Your work life tends to be focused on projects and your areas of responsibility. That means the information bombarding you each day must be organized according to those two key categories.
“Although projects and areas are related, it’s critically important that you distinguish between them. Failing to do so is a root cause of so many frustrations and challenges,” organizing expert Tiago Forte writes in his new book, The PARA Method.
Projects are endeavours that have a goal, allowing you to know when it is completed, and a deadline. But there are facets of your work and life that don’t have a clear goal or deadline. These are areas of responsibility, which usually have a standard to be maintained and an indefinite end date. Projects end, while areas of responsibility continue indefinitely.
Mr. Forte notes that if you have a project such as writing a book but treat it like an ongoing area of responsibility, it can feel aimless and without direction. If you want to maintain a certain weight, an area of responsibility, but treat it like a project, you may hit your target weight and then see it rise again as you didn’t develop the right habits.
Another way to look at it is that projects are sprints and areas of responsibility are marathons. And you need your information stored and ready for you in each situation, which he does through his PARA method, where those are the first two of four categories: Projects, areas, resources and archives.
Resources is a catch-all category for topics of interest that may be useful in the future. Archives is where you store information from the other three categories, notably projects that have ended and areas of former responsibility when you take on a new role.
If your My Documents folder is jammed haphazardly with material from all four categories, this re-configuration might help. Similarly, it can streamline how you deal with saving emails or material on a web-clipping file.
This goes against the grain. In school, he points out we learned to organize our class notes, handouts and study material by academic subject, such as math, history or chemistry. We continue to do so, with categories for documents organized in incredibly broad subjects like marketing, psychology, business or ideas. Instead, organize according to the outcomes you want to achieve.
That’s where his categories of projects and areas or responsibility are ideal. If you sit down to work on a graphic design project, you will need all the notes, documents and other material in one place, ready to go. “That may seem obvious yet I’ve found it is exactly the opposite of what most people do,” he says. “Most people tend to spread out all the relevant material they need to make progress in a dozen different places, which means they have to spend half an hour to locate them before they can even get started.”
Distinguishing between projects and areas of responsibility allows you to get a better handle on the extent of your current commitments – it’s in the list of project folders on your computer. The projects organizing method can also indicate how much progress you are making as they turn over and are slipped into archives and whether your efforts are aligned with overall goals.
He used to spend hours with clients meticulously creating all the folders to implement his system. Now he recommends these three steps, starting with just one information platform before moving to others:
- Archive existing files.
- Create project folders.
- Create additional folders as needed.
“This is your chance to wipe the slate clean and reboot your digital life based on timeless principles of organization,” he says.
Power Points
- Artificial intelligence resume scanners can’t read graphics, fancy formats or fonts so Korn Ferry consultant Mark Royal recommends simple formatting and if prompted to use a Word document stick with that rather than a PDF. If your current job title is unconventional, career coach Frances Weir advises putting in brackets what it might be in the hiring company, to help the bot.
- Author Mark Manson believes three questions determine 99 per cent of happiness in your life: What am I working on and why?; who am I spending time with and why?; and how well am I treating my body and why?
- In a difficult conversation, communications coach John Millen reminds you to use “I statements” instead of “you statements.” For example: “I feel uncomfortable when...” rather than “you always make me feel...”
- The shorter the explanation the more honesty it carries says executive Julie Zhuo.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.