I have utterly appalling time-management skills.  I always have — i’m always the dawdler, the daydreamer, the student handing in her assignments chronically late.  Perhaps one of the reasons i’m so well suited to working in a newsroom is that having a firm, no-way-out-of-it deadline right in my face is the only way i can get anything done.

The thing is i just like having things done.  I don’t like having to stop in the middle of a project.  I don’t like having to shift my focus to something new unless i’m stuck and just need a 5 minute mental break.  It makes me feel jittery and too-scattered to have several projects going at once — i become really disoriented and confused in situations like that.

Being an adult with about 10 projects going at once, however, is incredibly difficult with work habits like this.  I can’t just pencil out an entire evening for sewing, or all of a sunday afternoon for poking around in my garden.  The past 3 years — since the moment i finished a 9-month certificate program that had been the one consuming focus of my time for most of a year and whoosh my life came rushing back into fill the void — have been especially difficult as i try to juggle everything i’m interested in.

About a year or so ago i started experimenting with “just see what you can get done in 20 minutes” — an idea adapted from bitesizedcleaning, which in turn adapted it from FlyLady i believe.  Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t.  Trying to do too many 20-minute sessions in an evening can lead to the scattered, disoriented feeling i mentioned.  I’m experimenting with various ways of combining 20-minute sessions with long stretches of focusing on 1 project.

The biggest obstacle for me to overcome is my ingrained assumption that i need a solid hour to do something.  As a reminder to myself, here are some things easily accomplished in just 20 minutes:

• Re-potting 2 or 3 plants and tidying up the balcony garden.
• Ironing 1 top and 1 skirt that need simple hem fixes, then fixing the skirt (and, with 10 more minutes, fixing the top).
• Tidying the surfaces of both my desk and my worktable.
• Writing 1 simple, <400-words blog post.