I always like to plan my work, but it’s remarkably hard for me.

• How long will a task take?
• What emergencies will erupt, requiring my immediate attention?
• What tasks will get delayed by the customer?
• What tasks will be impossible because of technical issues?

But I went crazy this morning: I made a schedule included some time for all of my 10 projects.

Some new things I did:

• Included time every day for planning.
• Included some short gaps every day for extra stuff that comes up.
• Included two large (3 hour) gaps every week for stuff that has to be moved around.
• Planned work two weeks out.

When I have a scheduling problem, I’ll move things around airline-style: if I have to move a task, I’m just going to move it to some distant date in the future. I’m not going to try to push back every other item on the schedule.

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Results from Day 1 (Monday): I’ve already partly filled my large gaps for the week. (A project that I learned of last week requires some time for this week.) My large project for today wasn’t completed. I wasn’t able to get the software installed on the server quickly enough to get everything done before my 4pm meeting. That means I’ll have to reschedule it for some future day or week.