GTD for Parents — Navigating Deadlines and Diapers
This is a guest post from my fellow Stomper Eric Doggett, work-at-home dad, photographer, online business owner and all around cool guy.
As any of you that work from home know, trying to fit everything into a day is an incredible challenge. Add in a few kids who aren’t yet in school and you are guaranteed a hectic schedule that can easily rival anything your old fluorescent-lit cubicle ever threw at you.
As an Austin, Texas photographer, about 20% of my time is spent actually shooting. The rest of my schedule consists of image-editing, marketing, accounting, and the like. All of the things that us home-business types have to manage. I also have two boys, both of which aren’t old enough for school. My home is rapidly becoming a testosterone-dripping lair of insanity that neither my wife or I are ready for.
In an attempt to deal with this craziness, we’ve come up with some techniques to improve our productivity and save our minds. Here are 5 things that we’ve learned that you might be able to apply to your own household:
1. Get Used To Working In Blocks of Time
It has become a bit of a pipe dream in our house for me to work a 9-5 shift without any interruption. Actually, 2-3 hours at a time is closer to reality. It has taken a while to get in a mindset of working in blocks of time, but once I did I was able to become super-productive for those blocks. When something comes up, I immediately start mentally planning what I want to accomplish in the next block.
2. Evening Work Time
After the kids are in bed and considered to be ‘asleep’, I have another block of time to work with. However, this is a dangerous work time because I risk working too late and killing my motivation for early in the morning. You need to decide if the tasks you are working on during those evening hours warrant you being wiped out in the morning. Usually, the answer is ‘no’, so it’s important to step away and catch some sleep.
3. Scheduled Family Time
We’ve found that scheduling family time has worked really well for us. Usually it’s the time right before and right after dinner. It’s a good break between my earlier work and the evening session that will happen later. It also helps tire out the boys before their bedtime. We also try to make it happen outside as much as possible, because I heard a rumor once that sunlight was a good thing for you.
4. Organizational Tools
You can easily score your own ‘information paralysis’ session by studying all of the various tools and methodologies to organize your time. I came across a book/process called ‘Getting Things Done’ that has worked great for me.
In a nutshell, you organize your tasks by project as well as by the place that they are to be done. For example, the ‘Car’ grouping might have ‘Go to bank’ and ‘Get dry cleaning’ listed. This helps you be super-productive when you are out and about. Since I am way too lazy to manually keep track of all my tasks, I use a program called Omnifocus on the Mac to do this for me. The developers are about to release an iPhone version shortly which will be a great addition!
5. Taking Care of Yourself
You can’t do anything I’ve listed above effectively if you aren’t taking care of yourself. For example, that minimum amount of water you’re supposed to be drinking everyday (take half your body weight, drink that many ounces daily) does work! I’ve noticed a significant difference in how I feel when I haven’t had enough water. And unless you are looking for a midday food coma, avoid big, heavy lunches where possible and opt for eating smaller meals more often. Yes, it’s not always possible when your kid yells out ‘ice cream!’ in the middle of the day and you just wrapped up a big project, but give it a try (especially with the water) and you will feel better.
Eric Doggett is a photographer in Austin, Texas. He has a site specifically for beginning photography tips for your family at ShootTheBaby.com, as well as BoxOfficeBaby.com, a site where you can order incredibly unique children’s birthday party invitations and birth announcements. You can reach him at babydaddy -at- ShootTheBaby.com.
I do a lot of my work after the kids are asleep. I tend to stay up very late and not touch the computer until 9am or 10am the next morning.
While I am trying to institute blocks of time into my schedule, toddlers can only be so trained. But, I’m working on it.
Thanks for the great post :)
I’m learning to work in blocks, but it’s tough. Evenings are especially difficult because I wake up early and get reeeeeaalllly sleepy around 9:30. I’m useless when I’m tired. Looking forward to leaving the day job at the end of the month so I can get into a better rhythm.
Eric, thank you for this. I found it very useful. A while ago I had my life sorted by getting up early and getting things achieved then. Somehow I’ve slipped back to getting my stuff done in the evenings and it’s killed my productivity and relaxation. At the moment I’m getting up at the last possible minute and automatically this is building in an unnecessary morning panic. Wise words Eric. Thanks again.
Great tips.
There’s another application I would recommend, that can manage tasks and also set blocks of time:
http://www.Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version and iCal are available too.
The blocks of time thing is actually something I came across when doing sociology research on families committed to equal roles for fathers and mothers. More people should try it.
But for those who do their best work in the morning, I’ve come across some folks who get up before their kids and do things then. I find the idea of getting up at 5:30 a.m. kind of scary, myself, but it works well for some folks.
I think using Charlie Gilkey’s heatmapping your productivity ideas and tying them into the blocks of time thing could lead to some good outcomes.
Great article and suggestions. The GTD application I use allows me to view my entire GTD at work on my Win machine, at home on my Macs and even on my cell phone. And another app lets me call in tasks to my GTD without any writing or typing, great for those thoughts that hit me while driving. I’ve written about my experiences with GTD in a blog post at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/more-getting-things-done/ John