45-minute Sprint Protocol: Getting Organized
It’s a new year. And you probably have too much stuff around your house. Or maybe you did not get to some projects in 2022. Or maybe you like your stuff but it is all higgledy-piggledy and making you feel a little dizzy. Here is the short (very short!) design session I gifted to my mom to help get some things done and plan how to get rid of and organize her stuff in 2023.
I also gifted my mom with monthly visits to help her move the work forward. Hey - the gift fit and I know she won’t return it :-)
Brainstorm all the things (pre-work or about 5 min)
She riffed and I captured each thing that was on her mind on a post-it (1 item per post-it, with a sharpie). We ended up with about 50 “things” - some big, some small - and then just tossed them on a make-shift whiteboard in her office.
Organize/cluster all the things (5-7 min)
I stood at the whiteboard and she stood back and I asked questions while also making observations and moving post-its around. E.g. is this thing a subset of this other thing? Are these two things related? We then co-created a new summary post-it (in a different color) and placed that over the now stacked original post-its. E.g. “the attic” now covered several other post-its
Prioritize all the things (~ 5 min)
I gave my mom 7 voting “dots” to indicate the relative importance to her - specifically, if only one of these could happen, which would it be? If only two could happen, which two? Etc. She could cluster her votes if something was a lot more important than something else. And she lobbied for an extra voting dot (which was very on-brand for her). You could use actual stickers if you have some on hand but we just used checkmarks on the post-its.
Get all the things on a calendar (15 min)
This one took a little bit of time because we started looking things up online that might have implications for our work, e.g. what is the date of the neighborhood garage sale (answer … May!). We also had to talk through what had to happen before other things. And, critically for the heat of a Sacramento summer, we did NOT want to be up in the attic after spring. Too hot!! We then created the calendar on her wall, but choosing a smaller planner or going electronic at this point could work, too.
Write down the things that need to get done by the next time you meet (10 min)
This is where the magic of breaking down the big overwhelming project into small tasks really happens. For my mom, her first month of “homework” is to go into the attic and use color-coded stickers to mark all the items (a) to give away, (b) throw away, or (c) keep. That’s it until we meet again in February. That sounds do-able, yes? We called it “Mom’s Mess Management”, which just rolls off the tongue. NOTE: all sorts of details started coming out at this stage and new post-its were added into the clusters from STEP 3 … all of these steps are somewhat iterative, so don’t feel like you have to keep things 100% linear. The goal is to keep moving and not get bogged down.
Do the first thing and ONLY the first thing (choose something easy) (5 min)
We grabbed some of the color-coded dots, set a timer for 5 min, and went up into the attic to tag as much as we could in those 5 minutes. A little work-burst does wonders for the soul and sets a great mental anchor for doing the work again. Keep it really small and manageable. You are not trying to actually get all the work done - you just want to create a fun mental groove you can slip into next time.
Celebrate and tell each other “you are amazing” … then go have a glass of wine
Rewards and rest are critical! Plan your reward as intentionally as everything else. The more onerous the task, the more enticing the reward should be.
