Whether it’s a do-it-yourself renovation of your home office, a one-month trip, or participating in NaNoWriMo, there’s always the big, personal project that you’re trying to fit in your schedule. How do you make sure that it won’t have much of a negative impact on your work?

Evaluate Your Situation

There are several issues you need to address before you rearrange your schedule around your personal project. To start with, ask yourself the following questions:

Which projects will be affected the most? Some projects consume your time and effort more than others. Identify the clients or the tasks which will be most affected by the changes in your schedule. The best way to do this is to audit a typical workday and see which tasks you accomplish and how long it takes to finish them.

It’s also important to note how they will be affected. Will you have less time for live support? Will there be connectivity issues that will prevent you from uploading and downloading large files?

How will the work get done? Are you going to do all the work yourself or will you require assistance? Whenever I’d take more than a week off, I always do as much work as I can beforehand, so that only daily tasks such as checking and responding to email are affected.

Still, no matter how much work you try to finish ahead of time, new tasks will always accumulate and someone has to do them. Subcontractors or assistants can be helpful — but only if you hire and train them well. There are many things that can go wrong with such an arrangement, especially if it’s your first time to work this way. To ensure that your relationship with hired help will go smoothly, plan for a transition or trial phase and start working with them before you make any real changes to your schedule.

What is the best way for clients and colleagues contact you? While you’re working on your personal project, will your clients have to change the way they contact you? Let them know the best way to reach you in case of emergencies that can’t be easily discussed via email.

Develop a Contingency Plan
We’ve discussed contingency plans here at WWD before. If having contingency plans is important during regular workdays, they are even more important when you’re making changes to your schedule. After all, you might not be around when problems occur. Here are some problem areas you should plan for:

• Internet connectivity
• Hardware and software failures
• Data backup
• Revision requests and new orders from clients
• Complaints, questions and other support issues

Let Everyone Know

After planning the adjustments you need to make, you have to decide whether you’ll let relevant parties know about the changes. Sometimes, personal projects hardly make a difference in your schedule or work process. But if they will, your clients might need to know about it.

While you may have clients that are supportive and understanding, there will also be those who will worry and think you are abandoning them. Think about each client’s attitude to risk and changes before spilling all the details. As long as you don’t sacrifice the work quality or your adherence to deadlines, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Once in awhile, it’s good to take advantage of the flexibility that our teleworking schedules have to offer. With careful planning, we can strike a good balance between both paid and personal projects.

Have you altered your work schedule for a trip or a personal project? Share your tips in the comments.

Image by shadowkill from sxc.hu

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If you haven’t found satisfaction with any of the productivity tricks you’ve tried, it’s possible that you’re mistaking some of the myths for facts.  These myths could come from something you’ve read, or they could be your own preconceived notions.  To get productive, you need to get rid of these myths.

What are they and how do you debunk them?

There is one system to rule them all.

Once you get into David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or other similar productivity systems, it doesn’t mean you have to stick to its rules permanently.  There is no perfect system that’s already pre-made for you.  You need a bit of time, as well as trial and error, to find something that works.

Organized = Neat

If your office is neat, does it mean that it’s organized?  If your office looks messy, should you clean it up?  Before we start criticizing ourselves for not being neat enough, we need to get our semantics straight.

Neatness or cleanliness is more of an aesthetic value.  Organization, on the other hand, is more about how things function.  For example, if you have a stack of folders and all those folders are aligned on top of a dust-free desk, that’s neatness.  The stack of folders are only organized if they are arranged in a way that makes each folder easy to access.  So even if the desk is dusty and the folders aren’t perfectly aligned on top of each other, as long as they’re arranged in a way that makes sense to you (chronologically or alphabetically), then they are organized.

If you’re the type of person who has a messy office and hates it when someone comes in to “clean it up”, you know what I’m talking about.  Just because things don’t look orderly or like they were arranged by a robot, it doesn’t mean you’re not organized.  If you can find anything in your office within 2 seconds, you’re doing great – whether you’re neat or not.

The more tools you have, the better.

With all the number of Web 2.0 tools out there, and the number of web workers eager to try out each tool that comes along, it’s a surprise that we get any work done.

As for me, I prefer to stick to the least number of tools, and I try to avoid daily usage if it isn’t necessary. Tools should be there to help you out, not suck up your time and attention, which, of course, is better spent on other things.

Your schedule should be tight.

As someone who focuses mostly on creative work, I’ve realized that both routine and randomness have their place in your schedule.  My partner used to be very specific about my schedule.  She even created a spreadsheet that listed what I was supposed to be doing every hour.  When I told her I wanted some randomness, she blocked out a few hours in the weekend and labeled them “Randomness”.  Not quite what I meant.

The one thing that should be absolutely rigid and non-negotiable are your peak working hours.  These are the hours of the day when you are most productive and creative.  As such, those hours are when you should get the bulk of your work done.

As for the rest of the day, I prefer to make a simple list in Google Calendar of the major things I should accomplish, both business and personal tasks are included.  I find that I can’t do more than 7 major tasks each day.  What I do in between those tasks depends on what I feel like doing, whether it’s taking a walk, reading a book, carpentry, or even working.  It’s the random tasks surrounding my routine that makes my day more interesting.  They even make my work feel more fulfilling.

The key is not to worry if you feel unproductive at times, there are still some ways for you to feel accomplished at the end of the day.  As long as you get your few major tasks done, you shouldn’t obsess about working during every waking hour.

What preconceived notions on productivity did you have?  Which of these notions were true, and which were false?

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