Rotating Priorities Board
Long time, no post! I’ve been wildly busy and expressed I might be what with picking up the stray and the past few months being event-heavy… and then getting a new job. But I digress from my reason for being here!
I shared a picture of a tool I’ve been using the past couple of months with a friend and she advised me to write it up so she could share it with some other lovely people. So here I am, doing it really quick while I wait for dinner to finish roasting!
I call it my Rotating Priorities Board. This is a term I pulled out of one of my favorite books–Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher (affiliate link to Bookshop.org). Sher uses this name for a tool that is designed to help someone track a bunch of projects in various states of completion. My design does not exactly match hers, as I felt I needed a bit more information on my board to track my ongoing work.
Here is my board as it stands today.
Rotating Priorities Board
It hangs directly to my left side in my home office, so it’s always just out of the corner of my eye, reminding me of what I should be focusing on. The lefthand axis is state of completion, ranging from seed to harvest, a gardening metaphor I quite enjoyed. The upper axis is amount of attention the project currently has or needs, ranging from freezer to boil–this one being a cooking metaphor.
Every so often–I’m not regular about it, though I probably should be–I take a look at my project list and at my Rotating Priorities Board and I evaluate where on each spectrum a project falls. For “Mandala Madness”, a blanket crocheting project in the shape of a mandala, I have been thinking about it, but not acting on it, so it falls into the Freezer column of the board. I also haven’t started it, so it’s just a little seed of an idea, chilling in the bottom row. Another card, Secret Seer for example, is in the upper right, getting a good amount of attention–somewhere between warming on the stovetop and simmering–and approaching the end goal: a finished novel.
This board gives me a visual representation of my current commitments, and though it’s relatively new in my toolbox, it’s proving quite useful; the other day I told myself “no” to adding a new project, and today I thought, you know, I’m feeling overwhelmed, why don’t I pare my active projects down.
27 September 2021 productivity systems