Topic Tuesday - It's so shiny....Oh! Squirrel!

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

So....It's Topic Tuesday!  I've had some really great ideas over the past few weeks of topics I could post on, but ...well... I didn't write them down and I've gone and forgotten them.  *doh*

This time of year is super busy and I'm easily distracted anyway.  I've gone and made it worse by changing employers too!  Oy!  So with all the things going on, I've got the attention span of well, a very small insect, or a couple of pups who love squirrels.

Before I head off on too much of a tangent, let me put a question to you.  What do you do to keep yourself on track when you get super busy with tons of distractions.  To Do lists in Trello?  Confluence Note Pages?  Full on planning and tracking in Jira?  Something less technical?  Give me your tried and true (or tried and didn't go so well!) ways you stay focused and on track.

[Alyssa Priddy]

Congrats on the new job! That's awesome news :) So, for personal life, I have a trello board I use FOR EVERYTHING. My board is setup with columns for the days of the week so column 1 is Monday, column 2 is Tuesday, etc. I love it! Especially, the checklist function for my grocery list AND the image upload for things like wedding invites or calendar screen shots with address on them. Also, I use the color labels to prioritize my tasks for each day. So, red are critical, yellow are medium, and green are pretty much optional.

For my work, I have a great system in Outlook. My inbox is my queue of work and there is nothing in it but items undone. I have folders for data retention and they are organized by topic. So, if someone sent me a Jira request to add a field last week and I did it, its in my Jira folder NOT in my inbox. This helps so much to visibly see what I have to do. And for the emails in my inbox, I organize those with the color categories in Outlook. You can name different color labels- so my orange label is "Do Next Week" and my yellow label is marked "Waiting on Others" and when you label an email in your inbox like that, Outlook sorts them by those labels....so all of my "Waiting on Others" and "Do Next Week" go to the bottom of my inbox and I am left with active work that I need to do!

LOVE IT!

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

Oh Wow!
Thats a hecka cool trick in Outlook!  I'm gonna have to give that a try!

[Amanda Kirk]

Congrats on the new job, Kim! I hope you are loving it!

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

Thanks!  It does have new challenges, which I was hoping for.  I definitely need to pick my fellow AUG/Community folks for their Jira Service Desk Knowledge!