After a long day at your desk, do you ever ask yourself “What the heck did I accomplish today?” I know I could be working like a madman and pushing projects out before deadlines and I still won’t even remember what I did. It’s all a blur. At the end of the week, I could barely tell someone what I have been doing at work lately when asked. I’ve found a nice trick to help me fix that and regain that feeling of accomplishment.
Maybe you’ve heard of the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’m reading this book at the moment and one of the most important things he talks about is writing things down. Write everything down. When you think of an idea, get it out of your head and onto paper. The reason behind this is to get your brain clear of distractions so you can focus on the task at hand.
This past few weeks, I’ve been using my Action Notebook that I bought from Behance. I don’t think I’m using it perfectly, but it’s a good reminder for me to write things down and outline my todo lists AS it happens. I’m always adding items to my list with little checkboxes as I go along. For the most part, I’ve seen a serious productivity increase.
Another thing David Allen stresses in his book is doing a constant review or revisiting to those items. What good are they if you don’t review them to see what you’ve accomplished or missed?
So every Friday I’m going to review my lists and time I’ve logged at Go Media and come up with a short review of what I have accomplished this week. It should give you a way to kind of look inside my life at Go Media as well as give myself a way to remind myself that all the hard work I did over the week actually meant something. View my weekly review after the jump:
So here’s my rundown of what I did this week:
Week of June 9, 2008.
- Worked out a trade of Arsenal goods for Strata 3D. Strata is a cool 3D program that works directly with Photoshop CS3. I installed Photoshop Extended to get it working and toyed around with it. Pretty fun.
- Continued to work with CS-Cart Developers to get Arsenal 2.0 built.
- Finished a shirt design for the band The Human Abstract. Cool type treatment and all over print. It was approved.
- Worked on revisions and finishing up some design elements and animation for a new tattoo show that will air on A&E this summer.
- Went over to the new building to see how it was coming along. Flooring is just about done and construction has began after months of paperwork and permits. Very exciting.
- Responded to hundreds of emails.
- Followed up on a few leads, some for Proof7 and 9Grand Clothing Companies.
- Accidentally turned my computer off with my foot under my desk. Then my computer would not boot into Windows after that. 2 hours later I was working again. Lame.
- Launched Watercolors 2 pack. And spent some time promoting it.
- Worked with Adam Wagner, our newest hire. Adam was an intern last summer. He’s going to be helping me run the Go Mediazine and the Arsenal. You will hear more from him.
- Did 2 cool shirt designs for Strhess.
- Began discussing a new book project that involves a few other artists at Emptees.
- Planned to do a pro bono shirt design for Berea Fest and The Fest 2008.
- Started twittering.
So that’s it. Take it for what it is! Its my list. I encourage you to start your own lists and keep track of what you do each week. It takes a minute to write something down, but you could afford to look away from the computer screen, right?
So keep checking back on Fridays for more weekly updates! Better yet, why don’t you subscribe to our RSS?
Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland, Ohio. Besides the GoMediaZine, we also work for clients and sell stock artwork and design files on the Arsenal.
Jun 13
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