My Blog
On Twitter
Facebook Profile
Lisa Call – Textile Paintings Fan Page

 
—lisa

Thinking Big about Art