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What do you do with WIP?
Lawrence | Nov 16 2007
I have a problem organizing Work-In-Progress. While plenty of my work is electronic (easy - just close the folder and it's handy to open again) a signifigant portion consists of large (11"X17" up to 30"X42") sheafs of heavy drawings, and an associated stack of reference books, notebooks, reference drawings, and other cumbersome objects. Often I will be working on a stack of this stuff in a multi-day project. Then someone comes in waving another stack that trumps the first stack. Then the boss comes in with another stack that trumps the second stack. Then my top client calls and wants me to look something up on a third stack. Soon, my workspace is so disorganized that I cannot even find my socks when they are still on my feet. Typically, I have seven or eight projects I may have to reference or work on at any time. Needless to say, I can't just take one of these projects and put it away in a folder when it is interrupted. It takes several minutes to put away a thick, heavy rack of drawings, the three reference books and the notebooks I have out. Then I have to get them all out again when I get back to the first interrupted project. I have a workspace with a lot of surface area - four 6' tables arranged in a square, however I still end up with one interrupted project stacked underneath another interrupted project. What do people do with WIP that is too physically large to just put back in the folder or close up in the three-ring binder it belongs in? --Lawrence the Disorganized 2 Comments
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 MWR sez: Put it all upSubmitted by lile001 on November 19, 2007 - 7:08am.
MWR sez:
... or on a regular schedule. It seems like having more stuff out on the table makes it feel crazier. My bad habit is to organize this stuff at the end of a project or when I can't find stuff and I get too frustrated with that. That worked OK when I had one big project at a time. But single project workflow is SOOOOO 1980's.
The suggestion that made the LIFEHACKER book worth the cover price was "Personal Firewall" Although I work in noisy cube-world, and sometimes there is an advantage of hearing every conversation int he place, lately I have been stuffing the headphones in my ears, putting a sign in a chair at the door of my cube, turning off the blasted phone and the even more blasted cell phone, and violating written company policy by turning off my email (Gasp!) The sign on the opening in the cube says I am not to be disturbed unless I get a call from my wife, the Nobel Committee, or "you've finished soemthing I asked you to do". The Nobel Committee hasn't rung up yet, so I get a lot of space that way. » POSTED IN:
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