Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the amount of projects I want to work on, vs. the amount of time I have to devote to them. I’m down with GTD, so I’m familiar with setting up projects, next actions, etc., but that doesn’t seem to help me actually get anything done. Typically, I like to work many hours on projects, which doesn’t fit well with having an increasingly large number of projects to work on.

After a while of thinking about this last week, I thought about how a computer handles multitasking, and on a whim, I googled “timeslicing my life”, and found an interesting article by Chris Brogan entitled Timeslicing for Humans, which appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. I started doing this on Saturday, and have managed to get a lot of things done this weekend, most of which I’ve been putting off until I had more time to work on them. Working on things for 20 minutes at a time (going over as needed), I’m able to cycle through the 20 projects I have allotted in 4 hours, allowing for 3 cycles on weekend days and 2 to 3 on weekdays. If it keeps working for me, I’ll consider working several of my work projects in (but will keep them cycling all day, instead of finishing at normal workday’s end. Many times, I have no idea what I should work on next. I fixed this by using a 20-sided die, and re-rolling if I’ve already worked on that project in that cycle. When done with all of the projects for that cycle, start the cycle over.

Something I’ve found that’s interesting with this approach is that with some projects, I don’t know what to do next. I use that time to research my next actions. I use Evernote to keep track of my projects/next actions, which works really well for what I’m doing. Another cool thing — some projects I tend to backburner because they’re not interesting to me at the moment, or dread them for whatever reason. I’ve found that giving them 20 minutes of my time is no problem at all, and that the time actually flies by!

If you find yourself having too much to do, with too little direction (my issue), I invite you to try this out — it might work for you. And with that, my wedding photos are finally scanned, and a new blog post has been written. Something must be working right…