Thursday, May 13, 2010

Over and Over

When a job is extremely involved and sizeable, I tend to go at it multiple times, breaking it down from the largest components, then refining and refining to more and more detailed segments. With the WM, I went at it today first to look at the list overall and eliminate every one I could. Easy.

I went back to it to mark email versus snail mail submissions, standing back far so as to still be at really big-picture levels. I did *some* more eliminating, but that was not the point of the second exercise; just to create big-pile categories, basically.

Third run was to look at "SASE"-marked submissions even more closely, determining those with websites, which I'll have to check to verify whether snail mail is the ONLY method by which these agencies will accept submissions. This exercise reallocated several of the previously SASE-binned options, which did have email addresses and websites showing, and for which the WM wasn't absolutely clear. This run was to isolate those agencies which very definitely will require mail/hard copies.

I ended with seventeen.

This means there may yet be several more which prefer snail-mail submissions, but this segment is the definite luddites. Heh.

Intuitively non-obviously, my response to this is not to backburner these, but to want to get these submissions done FIRST.


The other way I manage big jobs like this is to set the biggest pains to be done first.

Of course, this does still mean I need a printer.

So that pain is #1, to be immediately followed by a whole bunch of customizing, organizing, printing, stamping, and sending. Shew.

This calls for a spreadsheet. (Yeah, I know. But seriously!)



Once this part is done, the e-work will seem almost easy!

*Kind of excited, yep*

*Still so much to do*


WHEW!

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