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Keeping track
Jun. 10th, 2015 07:21 pm(From offcenter.biz, April 2015; thought I'd better archive it before I forgot.)
I've talked before about how, with sufficient overcompensation, disorganization can seem organized. Today, a similar topic.
What was I going to say...
Oh, right. I forget things.
Not consistently, not always. I have a capacious memory for trivia. Book plots, song titles and lyrics, stuff I learned in school years ago, are all ready to pop up in the front of my brain at a moment's notice.
Last week's promise, or next week's deadline: not so much.
As with my lack of organization, I have coping strategies.
Write it down. I keep a bunch of different notebooks: a kiln log where I record each step of every firing, with notes about what went wrong or right, gas usage, timing. I'm trying to get better at including the results as well, but since the kiln unloads two days after the firing ends, I don't always remember to bring the log book. A pad that lives in the Market cash pouch, where we record sales, make note of restock needs, and record name and contact information for any special orders we take. I also still carry a pocket calendar, on paper, to record appointments and deadlines, though I'm not as good at using it as I once was. Denise remembers dates better than I do, and I've gotten spoiled. I try to salt my location with legals pads as well--in my backpack, in the studio, at Club Mud. When I don't have one handy, I'll resort to small scraps of paper with cryptic notes that live in my wallet until I've gotten around to deciphering and filing them properly at home.
Get it in writing. Email has been a huge help to me, because I can get very detailed specifications, information from people on what they need in an easily archivable form. (I also cc myself so I know what I promised in reply.) Phone messages are also helpful, but still need to be transcribed and saved somewhere.
Know where to find it. This is crucial. Loose phone messages, notes from my pocket, things left on my desk, disappear. Oh they're there somewhere, buried in the strata. Unless of course the cats have slid them onto the floor, where they disappear into Denise's strata. So I have to be systematic. The first step was to buy a file cabinet. I've got a drawer for household papers, another for business, with labeled folders for important topics. More recently, I've started filing things on my computer, specifically by creating "Special Order" files. They consolidate information from phone notes, Market pad and emails into an easily printable form, with products, patterns names and contact information. And they're dated by glaze firing so I know which one is current, and where to find older ones. That's the nice thing about multi-gigabyte hard drives: you never have to throw anything away.
Right now I've got two current spOrder files in the documents folder, one for miscellaneous small projects, another for an eight-place table setting bound for Tallahassee with a choice of thirty-two different patterns. I'll need to make one more before I start glazing, for a complicated multi-image, multi-plate project that's currently detailed in about a dozen emails.
(Actually, by the time I finished this firing cycle, that last spOrder file had no less than nine plates with 27 patterns. What was I thinking?)
I've talked before about how, with sufficient overcompensation, disorganization can seem organized. Today, a similar topic.
What was I going to say...
Oh, right. I forget things.
Not consistently, not always. I have a capacious memory for trivia. Book plots, song titles and lyrics, stuff I learned in school years ago, are all ready to pop up in the front of my brain at a moment's notice.
Last week's promise, or next week's deadline: not so much.
As with my lack of organization, I have coping strategies.
Write it down. I keep a bunch of different notebooks: a kiln log where I record each step of every firing, with notes about what went wrong or right, gas usage, timing. I'm trying to get better at including the results as well, but since the kiln unloads two days after the firing ends, I don't always remember to bring the log book. A pad that lives in the Market cash pouch, where we record sales, make note of restock needs, and record name and contact information for any special orders we take. I also still carry a pocket calendar, on paper, to record appointments and deadlines, though I'm not as good at using it as I once was. Denise remembers dates better than I do, and I've gotten spoiled. I try to salt my location with legals pads as well--in my backpack, in the studio, at Club Mud. When I don't have one handy, I'll resort to small scraps of paper with cryptic notes that live in my wallet until I've gotten around to deciphering and filing them properly at home.
Get it in writing. Email has been a huge help to me, because I can get very detailed specifications, information from people on what they need in an easily archivable form. (I also cc myself so I know what I promised in reply.) Phone messages are also helpful, but still need to be transcribed and saved somewhere.
Know where to find it. This is crucial. Loose phone messages, notes from my pocket, things left on my desk, disappear. Oh they're there somewhere, buried in the strata. Unless of course the cats have slid them onto the floor, where they disappear into Denise's strata. So I have to be systematic. The first step was to buy a file cabinet. I've got a drawer for household papers, another for business, with labeled folders for important topics. More recently, I've started filing things on my computer, specifically by creating "Special Order" files. They consolidate information from phone notes, Market pad and emails into an easily printable form, with products, patterns names and contact information. And they're dated by glaze firing so I know which one is current, and where to find older ones. That's the nice thing about multi-gigabyte hard drives: you never have to throw anything away.
Right now I've got two current spOrder files in the documents folder, one for miscellaneous small projects, another for an eight-place table setting bound for Tallahassee with a choice of thirty-two different patterns. I'll need to make one more before I start glazing, for a complicated multi-image, multi-plate project that's currently detailed in about a dozen emails.
(Actually, by the time I finished this firing cycle, that last spOrder file had no less than nine plates with 27 patterns. What was I thinking?)