The 12 Week plan is a great way to get moving on the stuff that I never seem to have time for. It allows me to break things down and schedule what I am going to do to make sure I make progress. But it works best for large, complex projects with multiple steps. What about smaller projects? Was there a way to move small stalled projects forward?
Why I Need Something More Than 12 Weeks
I learned early on that having more than 4 projects in my 12 Week Plan is a recipe for disaster. I end up trying to do everything at once and ultimately get very little done.
Yet, there are lots of little projects that I don’t feel deserve a full twelve week spot – things that could be taking care of in one or two two-hour sessions. I tried piling them into one of the 12 week slots, but they never got the focus with the bigger projects in the spotlight.
Small Projects Don’t Get Done
So these little projects sat on my task list and I never got to them.
And every week I would look at my lack of progress and shake my head (or worse, berate myself for not knocking out simple things).
I knew I needed something better.
My New Tracker
I’ve been playing around with trackers in my bullet journal, and I found something that works really well.
It’s very simple: the day numbers are on the top of the page, and the projects down the side.
If I work on a project on a given day, I put a dot. Otherwise I put a dash. When a project completes, I put an X. If I had to start a project mid-month, I put an open circle.
Below is a picture of my May tracker. Blobs of ink and all.
Results
As you can see, I started the month with 19 projects and added 1 during the month.
Of those 19 projects I had done almost nothing in the previous three months.
During the month, thanks to the tracker, I finished 7 of those projects, and the one that was started during the month finished as well. That means I closed out about 1/3 of my open projects that had been stalled.
of the remaining 13, 8 of those had action taken on them.
It’s a pretty good result for just throwing my small open projects on a grid.
Summary
This new, simple project grid allowed me to get moving on my small stalled projects. I find myself scanning the list if I have time to see if there is something I can do on one of them. All in all, I am surprised at how well it is working, and I intend to keep using it.
