Mindful Productivity Podcast

Project Organization

May 23, 2023 Sarah Steckler Episode 204
Mindful Productivity Podcast
Project Organization
Show Notes Transcript

Let's talk about Project Organization! If you're feeling overwhelmed this is a great episode to help you capture your ideas and get organized.

I'll be sharing:

  • How to capture and categorize project ideas
  • Project categories and considerations
  • The difference between passive and active projects
  • Ongoing vs. one-off projects
  • How I setup projects inside of Notion
  • Ideas for surfacing, filtering, and sorting projects
  • Mindset shifts that help tasks become less overwhelming


Find more resources over at SarahSteckler.com

Come say hi on Instagram @sarahsteckler

Capturing ideas for projects, how I break them down into categories, how I use them inside of a planner, and how I have them organized in Notion. So hopefully, walking you through this process will give you a better idea into my own project management strategy, give you some ideas for yourself, and help get you started on creating a more organized and mindfully productive life. Let's go ahead and get into it. Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and today we're going to be talking all about projects. Specifically, I'm going to be walking you through how I organize my mind and my brain when it comes to capturing ideas for projects, how I break them down into categories, how I use them inside of a planner, and how I have them organized in Notion. So hopefully walking you through this process will give you a better idea into my own project management strategy, give you some ideas for yourself, and help get you started on creating a more organized and mindfully productive life. Let's go ahead and get into it. Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now. Hello, friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so excited to be here today to talk to you about project management, specifically when it comes to capturing all of your ideas, organizing them, categorizing them, and being able to take action on them. Because there's nothing worse than having a ton of ideas in your head and feeling absolutely completely paralyzed and stuck. And to be honest with you, that's exactly where I feel in my life right now. After our huge move, I still feel like I'm treading water, all that stuff, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life now, what does it look like, what does my business look like, and what are the things I really want to prioritize. When you do work from home or run your own business, this is probably one of the hardest things to do as a creative entrepreneur because you have endless ideas but you don't have endless energy and the days can get away with you. I have had so many days lately, honestly, weeks and months where it feels like I haven't really moved the needle on much of anything in my life and business, and it can feel like everything is piling up and cluttering around me. Literal stuff, literal ideas, all that thing. So today I thought I would actually take some time as a helpful reminder to me in walking you through this process. There's something about trying to talking about stuff, teaching other people, reflecting on processes that can really help us individually, too. And that's one of the reasons why I'm excited to get back into podcasting, because I feel like the more I talk about all these different mindful productivity strategies, the more I remember them for myself, and it becomes very, very helpful. So today I have a plethora of things in front of me. I've got a notepad, I've got two of my planners, and I've also got my Notion daily dashboard open where I have a project database, and I'm going to be walking you through all of it. My goal here is hopefully not to overwhelm you, but to give you an idea of how I break down my project process and hopefully give you some ideas for how you can begin to do this as well. One of the things that is really, really important to me is to make sure that I'm capturing all of my ideas so I don't feel that like FOMO or I don't forget about things. I can tell you, there have been times where I have wrote down a crazy, amazing, incredible idea on a notepad, totally forgotten about it, and then literally found it like four years later and was super sad that that could have been something I implemented into my business earlier. So part of project management is also capturing all of your ideas. It's something I also talk about. There's an episode, let me check what number. Okay, I had to pause. It is Episode 144 of the Mindful Productivity Podcast. It's called idea capturing. And in that episode, I go deeper into talking about our brain's true capacity, how to optimize your mental energy, how to effectively capture your thoughts and ideas, the power of servicing your ideas, and strategies to effectively organize and vet your ideas. I won't spend too much time in this episode going into all of those as they relate to projects because you can listen to that episode, which I will link below. It's really, really helpful for doing all those things, journaling, brain dumping, organizational note taking, you name it. But today we will be talking a little bit about that. So there might be a little bit of overlap. But to dive in, I want to walk you through. I actually did a little list here on a notepad in front of me talking about the idea of breaking down projects into different categories. And I also just want to say anytime you're doing a brain dump or you're trying to get stuff out of your head and you're feeling very overwhelmed, there's going to be all different kinds of angles that you approach that process. There's going to be higher up to working down to the microcosm of your ideas. So starting big and going down small, and then there's going to be the other way. So when you're capturing your ideas, don't get overwhelmed and, well, do I make categories first and then put stuff into categories, or do I make stuff and then put them into categories? It's going to be a little bit of both. So as I'm sharing this, just keep that in mind. But I wanted to start out breaking down some of the current overall bigger, broader project categories that I currently have in my brain. So I broke them down into essentially four different categories. I have home, so that's my home environment, what's going on with my house, as you can imagine, that could be decluttering projects, keeping the kitchen clean, you name it. I have the self, so that's me, my mental health, my sleep schedule, any workouts, meal plans, right? All of that falls into there. And then I have family. So this can include spouse, kids, pets, or if you don't live with anyone else in your household, this could be external family, friends, coworkers, whatever you deem, other entities or individuals that require your time, space, or attention. There are things outside of you that you're going to have to respond to. Then I have my business. And one thing I want to say about the business project category is that I've broken this down into two things which really, really impacts my energy capacity. So I have both passive project goals and active project goals. So for example, passive goals in my business will be things like learning. These are things where there are courses that I need to go through, podcasts I want to listen to, books I want to read, or anything I might be attending, so summits or maybe bundles that I'm going through. Most of those things are passive. Now, within that, courses are going to have you take actionable steps. If you're in a program or coaching program, you're likely going to need to participate. So don't think of these as blanket statements, but more so use what part of your brain are you most likely using? I really like identifying what these passive and learning goals are for me because there are definitely times where I have days or weeks where I can't really get the creative side of my brain to work, or I didn't sleep well, and the idea of trying to speak or write or do anything in that capacity or even decision making feels incredibly overwhelming. So it's nice to lean and fall back on to learning goals and projects where I can just sit back, I can watch videos and courses, I can read stuff, and I can just tell myself, all you have to do is learn. You don't even need to test yourself or be able to remember everything. You can give yourself permission to go back through materials more than once. But there is something really lovely about saying, Hey, today I am just going to have a learning day. And that's also something I love to do as well. If you ever create theme days in your business, having a complete day that's just devoted to learning is amazing. Those types of projects. And then there's also projects within my business that are active, right? These are things where I'm actively doing something, creating something, or actively decision making. And some of those decision making projects revolve around not actually tangibly doing something on my computer or in a journal, but sometimes that also means taking me and my Bulldog Bella out to a park or to a walk in the forest to really be able to think through things in my business and make bigger decisions. Again, some of those specific projects within the active phase of my business could be things like creating podcast episodes, blogs, curriculum development, creating sales pages, etc. You name it. Another thing I want to mention about projects is that projects can overlap and also there are many projects in your life that will happen simultaneously. We're not in a vacuum or some void where only one thing is happening at a time, I wish sometimes, but most of the time you're going to have projects in your life and business that overlap. You're going to be doing things at multiple times in multiple ways throughout the week, the month, what have you, and that's totally okay. You can have multiple projects going on. We'll get into a little more detail in terms of how I set up projects specifically in Notion. I want to walk you through, obviously verbally, what I have set up in that database so that you can see how I break down all the specifics of projects. But I thought it'd be fun now to actually take a minute and walk you through how I organize my projects from ideas to actual things that I might write down in my journals or planners. If you've been listening to my podcast for a while, then this probably comes as no surprise to you, but the first thing I do is a brain dump. I do use my daily productivity and brain dump book for this. I thought it'd be fun to actually go through some of the brain dumps I've done in the past and some of the projects that I outlined. I will actually open up a blank page. Usually for this, I use the page that has a completely blank page on the brain dump template side. And in this one, this is all the way back from 2021, specifically for quarters one and two, I had a project list for 2021. I haven't looked at this, obviously, in years. Some of the projects I listed out were a published with purpose evergreen funnel, getting more specific on the SEO for my blog post, creating a funnel for my pretty simple podcast course. I wrote down circle community, which I actually did that. Everything's an experiment in business. So I actually moved all of my paid Facebook groups from my courses into one circle community for a while. And it actually, it was great. I loved circle. I loved that whole platform. But getting people to actually go to another platform outside of Facebook was a horrible disaster and a fail. And I found this to be true also as a participant in communities. I love things like mighty networks, I love Slack, but if I don't put it on my calendar or make a regular intentional decision to go check those communities, I just totally forget about them. And that's essentially what happened with my circle community. Students really loved it. It was really fun. We had a lot of cool community builders in there, but the engagement just plummeted. So even though that was one of my project goals and I did accomplish it in 2021, we did end up going back into the Facebook group simply because it just became too difficult for people to remember to go to an outside community. So just wanted to share that because sometimes things don't go as planned, right? And it doesn't mean you're a failure. It just means like, oh, that didn't work. Other projects I had, I redid one of my courses and updated the curriculum. I set up a new project management system. I think I was experimenting a lot with... No, I was definitely a notion by this time. I'm trying to think. I don't know what specifically that project was for. I had a project to organize and revamp my notion. I remember that time it was a little bit messy. I had a project for setting up my 2021 Google calendar. 2020 taxes was a project. Oh, and then I also had a list of things I wanted to learn in March of that year. I had a couple of different things. It looked like I was still experimenting with ClickUp at that time. I had some coaching calls I was attending and some different courses that I wanted to continue to learn from. So that was some of my project brain dumps that I did there. And then inside of my brain dump book on the daily productivity page, there are two columns where basically you choose two main focuses for the day, and then you break down those things into five target areas. These aren't necessarily specific tasks, but these are things that you can do in a Pomodoro's worth of time. So that's what I'll typically do as well. And another thing I do with my brain dump book is in the very back, there are brain dump pages where you have a brain dump template. And then instead of the daily productivity page, there are actually two columns on the right-hand side of the spread with a bunch of checkboxes. So what I actually do every now and then is I'll go back through all of my brain dumps. And I love that I have this all in one book, right one area. And I will actually go through and highlight or circle things that I really don't want to forget, and I'll brain dump those in the back of this book on this page. Right now, I can see that at the time of this brain dump, I think this was February 2020, I had written down a bunch of stuff from all my collective brain dumbs that year. So I had a category for journals, and then underneath that, I wrote down all of the different new journal and planner ideas that I wanted to create. I had a list for course catch up, and then all of the different courses I was currently working through, course content creation. And then I had the current course I was working on. I had a list for publish with purpose updates because things are always changing in the publishing space and with Amazon and all the different publishing avenues you can take. And so I had some updates there. And then I also had a couple of things I wanted to add to my regular weekly Pulsepoint check in. So I have a whole template and a Notion template now. I used to have a Google Doc that I would print out or a PDF and sometimes I still like to do that. But now I have a template all in Notion so I just duplicate that every week. But I had some stuff I wanted to add to my ongoing weekly stuff. Looks like I said delete desktop photos and files, which is good because that gets really messy. Weekly sales and expenses. Oh, weekend intentions, that's nice. Then I had another category for product ideas. A couple of different things there that actually never happened. What I did was those were things that I had collected from my brain dumps for that year that I was like, I don't want to forget these things, so I put them top of mind here. Then on the right-hand side page with those two columns, I made two categories. I wrote catch up tasks and future planning. What are the things out of these that I want to do right now? What are ideas and projects that I'm just going to move to the future? I'm not even necessarily going to give a specific date right now, but I just want to keep those top of mind. What's so nice about doing this is then you feel, again, less FOMO about your own brain and your own creative process, because instead of having to go back through pages and pages and pages of brain dumbs from that year, I now had the most important stuff pulled out of those places in one spread. Now when I was looking back at that year and moving forward, I was like, These are the things I need to know. These are the cliff notes version of my brain that year all in one place. I share that to share a little bit about my process there. As you can see, this is time consuming. Not terribly so, but I really do love to take time to do all of this. It's one of those things in business where you're not actively making money doing something like this. But it really helps streamline my business because it becomes so much easier to make decisions and plan my day when I take time to do these things. So that's what I do there in my brain dump. And then I use, and you can see there's a whole process here of thinking, going on forest walks, making decisions in my brain and idea aiding, and then putting pen to paper. And all of these different things I feel like, tap into a different area of my creativity and the productivity side of my brain. I love doing both. I prefer to write things down and then go into Notion later. And you'll see why in a second. It also just makes things clearer when you're putting stuff into Notion because you don't have to have all that space to brain dump and there's less verbiage and words, and you can really just get clear on what are the tangible outcomes I want to include in this project. You can set deadlines and specific tasks. So this all really does pay dividends in the long run. Inside of my other planner that I use, the Mindful Productivity Guide, and I will link to both of these below if you want to see walkthrough videos of what's included in them or try them out. But inside of this planner, which is undated in the beginning of it, and I'm only going to talk about these pages within it because there's all kinds of stuff in here, I actually have project pages. And these project pages are, again, a two page spread. So when you open up the page on the left hand side, you've got your project page, and on the right-hand side, you've got project notes. And what I like to do, in fact, let me see what projects I currently have outlined in this specific one. I'm getting close to needing to start a new planner project page. Okay, so here's one. I did a website audit. This was back in 2020 update and transfer. So I can't remember if I was changing the theme of my Squarespace site, but I had all these things I wanted to do. So this was a project. So what I did is I answered all these questions I have for myself here. So there's the due date, the work timeline, there's a space for date completed. I estimated my time estimate. You guys, if you're ever doing a new project or something, again, doesn't matter, I highly recommend tracking your time, not just, hey, how many days or weeks did it take you? Because that's really not an accurate representation of what we're doing. Because what you really want to know are the hours and minutes. So using something like clockify. Me or any other time tracking device, even if it's literally using a stopwatch and writing down the time you work on something, can be so incredibly helpful to let yourself realistically know how long things take. I did this a lot years and years ago. I worked with a few clients updating or creating Squarespace websites for them, and it was really eye opening to see just how many hours certain things took me. And then that way, when I was editing the proposal and we were talking about the timeline, I could really be realistic and it's going to take me 20 hours to do this, and I'm probably going to be able to do that over the course of four or five days, not just two days. And so I just felt like it was so much easier to set the expectations and the timeline for them. And I feel like the communication was so much better when you know, you know. And internally, it's also nice because you can set expectations for yourself. There are so many days where I sit down on my computer and I'm like, I'm going to just totally do this amazing, epic, long form blog post in two hours. And then you realize, well, no, it'd be helpful if I actually did a brain dump, created an outline first. Maybe that takes two hours and then maybe I sit on it a little bit. I get some feedback from people and then day two is when I really start writing the first draft. Anyway, time tracking, very helpful. The other thing I have in this template on this left hand side page is I have a column that says to research. So it looks like here I had a couple highlighted things. This, again, was for updating my website or doing a website audit. I said, learn more about Convert box and create a strategy around content. So that's a tool that I have used. And then I wrote down brainstorm weekly newsletter and onboarding email. So these were things I wanted to research, create a schedule for routine maintenance checks. So not necessarily things I needed to research outside of myself, but things I needed an answer to before I could really move the needle in the project. And then there's an area for task breakdown. So I actually had to go through all of my podcasts and update them manually, along with blog posts. I wanted to check every page for past things that I might want to update. This was a huge... I'm remembering back to doing all this. And I also had here, do I want to consider having a link to that Buy Me a Coffee thing, which I've never had anyone buy me a coffee. So I think I still have a link to it somewhere, but it's not really something that happens in my business. And yeah. And then so then in my project notes, this is where I have questions or some journaling. I had some ideas about my products and my courses and how I might want to outline them in my website. And so, again, these were my project pages. So I also have... I'm looking at another project here. I had a project for my published with purpose launch. So I had a live launch plan to research. I had map out what the on demand events were going to be. And then I also have projects for curriculum development. I have an ongoing project now for a bigger project I'm doing in my business, which I'm still keeping secret right now. And I've also used these project pages in the past to outline the next 16 episodes for my podcast or a quarterly chunk of episodes, especially if I'm doing a series or something like that. Projects can also be content mapping ideas, all those things. That's the process that I currently use when it comes to ideating and pen to paper. Now I thought it would be fun for me to open up Notion and show you, well, tell you how I have my project database organized and some of the things I have selected. Keep in mind, you do not have to make yours as complicated as this. I wouldn't even say it's complicated. I would just say it's detailed. But this is something I have created inside of my program, Pretty Productive Life, and students get access to all these templates and everything. And so I'm going to actually walk you through what I use and the exact thing that's available inside of that. So I don't know how familiar you may be with Notions, so I want to try to keep this as simple as possible. Inside of Notion, which is essentially a Wiki style editor, and you can create all things like you can create text boxes, you can create databases, which can be viewed in many different ways, tables, caban boards, timeline views, gallery views. There's all different kinds of ways that you can look at all of the same information, and this is why I love Notion. But inside of here specifically, I have something I've created called my daily dashboard. I also do have podcast episodes where I walk you through how I've set up my entire Notion. If you want to check those out, I will make sure to link them below. But inside of my daily dashboard, this is where I have a lot of those views of my various databases positioned or curated in a way where I can surface just the information I need. So if I'm scrolling down here on my daily dashboard for my life and business, I have a whole area that says current projects and content. And underneath here, I have projects, and then I have different views of all the projects. So I have my main projects and I can see the status of them, what the percentage of them being completed is. And then I also have different views that are like tabs. So I have projects that are specifically for any summits, bundles or affiliate launches I'm a part of. Last year was the year of bundles, it felt like. And there were, I think at one time, I think I was participating in seven or eight different bundles over the span of two or three months. And it was wild. It was a lot of fun. I got to collaborate with a lot of fun people and grew my email list like crazy. But there were so many details. So having this view of all of the current bundles and summits I was a part of, along with a bird's eye view of what week each one of them was happening, the promotion schedules, and then all of the links within sight of each of those saved me. I would not have been able to keep track of everything had I not organized everything in that way. And now I actually have templates inside of this project database where if I'm invited to or accepted into another summit or bundle, I can just click on New Summit or Bundle, and it will bring up all of the tasks that I know I need to get information on. So where are the promo materials? What are the promo dates? What are the dates for your coupon code in Thrivecard that you need to have? What's the product you're offering? Where are the templates for any copy or anything like that? All of that's already pre populated in there because I've done so many of these now, I know what all those details are. And that's another reason why I love tracking things in Notion and using templates, because once you do one project in Notion, you can create a template from it and use that again. So I do the same thing for curriculum development or sales pages or anything like that. Once I do a project, I'll go back through, do a recap of how that went, and then I will take the important parts out of it and create a new Notion template. So let's actually jump in to one of... Well, first of all, I'll tell you some of the current projects that are on my table here. Now, this is now done, more or less. I still feel the emotional weight of it. But we finished our PCS, or our permanent change of station from Washington State down here to San Diego. My husband's in the Navy and we move quite a bit. We finished that. What was really cool about that project is I am a solo entrepreneur, so it's just me. I don't currently have a team or VA. My husband, obviously, is very much part of that project. So I was able to invite him into Notion. And then we were able to pick and choose and assign each other different tasks within that project. I don't even want to think about all we did. It was wild. And I hate doing the move. At first, when we first started this lifestyle together over 10 years ago, every move was really exciting. Now it's both exciting but also I know what it takes and how much it drains me. So I definitely dread them a little bit. But having all of those tasks laid out really, really saved us from forgetting details or remembering to circle back with people. As you know, moving, I'm assuming as you know, if you've moved, you know that there are so many things that take place and so many things that get like people drop the ball and you have to circle back with people and it's a lot of frustration. So let's see, I also had a project for my live round of published with purpose. So I have a project template that I create every time we do a live round that helps me schedule out the calls. And I also use that place to write down ongoing student questions or updates to the course that come up during those live calls. It's also where I take notes for all those things. And then I had curriculum development for pretty productive life, which is still ongoing, and some other courses that I'm a part of that I've created as projects. So again, this is similar to what I was talking about inside of the planner. These are all now in Notion. So if we open up one of these projects, I want to show you or tell you some of the different items, different components I have within of this database. And again, these are just some of the things I have. You do not need to have all these things, but these are helpful to me. So I obviously have a checkbox for whether or not an item or project has been completed. And the beauty of Notion 2 is you can filter and sort your views. So when I've completed a project, then that disappears from my current view of current projects so I don't see it anymore. I also have a quick description of the project, the owner, which is typically me. And then I have a date category, which is the due dates, like the DO. So what's the time frame for this process? So for this curriculum development, I actually have a couple of months here that I'm working on this. Then the actual duration, that sometimes can be different. For example, when I have a summit or a bundle that I'm participating in, the due DO dates are when I'm doing stuff and working on things. And that typically expands much longer than the actual promo dates. So the duration of the bundle may only be 4 to 7 days, but the due dates may be a month or more. And then I have an actual date for when the project is due. And then I have a project scope category, which is actually just a tag property. So it is, in fact, it is a select property. So I have either I choose whether it's an ongoing project or a one-off project. One off projects are just that. They're only happening one time and then they end. They have a start time and an end time where ongoing projects are something that I'm working on either for a longer period of time or they're projects that never really end. So household maintenance, for example, would be an ongoing thing or lawn care, something like that would be an ongoing project. I also have this linked to my task database. So I have another database specifically for all of my tasks. And inside of my project templates, anytime I create a new project, any task that I add to this specific project in this window in Notion automatically gets tagged with this specific project. So if I were to jump back to my main task database and look at any of those tasks, if I put them in here, they're already tagged with this project. So I know exactly what belongs to what and everything gets placed appropriately. I also have an area where I typically will link projects to specific weeks. So I do have a weeks database where I have different things that I do within my weeks. I don't want to get too much into the build of my notion because I do have separate episodes where I do that, and I don't want to confuse everyone listening too much. But then I also have a status property and I also have a, let's see, focused project stage. So inside of how I do this, I have a whole focused project training inside of Project Effective Life where I walk through something similar to this, but more in-depth in terms of how to create projects and how to break them down, make sure you're meeting your deadlines and your milestones and you know what all those are. And then I have different things, like I have type. So I have different types of projects. So I have summits, content creation, curriculum development, learning, marketing, household operations, creativity, family finances. There's a few more just to give you an idea. And then I also have areas where I can link things to specific products or services that I offer or specific goals or objectives within my business at scale. So that's what this looks like inside of Notion. And again, I don't always use all these properties, but they're there and they can help me surface and filter all these different projects depending on how I want to at any given time. So not only can I surface things by like, Is it a summit or a bundle? But I can also surface things by is it an ongoing project? Is it business? Is it personal? And all of that can really help me stay focused and less overwhelmed because instead of looking at all of my project ideas and unfinished projects and projects for next year, next quarter and projects now, but also projects not happening until next week. Instead of seeing all of those at once, I can be like, just show me the projects for right this second, right or right today or this week or specific projects that are just for my home that have to happen this week or that are ongoing. That is so nice because you're definitely going to have times where you need to filter and sort your life. So that's what I have there. I also, too, I can't remember if I already said this, I just want to remind you that everything in your life is essentially a project. So when you think about it that way, tasks become... Everything can be just as overwhelming, but tasks then roll up into projects. And I love this because when I think of my cleaning schedule, for example, as more of an ongoing project, then instead of being like, Oh, no, there's dishes in the sink, and I'm a horrible person who doesn't have their life together, which there's always dishes in the sink. I cannot, for the life of me, keep a clean kitchen. It's just always messy. Instead of thinking about that and being like, Oh, if I walk in there to get another cup of coffee or feed my cat, instead of being like, Oh, the dishes are in the sink and I'm stressed out, I can just remember that that's a part of my cleaning or household maintenance project. And I'm not working on that today or even this week necessarily. So I don't have to worry about that specific task. And just that change in mindframe mindset really helps me sometimes because I'll have the same thing happen in my business where I'll see, for example, I'm behind on the podcast or I haven't recorded a podcast in weeks or months, which is this is the first year where that's really been a thing. And instead of beating myself up for being inconsistent or not having the capacity to do that, I just remind myself that's currently not on your project scope right now. You're not currently working on podcasts, right? We've put that aside until May or June, whatever. Right now, here's what you are focusing on. So the more you can put and think about everything in your life as a project, the better. Another thing that I think can be really fun is to create a project for all of your hobbies. Maybe that's something I could do deep dive in in another podcast. But having a hobby project where here's the things that I'm doing ongoing for my mental health or my well being, or here's the things I just love doing. And all of those things could be tasks within the project. Not so much as tasks that you need to do. But sometimes I get in a place with my mental health or I have a depressive episode or whatever, and I, for the life of me, just feel so paralyzed in my brain. And it's so nice to bring up a list of, hey, here's all the things that you can do that will make you feel better. The other weekend, I went to Michael's and bought a little wooden bird house and painted it, and it looks silly and not that great. But I can tell you, I had the time of my life listening to lo-fi music on YouTube and painting that birdhouse. And in the half an hour it took me, I felt worlds better and I stopped thinking about the state of the world or my anxiety and was able to really focus on that. So having projects that help you with your mental health and remind you of all the things that are available to you can be incredibly helpful as well. As you can tell, I could talk about projects and project management for a lot longer than the almost 40 minutes that I've been talking, but I hope that this gives you some ideas into how you can capture, manage, and take action on your own projects. I hope you have a wonderful week moving forward. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. As always, I have show notes and links to everything over on my website at Sarah Steckler.com you can always say hi on Instagram as well if you enjoyed the episode. I'm @sarahsteckler. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you all next week.

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