Unlearning my way to success

               “Be organized!” was a common refrain I’d heard growing up. My parents, teachers, seniors at school, peers, everyone around me had taught me the value of being organized. Crafting a study calendar was thus, my first foray into the big bad world of scheduling productivity to maximize efficiency and minimize disruptions while still allowing for planned downtime. I ran out of breath just typing these big words. What was once a simple calendar evolved into complex schedulers into my early career days. I had spreadsheets galore. Until one day, my laptop crashed. It just gave up, literally. This was before the advent of FTP and file-sharing and cloud storage. The crashed computer meant all the careful scheduling we’d done was gone to waste.

               There was one way to tackle this mess in a short time: reach out to individual project managers to ask for one piece of information only: a date by when they expected to achieve the first milestone. That part made their lives simpler, because regardless of the beautiful, color-coded, pivot-tabled spreadsheets, every single one of us typically tackles tasks most urgent and important at a time. Whatever’s due first is on the top of our minds.

After that day, I stopped worrying about the long-distance goals. I still had them, but they no longer occupied my mental hard-drive. Once a long-distance goal was created, I would then chunk it down into smaller, time-driven targets, and like a marathoner, would then focus on simply getting from one milestone to another. My productivity spiked, because I was no more trying to constantly zoom out and zoom in on my scheduler. It was there, but it wasn’t always on in a tab!

Calendars/schedulers aren’t written in stone, and there’s a reason for that – that reason is called “flexibility and adaptability, or what today’s tech industry calls as being ‘agile.’ Now that my blinders were off, I realized that sometimes even the best laid plans have to be turned on their heads to make the impossible possible. I stopped stressing about moving around the pieces on my scheduler. If it had to be done, it had to be done. I wasn’t going to worry about it, because it simply meant I had to adjust my direction and speed to head towards the new milestone.

Through this accidental failure of my laptop, I ended up unlearning my old, set-in-stone ways, and learnt to be defter and more approachable. My clients were happy because now, the questions they asked me were not met with a, “let me check the scheduler and revert.” The answers they got were given as a realistic estimate based on what milestone we were at. The schedulers were still there, and much used, but my perspective of looking at them had now shifted. They were now tools again as they were meant to be instead of crutches as they had evolved into. My communication with the clients became more focused, and not-very-surprisingly, more efficient, since I was now speaking the client’s language instead of tossing jargon like one would toss Halloween candy.

My to-do list had become cluttered with less productive tasks, which forced multiple open tabs, leading to a dispersion of focus and thus, reduced productivity. The laptop failure resulted in decluttering the scheduler, forcing me to stop over-organizing and just do whatever needed to be done in that moment, thus minimizing my over-dependency on schedulers and organizers.