Trying to improve how I self orgranise

Starting my own personal projects has meant trying to find a different way to manage and prioritise my work, mostly because I’m not constrained in the same way in my own work as I am in my day job. During my day job those constraints tend to be things like time, budget, opportunity cost, corporate relationships and other business-y goals but personally I have the luxury of avoiding almost all of those, which is making it difficult to fit my personal projects in to any of the ways I’m proficient in project management.

Over the past ten years I’ve tried an enormous number of methodologies for time and project management, a few of them have been so successful in such a broad number of use-cases that I continue to implement parts of them in a ton of different ways.

As useful as those different processes have been, I’ve never come across a single methodology where I’ve stuck to all the elements it proposes as being valuable. Generally, I pick and choose the best bits from each and hobble together my own methodology.

To try and find something which will suit my own work I spent this weekend reading blogs and watching videos of ways others have implemented Notion in to their process, but honestly feel like it’s almost exclusively used by people who make videos about how best to use Notion, and I’m finding it really difficult to see how it could benefit me when I apply it to my own projects.

I’m being slightly facetious here, I can definitely see it’s value for the person who’s mind works in the right way, but it really lacks any kind of automation and to that extent isn’t really any better for me than a pen and paper, or as has been my go to most recently, a checklist in Things.

I think part of the problem I’m coming up against is knowing exactly what work, tasks and projects I’m trying to prioritise. Perhaps before I try to settle on the best tool to help me I need to first brain dump everything that’s swirling around in my mind, and begin solidifying the projects and goals I have.

This is by no means an answer, but more a way for me to get started in better organising myself and pushing for a reason to be more efficient in the way I work. I’ll start by getting everything I can think of down in a to-do list, and then trying to find a system which fits me best from there, rather than working the other way round and trying to retrofit a nice looking app/tool in to my workflow.