I have dreams of organizing everything perfectly, perhaps in a color-coded and simultaneously alphabetized kind of way. In my dreams, everything is done nicely ahead of time, I know exactly where everything is, and everything always goes just according to plan, and on the rare occasions when it doesn’t, my backup plan steps neatly in and things turn out even better than they would have originally.
Of course, this is all just a dream. In reality, I manage to plan ahead enough just enough to get by, and just enough to get made fun of by people who don’t understand the joy in having at least a couple of things color-coded, and who have never used a spreadsheet to make a packing list.
However, even when my organizational aspirations are only partly realized, I have never ever, nope, not even once, been sorry that I started the organizational process. Even a partial plan is better than none, and any thinking done ahead of time helps start those subconscious processes running, so that you wake up in the morning and realize the one critical thing that needs to be done.
The other big plus that the planning process brings is the ability to do stuff ahead of time, when you have time — a strategy that I like to call timeshifting. Instead of waiting until the last minute, you can take the time you have now, when it is not last minute, and do things that will make it easier to get all the stuff done later.
This past weekend I hosted a graduation party for my daughter and son-in-law, who just graduated from nursing school. With twin ten-month-olds and a full-time job, there’s never enough time to do anything, and nap times always end early when you were really counting on that two-hour morning nap. But, I made a plan, and that plan took about ten pieces of paper and a big black sharpie to create, and then I knew what I could try to fit in ahead of time, and what needed to wait until the last minute.
The other bonus that a plan makes it much easier to delegate. If someone asks what they can do to help, you have a list, and you can just hand items off your list!
I have a five step strategy for planning and executing on any medium to biggish sized project. They are:
1. Gather Ideas
This is the fun part — do some internet searches, see what Pinterest has to offer, and save it in some form. It’s always easy to just make a new Pinterest board for your project and save your ideas there. Pro tip: You can definitely do this part while lying in bed with your iPad. I’m a big fan of any task I can accomplish while lounging about.
The important part here is to keep track of everything, because you don’t want to be frantically trying to find that recipe you read for the garlic feta dip that sounded fabulous but you forgot to save it. (Spoiler alert: it totally was.)
Also, while I’m looking around for ideas, I’m keeping an eye out for ways that I can outsource or delegate anything. For the graduation party, I bought a customized image on Etsy for the invites, which was super cute and only cost $10, and took so much less time than if I had tried to create the perfect image for the invitations.
Now is also a good time to start thinking about what you are not going to do. It’s really easy to start to go way overboard in aspirations, and it’s great to add in a stretch goal or two, but the entire project shouldn’t be filled with stretch goals. Basics first!
My oldest daughter got married last summer, and scheduled her wedding exactly a month after my twins were scheduled to be born. I told her from the start I wasn’t going to be able to help much, what with being worn down from being 43 and pregnant with twins, and then the first month of newborn babies, but we did spend a fair bit of time just discussing logistics. (I could do that while lounging!)
We talked a lot about the kinds of things to just skip — she had a lot of really cute ideas, but as we talked through how some of them would work, and how much extra effort they’d be, they got cut. The wedding was still amazing and adorable, and no one missed any of the things they didn’t do, and all the sanity it saved was totally worth it.
2. Set A Target and Write It Down
For a party or big dinner, that could be the menu and the invitations; for a trip, a location and a list of activities, for a move, it might be a schedule and a packing strategy. For the graduation party, I sketched out the different food sections (appetizers, trays, desserts, drinks) and then filled in all of the food items for each section, which was easy, because I’d saved all my ideas already!
Putting everything down on one piece of paper in sections made it easy to see what I had too much of (desserts!) and where I needed more variety. (Okay, to be honest, I didn’t need more variety anywhere. I spent a lot of time in step one, but if I did need more variety, it’d be easy to see it here!)
Write it down. DO NOT SKIP THIS PART!! All the thinking about everything you’re doing is tons of work, and no matter how good you are at remembering, you are definitely better at reading a list of written down things than remembering a list. Then you only have to remember where you put your list.
This is another good time to look at what you’re planning and decide if there’s anything to cut back on, delegate, or just plain skip. In the software development world (and maybe other businesses too, but that’s what I know!) the saying is you can pick two of scope, time and cost. If you want a ton of features for a low cost, it’s going to take a while… and if you have a fixed deadline, it’s either going to cost a lot or it’s not going to be the shiny perfect thing that upper management was dreaming of. (And honestly, even if you do throw a lot of money at it, the scope is probably going to suffer a bit with a tight deadline.)
The thing that I always have to work to remember is that no one has any idea what you choose to skip, and things usually work out just fine anyhow. No one knows that you didn’t make a cute Italian soda station with a printed sign that said how to make them, and no one missed it. My middle daughter got married a couple of months ago (yes, it’s been a year of weddings!) and at the last minute, I volunteered to take over stocking the bar, because it became pretty clear that they had no idea what to do and no budget to do it with.
As I worked through the steps, I got lots of ideas in step one. My daughter’s name is Katrina, and what would be more hilarious than having one of the signature drinks be a hurricane? But, as I continued to work through the planning and figuring out what would be needed to make that happen (it seemed impossible and/or prohibitively expensive to obtain passion fruit juice, the main ingredient!) I just cut out that idea and moved on to signature drinks that only contained one kind of alcohol and a mixer. No one left the wedding thinking, man, this was a great wedding, but it would have been so much better with hurricanes at the bar.
3. Break It Down
This is where things really start to kick into motion. At this point, you have a menu, you have a list of activities, you have a moving date in mind. At this point, for each item, you’re going to break each thing into as many steps as you can. Reasonable steps, of course, not crazy steps. But do think creatively. If you are going to bake 12 dozen cookies, think about freezing them in shaped cookies ahead of time, rather than doing it all the day before. It is WAY easier to toss frozen cookies on a tray and throw them in the oven than it is to do it all at once.
At this point, I write down everything that needs to be done. I write down grocery shopping, and then I make my list of everything I need based on the menu I’ve decided on, or if I’m going on vacation, I write down all the groups of things that need to be packed — like baby clothes, swim stuff, etc. For our last move, I wrote down all the different rooms, all the different supplies that was needed, and what different things needed to be packed in each room, like books in upstairs TV room, toys in boys’ room, and so on.
As I break things down, I like to try to break them down into ways that are time-based, as well as task-based. When I was moving, I didn’t want to pack up the pantry on day one of doing moving things, but packing up all the books could be done early, as well as things like getting all the necessary supplies and cleaning out the pantry could also be done early. When figuring out what to do when, the important thing to remember is you will never have more time later! Which means that figuring out even small things that can be done earlier can really make a difference when it comes down to D-day.
Some things to consider, based on what exactly the project is, is to split grocery shopping for dry goods vs. shopping for perishables, splitting a recipe into assembling the dry ingredients and storing them in a ziploc bag or mason jar until it’s time to bake. Or split making labels for all your moving boxes with actually packing the boxes, so it’s super easy to throw the label on when you do pack. Even doing something like making a bucket of all your packing supplies will help a lot when crunch time comes!
4. Back It Up
Now you have a list of everything you need to do — now you can figure out when all that stuff needs to get done. Plan for the earliest possible time! I set up the buffet table three days before the party for our graduation event! I like to make a list of what I will do on each day leading up to the event. For example, I did cleaning the weekend before, made cookies and cupcakes and froze them raw the week before (although this could have been done much earlier) and did grocery shopping for fruit three days before. Having my list all written down made it really easy to just look at what I needed to do next and go do it, rather than having to think through the whole strategy again.
As you work through your tasks, remember that you will not get them all done on the assigned day. That’s okay! Every time you pick up your list to work on something, just go back to the earliest day that doesn’t have everything crossed off, and work on that. You might also look back and find that you don’t actually need to do some of those things you were planning on earlier. Maybe decluttering the upstairs hallway isn’t that critical, because everyone’s just going to be downstairs and not go upstairs at all. Cross it off!
Some items may have preparatory steps involved, like testing a new recipe before you finalize the menu, or scouting out what alcohol is available at Costco before you figure out the final drink menu. Make sure to write those things down too, and schedule them as early as possible, so you can adjust the plan if it turns out that recipe is a no-go.
When you’re making your schedule, it’s also a good time to think about how you can delegate or get yourself more time as needed. For our graduation party, I enlisted my middle daughter to come babysit the twins for a while the day before, which gave me a nice uninterrupted chunk of time, and then when they went down for a nap, I sent her with my last minute list to the grocery store. Double efficiency!
When I was trying to stock the bar for middle daughter’s wedding, I was also trying to launch a big project at work, and host my mother-in-law! My husband, however, had taken a day off of work to hang out with his mom, and they took a little excursion to Costco with the list of all the bar supplies I was going to buy there. It was a huge help, and made possible because I already had a plan for what I was getting there.
Don’t forget to be realistic about how much you can do on any particular day too. If Friday is a day when you drive the kids three separate places in three opposite directions, it’s not the day to plan to accomplish half your tasks.
5. Clear the Runway
Besides just thinking about the event, think about the two or three days leading up to the event, and try to make your normal daily stuff, like feeding your family, as easy as possible (or delegate it!). I always get more stressed out when a big project is coming up, and it’s nice to know that you aren’t going to panic at 4:45 when you realize you haven’t even considered what dinner is going to be. Also think about things that will make those days easier overall, if it’s eating off of paper plates or getting take out for dinner or letting the kids watch tv when they don’t usually get that much screen time.
Sometimes, it’s not possible to clear off as much as you’d like, if the big update your company is pinning all of its hopes for 2017 is happening the day after your daughter’s wedding. In these cases, the strategies are really just the same as before — simplify, delegate, do the important stuff first.
As you make your final approach, remember that everything’s not going to go perfectly from your Pinterest vision in step one, and that’s ok. You will order two super adorable creamer pitchers, one for milk and one for cream for coffee, and you will put them on the table, and you will completely forget to fill them up.
Your hope of completely organizing the downstairs may turn into stuffing things into the guest room, and that’s fine. Even though I didn’t completely organize everything, it’s still much more organized than it was in the beginning, and that’s progress.
In The End
Things that require a lot of planning rarely work out perfectly, but by doing the thinking up front, and splitting tasks up, it might be possible to survive the experience with a few specks of sanity remaining.
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