Friday Routines

On Fridays, before I leave work, I make it a routine to spend the last ten minutes of the day straightening up and getting organized for Monday. Its an idea I adapted some time ago from an organizing mailing list.

The most important step is to write down what I’m working on. Its easy to forget between Friday and Monday what I was in the middle of working on and where I left off…hot on solving a bug, write down my train of thought. By Monday it will be long gone and replaced with thoughts about the weekend. That alone saves enough time in lost productivity Monday morning to make up for all the other steps.

I straighten up everything on my desk. I put all the caps back on all the pens and put them all back in the pencil cup. I sort any papers on my desk and either file them (currently my file system is a pile on the corner of the desk where related papers are held together with paper-clips or binder clips) or stack them in neat piles. I’m kind of particular about my piles, they have to look neat, corners of the pages lined up.