The Ketchup Strategy

All right, to be perfectly fair, today's post is really about the "Catch-Up Strategy," but I so rarely get to put pictures with my blog posts that I took a little liberty with the name of it.

Do you ever find yourself so swamped with current projects that you get behind in closing out some of the older ones? Every so often, that's the case for me. And with my "mild ADD" personality, I get more excited about new projects than I do about burning CDs and creating ASCII text files and so, inevitably, every once in a while, I have to implement the Catch-Up Strategy.

That's when I go through the file folder on my desk labeled "Awaiting Finalization," and I sort through the pile of paper on my desk to find the projects that made it out of the "Awaiting Finalization" folder but never got finalized, and I double-check that with my daily planner, where action items like "Finish Jones Project!!!!!!" languish unchecked off.

And I clear my calendar, ignore the ringing phone and the pinging e-mail ... and just focus on sending off those digital files, burning the CDs and printing the laserprints (for those clients who choose to get paper packets -- which is still surprisingly a large number).

And so, today, I finished three of those long-awaited finalizations. But tomorrow, alas, more tomatoes will be harmed as I put the "Catch-Up Strategy" in motion for a few more stragglers.

Maybe you can do the same. (And have a hamburger with fries for lunch ....)