Open Thread: What are your hacks for organizing your Optionality life?
Congratulations! You are living your best portfolio life. But how are you managing it?
In the coming month we are focusing on both the cultivation and integration of our many personal and professional identities, but also on the flat-out nitty-gritty brass tacks required to manage all of our meaningful projects, slices of our life Venn diagram, color blocks on the life calendar—whatever you want to call them.
The image above, by the way, is not the latest piece in a showcase at MOMA, it’s my calendar for this week, in all its color-coded glory. I’ve actually simplified it by removing some of the regular activities that I no longer have to remind myself to do (like eat lunch, which I used to block in gray). I initially built it with tall blocks of time I set to dedicate to a single project or role and to ensure I was mapping out enough time for work I had committed to. But sadly, not everyone’s schedule adheres perfectly to mine, and I’ve had to chop and redistribute those blocks to once-sacred places below and above this screen shot view. There also appears to be overlap in areas, and, yes, this tends to happen, but most of these overlaps indicate blocks I’ve placed on others’ calendars to let them know I am not available at that time, or they represent my kids’ activities so I know where they are at any given time and when to pick them up. Once a week I review the week ahead to ensure I’m not, say, recording a podcast when I should be taking my daughter to a Doctor’s appointment, but admittedly my system is not 100% foolproof.
Premium Members: For inspiration on how (and why!) to set up your portfolio life, tune into our podcast conversation with Optionality Advisory Committee member, Harvard Senior Lecturer, “Human Venn Diagram,” and author of The Portfolio Life Christina Wallace.
We’ll be getting into the challenges of fractional work, multiple projects, and the competing priorities that are bound to emerge when you embark on a life of Optionality, as well as the frameworks and hacks for making it all work.
To kick off, however, we’re asking you: What are some of the logistical challenges to holding down multiple gigs or roles, and what are your time-management hacks?
This is where I find some challenge distinguishing and blocking time between ongoing fractional gigs and more traditional consulting. In the latter you typically have a point of contact or two; you may have recurring check-ins scheduled, and you're likely to have some kind of deliverables timeline that gives a very specific and...this is key...closed-end framework for your work together. It feels pretty easy to set boundaries about ad hoc communications, requests, etc. in that framework.
Meanwhile a fractional gig means you're part of the team...and are integrated into the team...and especially if the rest of the team is all full-time without any constraints, setting and maintaining boundaries is all on you. You just have to suck it up and set and maintain those boundaries and not worry so much about making everybody happy all the time any time.
my own approach is that I do try to do what I call flexible time-blocking. And I definitely have only recently learned to include all my *personal* goals into that time blocking too. Do I want to do a daily walk? Calendar it. Do I want to practice piano? Calendar it. I do this scheduling every Sunday once I see what my calendar of "musts" for the coming week looks like.
I really love the notion of feeling colors - how do I feel about my life and its components? I suspect tho that sometimes i’ll feel different ways at different times.