My name is Kourosh.

I wanted to show you one way that I've been able to

handle a large number of projects recently.

Some of them had deadlines, some of them didn't, and

there's no really right way to do this sort of thing, but

this particular approach has worked for me.

And I wanted to at least present a principle that could go behind

working on multiple projects.

The thing is,

juggling multiple deadlines, knowing what to start and when,

knowing what you'll be able to take on a few months from now

these are not simple matters.

Each project you take on will likely last

an unclear amount of time, and

you probably have other responsibilities to take care of in the meantime.

To find some degree of calm, we need to

feel that we can work from let's say a simple

set of decisions, like a short list.

And then feel that that list and our system in general are supportive.

We need to feel that the things we see

on our list, the decisions we can make from them,

that these items are useful

for now, for the present, for where we are.

And that other work will stay out of our way until they're needed.

One of the things we can do to help us on the way there

is to plan the beginning of our projects.

This is the central idea of today's video.

plan the beginning of your projects.

When you do this, you can create a buffer.

It gives you confidence that you'll get to something when needed,

that you'll have time to be creative with it,

and you'll have a relaxed pace to do your work.

You can be more focused with where you decide

you want your attention to be.

So again, while I consider this tip itself simple,

there is a certain advanced quality to it in that

it rests on you having some time and task management skills.

Now, specifically, these

are at least that you have some trusted system,

something that you can regularly review to

put what you want in front of you when you want it to be there.

That you can have certain projects active and set other ones aside.

You can be using pen and paper.

You can be using any particular system that you find to be useful for you.

And of course, good systems always are developing, so

I'm not saying you need something to be perfect. You just need something you're working on.

It could be a daily list.

You also need some way of outlining or brainstorming.

That could be pen and paper if you'd like.

Finally, you'll need to have some practice with what I call "Workflow Fundamentals".

These are things you may already be doing, but

I'm adding a label to them here, and I'll describe them briefly in a moment.

For this particular video, though, I'll be using a couple of tools.

One is MindNode for outlining,

and the other is OmniFocus for task management.

The Workflow Fundamentals that I just mentioned

are specifically, being able to

decide on a piece of work,

being with that work, and then

doing that regularly.

These sound simple, and again

we often already do this. But as anyone who has ever

procrastinated can attest to, these are not so simple.

I'd say they are more practiced than they are fully mastered.

Rather than be all talk, I wanted to show off a sampling of my own projects.

This is roughly, quarter 4, 2016

extending into the beginning of 2017.

Some projects - I've removed,

some smaller ones, some things, I just don't think should be public, ...

some parts I've anonymized a bit, but for the most part

this represents what I've been able to do.

Some of these had deadlines, some of them didn't.

Some of them are about me working on the same project, actually,

during two different time spans.

The thing is, if I actually looked at this timeline,

I don't think I would have done the work.

I'd probably have been more overwhelmed than anything else.

While I was doing all of this, I wasn't overwhelmed.

I was able to focus, calmly.

I still saw my clients,

I spent time with family, I did the dishes...

practiced piano, enjoyed video games ...

do things that are generally good to do.

Certainly there were days of stress, too, but that's more about

life throwing things at me because that's what life likes to do.

It wasn't though about a sense of inability or some dread of doing work.

And it might sound like or look like that I'm showing off a bit, and

possibly I am. I do look at this with

some excitement and say hey look at all the stuff I managed to do.

Go me. But, I also wanted to

present that the ideas are not

far-fetched and that you can do it, too.

So, how did I get there from a simple list?

I'll show an example of how I did this recently.

So, I've been in the middle of a bunch of

public talks that I've needed to prepare.

The presentations are each meant to be about 1-3 hours.

And, they are effectively performances.

I need to put some ideas together,

some ideas I've already written, some things I haven't.

And then I need to practice them, too. Have, like an ongoing flow to the presentation ...

And then I need to practice them again, right before the presentation,

so that I have the ideas fresh in mind when I'm presenting.

So, my general approach to working on a project is to

start it early, preferably as soon as it's assigned,

and then sit with it regularly.

Usually I do that daily until it's done.

I have a task in my system that

repeats daily so that when I mark it complete,

it disappears today and then appears again the next day.

Smaller, non-repeating tasks, more routine

clearing type things,... they'll sit there, too.

At any one time, I tend to have about 1-3 of these projects going.

These basically become my "big rocks" of the day.

So, more likely, I have multiple repeating tasks that I touch on every day.

Here's an example of how my daily list actually looks.

You can see the top three as my ongoing projects,

and I also work on music every morning, regardless of what's going on.

And on the day I took this screenshot, it was the weekend.

So, you can see my weekend task of updating

and filing things on my computer, too.

Other projects are effectively on hold.

I have a way to maybe do the, let's say those

tiny 2-minute or less tasks for side projects, but

for the most part these projects are set aside.

The problem was that I had about 8 of these presentations

to put together over the course of several months, and

I also had other obligations to take care of,

and I don't particularly like working

on multiple presentations at once. I just feel that

creatively I get my wires crossed.

So maybe I'd want one of these to be

the project I was working on while the others could be about

say, family or my psychiatric practice.

So I had to figure out, how do I make sure I have enough time to do each project?

I never know quite how long a project will take,

and, I don't know what the work landscape's going to look like

on the day that I want to start either.

So a few months ago, I started sketching an outline of

the talks that were on my mind.

This is MindNode. You can see

these were just the initial talks that I was needing to prepare.

I added some dates of presentations that I

remembered, other ones I didn't. I just had a general idea...

I still needed to talk to some people about things...

And I kept fleshing out the plan.

I added some titles, some dates,

and eventually, I had a list of all of the presentations.

I just needed to start adding dates as to when

to begin preparations for each one.

I eventually came up with a series of potential start dates,

aiming for at least a few weeks or a month beforehand.

I just wanted to make sure that I was able to start something by a particular date.

Again, this wasn't a due date. It was a "try to start by" date.

So now I had to add those lists of dates to when I would start the projects.

And, maybe the simplest way to do this could be a calendar, so

if you want to do that, go for it. That could work fine.

Personally, I wanted to integrate it as part of OmniFocus.

So I created a group of tasks under the heading "Navigation".

And, I added defer dates to

the tasks that represent each project

that I needed to start by a certain time.

You can see that these tasks are grayed out, which means that they're not

active. I wouldn't see them in my daily list.

And, this particular image was taken before February 6th.

When that day comes,

then it becomes active, and I would see it on my daily list.

I could then decide what I want to place on hold

or make inactive so I could maintain

the roughly 3 maximum projects.

Keeping that number steady helps me not get overwhelmed.

And it's a nice solid structure that allows me to keep on course.

For those of you using OmniFocus, I can briefly show you the inner workings of this.

The project is "Land & Sea".

And I've blogged about it separately, and I'll add maybe a link

somewhere about how I use this.

The new addition in this particular video

is this top section called "Navigation" which I just described.

But if you have everything grouped together into a single project,

you can select the project, here "Land & Sea" Project,

then focus it using Shift-Command-f,

and then use Command-4 to enter Forecast mode.

What that does,

if you have your deferred items shown,

is that you can now see your upcoming month without

interference from the rest of your project library.

All the while, you actually still maintain this simple list

from which you can work.

You can do all the planning around this but when

you want to work, you just have an easy way to do so.

Certainly there are other ways to plan ahead, but this has been nice for me.

Once I had it set up, I really could just run on autopilot,

sitting with the work in my daily list.

The idea is the same: Plan the beginning of your projects.

Interestingly on several occasions,

I hadn't even run into those dates I'd set.

Instead, I would often finish something else first, and then

I could make a presentation project active

before that defer date.

Right now is February, and I'm done through July.

Now that might seem that the whole exercise is

fruitless, but that's not the case at all.

Doing this work crucially helped me focus.

Because I knew that if I didn't do things at a certain pace,

I would have the alerts that I needed

to return to the pace that I needed.

And that peace of mind made a huge difference.

And I also did run into those dates on occasion, too.

If you're interested in further study, I can recommend

Zen & The Art of Work, Creating Flow with OmniFocus, or

Workflow Mastery.

Zen & The Art of Work is a video course about building

a simple system - it could be pen and paper if you want -

starting with a single project that you choose.

Something fun, something difficult, whatever you want.

You then go through a series of single exercises at your own pace

to eventually build an overarching working system for all of your projects.

Then, Creating Flow with OmniFocus is about

using the program OmniFocus and helps you

learn task management in detail.

There you can start with as many projects as you like and orchestrate

things from there.

Workflow Mastery is an application independent

ebook that studies productivity and

meaningful work in academic depth.

It's likely most useful if you

already have a working system that you are looking to polish to a shine.