My Year of Finishing Projects

by Phoebe Farag Mikhail

I write this post with my head hanging in shame.

After finishing a huge editing project of a 500 page translated book, I feel a sense of relief and some sense of accomplishment, but not much.

It took me almost eight years to finish this project, and it didn’t have to. In those eight years, the original author had even passed away. Granted, the book was long, the editing tedious, and I did it in my spare time.

But it did not have to take eight years.

I could have finished it before getting married. I could have finished it before having my first child. I could have finished it before having my second child.

But now that it is done, and in the hands of the publisher, I will share the lessons I have learned from this shamefully accomplished project, and what finally motivated me to finish it.

Lesson 1: When committing to a project, carve out the time to do it. I often listed this project as a task to get done on a day or a week, but I didn’t block out the time in my schedule for it. If I had allotted simply 30 minutes a day to work on it from the beginning, it would have been done in two years, not eight. Because I did not do so, the task was done in fits and spurts – I would get 30 pages done in one sitting, then go back to it five months later, after putting it on the back burner to more urgent tasks. This is a lesson in discipline, project management, and time management. This free ebook, How to Work for Yourself, shares some good ideas for how to carve out those needed minutes and hours. I wish I had read it eight years ago.

Lesson 2: I work better when I work with other people. Editing is a solitary and tedious job. It takes time and concentration, and usually involves me and a computer, or piece of paper and a pen. However, when I joined a translation committee, and there were others who were now checking the sections I edited against the original language, I moved more quickly. It became a team effort, and my teammates were reviewing sections of the book faster than I was editing them – which motivated me to finish more quickly. This means that I should figure out a way to make future projects also team efforts – even when they don’t seem so at first.

Lesson 3: I work well with deadlines. The final push for me to get this done was when the publisher started pressing for the final manuscript, and the translator started holding me accountable. The pressure was on, but because it had taken me so long, I still had to balance this task with responsibilities I did not have when I first started. The lesson for me on future projects that don’t have external deadlines is to create them – perhaps by asking others to hold me accountable to a deadline I have set, or by vowing not to move on to a new, more exciting project till I finish the one I’m working on now.

Eleven months into 2014, I’m sharing my new year’s resolution because I decided writing how I finished a long term project would be more useful than writing about my intentions to do so. 

What helps you accomplish projects you have started? Please share your tips and ideas!

It's About Time

(From paper to electronic planning, with a free resource!)

By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Starting today, everyone who subscribes to my blog by email will receive a free resource that I developed: “Keeping it together: the essential elements of a time management system.” It’s a one page checklist of the five things necessary for an effective planning system. Please allow 3-5 days to receive the resource when you subscribe. Current subscribers will automatically receive the resource via email. In this post, I’ll share the specific five examples I use in my system, and contains affiliate links to the products I use.

Call me a geek, but nothing beat the feeling of putting new planning pages in my FranklinCovey binder, the excitement of all the future plans that would be recorded on those pages, the inspiration from the quotes on every page, the notes that would be taken during interesting talks and productive meetings …

Those days are over. My husband got a tablet and converted to electronic planning, and it only made sense that I follow suit so that we could share calendars. So finally, I made the move to a hybrid electronic and paper planning system.

For my calendar, we decided on Cozi, a wonderful (and free!) app that allows the whole family to share an online calendar through a common family password. Every family member is color coded so that we know which appointments pertain to which family members, and the app synchs with the online K12 calendars and with Microsoft Outlook, which many people use at work. Its visually appealing user interface and ability to print out calendars to post in the kitchen or on bulletin boards almost replaces that paper planning feeling.

I access my Cozi calendar on my smart phone and my Amazon Kindle Fire, which I purchased mainly for its low price considering all its features, its smaller size compared to other tablets, and its “Free Time” feature for kids. Cozi works on Kindle Fire, Android tablets and phones, Ipads, and Iphones. It took me about two hours to transfer all my appointments and tasks from my paper planner to the online calendar, but the ability to share calendars with my husband (and potentially my kids when they get old enough to use it) has saved us hours and frustration trying to coordinate our daily changing schedules.

I keep my master list on Cozi, but I use these Moleskin Cahier Journals to keep my daily task lists and notes. Some of the pages in these notebooks are perforated, making them perfect for disposable notes like shopping lists. I use this inexpensive pen/stylus combo to keep with me (the package contains five), and keep it all together in this Kindle Fire Folio, which also has pockets to hold things like business cards and my kids’ vaccination cards. 

My planning system

Finally, I store my completed notebooks (and unused ones) in this plastic bin that I bought in a package from Costco:

How do you keep yourself organized? Please share your ideas in the comments!

The Road to Hell (and Other Bad Words)

What I’ve Been Reading (No. 1)

By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

“Hell,” I learned a few years ago, is a bad word in some states, like Virginia, where my Sunday School students widened their eyes in shock when their teacher from New York used it. “It’s not a bad word where I come from,” I tried to explain. 

They must never have heard their aging next door neighbor repeat the old maxim: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The proverb is used when the cause of something bad is someone’s failure to do something good, even though that person had good intentions to do otherwise.

On January 1, 2013, many of us resolved, with good intentions, to be more organized this year. Or to get more exercise this year. Or to clean out our garage this year. Or to leave work at 5 pm every day this year. Or to stop twittering away all our time on Facebook this year. Or—well, it’s February.  

Are you, like me, on the road to hell?

There is another bad word, however, that may help you and I get off that road.

Discipline.

It’s bad because we often think of discipline as something unpleasant we must inflict upon ourselves for some greater good, or some internal ability that some people have, but others don’t. Or, with regards to children, “discipline” often connotes how parents should deal with their children when they misbehave.

Link the word “discipline” with “desire,” however, and it seems less difficult to swallow. Discipline without desire can be fruitless, and almost impossible to maintain, unless there is some external threat of punishment. 

But when discipline is motivated by an intense desire, it’s not even called discipline anymore. It’s called doing what we want. Similarly, if we considered this link between desire and discipline when it comes to raising children, we might think about how we want to instill in them a desire to behave, rather than fear of punishment when they misbehave (I’ll blog about that in a future post).

Discipline (and its friend, self-control), is driven by the desire to achieve, and can be developed and strengthened. Anyone with the desire to accomplish can develop discipline and reap its countless rewards.

 I’ve discovered that to develop more discipline in my life, I must:

1. Feed my desire for my goal
2. Build discipline by developing habits that will help me achieve that goal.

  To give an example of feeding my desire, I have a goal of waking up early in the morning, before my kids, to get a head start on my day and do things I usually can’t do when they’re awake. Despite the plentiful obstacles to waking up early in the morning, I feed my desire to wake up early by investing in high quality coffee beans so I have a fresh cup of coffee to look forward to in the morning, doing things I enjoy in my early morning hours (like praying, writing, NOT folding laundry), and reminding myself of the inexpressible joy I feel when my son wakes up, runs out to the living room into my arms, and happily exclaims, “good morning Mommy!”

For developing good habits to build discipline, I came across a great resource that summarizes the most important habits needed to develop discipline and accomplish goals: a short and sweet Crystal Paine’s ebook, 21 Days to a More Disciplined Life.* These include the tried and true habits of goal setting, learning to say “no,” breaking down large projects into smaller tasks, and finding accountability partners. 

You can read the blog posts upon which blogger Crystal Paine based this book here.  To develop good habits to help me wake up early, I say ‘no’ to late night computer use, and ask my husband to wake me if he finds me shutting off my alarm.

Reformulate your goal into a desire you can feed, then develop good habits to build the discipline you need to achieve them. Do you have other resources for leading a more disciplined life? Please share them in the comments.

*This post contains affiliate links. That means if you choose to purchase the book mentioned in the blog, I will get a commission if you click through my links. I will never post an affiliate link to a book unless I have read it myself, found it useful, and worth sharing.