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This is a bit of a personal take on things, not advice or anything. But I was talking with a friend about organization and planning and wanted to share something.
I find Organization inspires me.
Planning, scheduling, breaking work down, and so on gets me going. There’s something about it that gets my imagination going and gets me inspired. So yes, I preach a lot about organizing and Agile and the rest, but I want to note how it helps me imagine.
I realized in that talk that sometimes when I’m down, planning gets me going again.
For instance, recently I was feeling uninspired and didn’t have a sense of what I was doing. So I made some finer-grained plans on my major projects – in fact, I felt driven to do it. It made me a lot more aware, a lot more organized, and a lot more “into” what I was doing.
I think there’s two parts of this.
First, when you plan and organize projects, you get into them. You feel what made you want to do them. You imagine ways to do them. You become aware of them and experience them more intimately.
Secondly, when you plan and organize projects, you can see how to get them done. You see the end goals, you see the path, you know your challenges and your workarounds. You know how to get them done – which probably energizes you as well.
So ironically, now I the planning and organizing guy, realize I may need to do it a little more now and then. That’s a useful realization – sometimes even I need to do a little more work breakdown for reasons over work breakdown.
But that’s why I share these things. Putting it into words makes me think, feedback from you the readers helps me process, and we learn together.
So let’s get organized – in an inspiring way.
Steven Savage