Pending

One of my smaller whiteboards is headed “PENDING” and it’s filling up fast.  Part of my job now is to ask people questions, track materials, keep tabs on deals and processes, and other organisational shit that I am historically Very Bad At.  Hence the PENDING board.  Write everything down on something that’s going to be in front of you all the damn time.  I dearly wish there was something like the old iOS Panic Status Board (which I still run on my ancient iPad 2 in the office) that was Windows-based or web browser accessible so I could throw it up on the external monitor. 

I remember being fascinated by the hacks on old Kindles that turned them into glanceable ambient information radiators.  (example)  They were mostly way too hard to implement but wonderful ideas nonetheless. It’s impossible to get the Echo Spot to display anything useful. Everything went backwards. So now I scrawl on whiteboards and scribble in notebooks and mark up a paper calendar.

(Kanban boards wotk for people I know, but they send me blind.)

My whole setup is extremely primitive.

That’s right.  Binder clips, a calendar printed off from the web, adhesive hooks. Nothing in here is fancy.  Just find what gets the job done.  You can fiddle about and make it pretty later if you want to.  Function first, detail later.  I can look up over the top of the monitor and see everything that’s on deck, and the time-sensitive stuff is in Google Calendar. (By “time sensitive” I mean things like “definitely start X today” or “you need to call X at 5pm on Monday.”)

I know someone who was working in a small space and did this with post-it notes on the wall next to their laptop.  It doesn’t take much.  Just having the idea and implementing it in minimum viable form.