[VIDEO]: Office Organization: Planning Projects

I always have soooo many projects going on in my business. While not all of them are implemented at once (thank goodness!), I write all of them down (both ideas and projects that are currently being implemented) so I know what’s going on at any given time.

In this video, I show you my rainbow sticky note white board in my office that I use to track and manage all of the projects for Alejandra.tv. We call it our “Tetris Board” because, well, it kind of looks like a Tetris board if you stand back and look at it. I absolutely love this board because it’s visual (I can SEE what’s going on) and it’s color-coded (I love things that are color-coded if you didn’t know ;).

Video Details

Hi everyone. So in this video, I’m going to share with you guys one tip for getting things done and that tip is to have a project planning board in your home or in your office. So I’m in my office. I’m in front of my project planning board. And this is by far not my to-do list. My to-do list is separate from this board. This is instead a place where I track and I manage all the projects that are going on inside of my business. So let me grab the camera and show you guys what this looks like and show you guys how you can do the same thing inside of your home or your office.

How to Organize, Plan, & Track Office Projects

So these are my project boards in my home office. I’m just going to quickly go up and down and share with you guys what they look like and then I’ll explain to you guys how I use them. So yeah, so aren’t these so pretty? I just feel like they’re so pretty, probably just because all the post-it notes are in a color-coded order and they just look so neat and organized.

But let me first quickly tell you what these boards are. So these are – they’re whiteboards but they don’t look like boards because they’re very thin but they’re whiteboards. They’re laminated and you can write on them with a dry- eraser marker and they erase perfectly fine. I’m not really like a dry-erase person because I’m left-handed and so the ink will just smear on my hand. So that’s why I like to use post-it notes.

But a company called Planetsafe Planners makes these boards. They’re 100% biodegradable. And they make all kinds of whiteboards. They make calendars, they make spiral bound, charts like this. This is – I forget what this is called. This is like the 36 x 24 5-column tracker. They’re double-sided so in the back is something different. But yeah, they have different sizes, different calendars for different uses. They sell post-it-notes so they’re actually made to put post-it notes like this. They have tons of different colors, tons of different size post-it notes. So they’re just very cool.

Organizing Projects and Assignments

So let me tell you what I used these for. So everything I do at work, I track. Like every project that we’re working on gets written down just so I know what’s going on, Ed knows what’s going on, and everybody that’s working on something has a clue of what’s going on. So basically, what I do is every time a new project comes up or we think of a new project that we want to work on, we’ll just get a sticky note and we’ll write down the project and then we’ll put it under the master project category.

For example, design. Matt is our graphic designer. So these three projects are three projects that Matt is working on. So if I want to know or if Ed wants to know what Matt is working on then he can just come here and look at the design column and see, “OK. Matt has got three things going on.” Or what we’re doing with the website? OK. Pete has got six things going on. He’s working on these six projects. So we can just kind of know what’s going on. We all kind of understand like where we are with things.

Once something gets accomplished, it gets moved down to the accomplished section. Now, these you can – I just made up this category. I just use my little maker and label this. You can label it whatever you want. Obviously, label your categories with whatever you want. But once something gets accomplished like for instance this, if you haven’t noticed, we have a new YouTube background. Thanks to Matt, our awesome graphic designer. He did an amazing job. So once this is done then it comes down here and it goes into the accomplished section.

Tracking Completed Projects

You’re probably wondering, “Well, why do we have an accomplished section like why don’t we just throw these sticky notes like a normal person would?” Well, when I look at this board like I come up here and I look at all these sticky notes, I don’t know about you but I’ just like, “Oh my gosh! There is so much to do. We have so many projects going on. How are we ever going to get these things done?”

When that happens, when I have those thoughts, I just look down here and I look at everything that we’ve accomplished and I’m like, “OK. I know that everything is going to get done. Look how far we’ve come. Look at all the things that I’ve gotten done in the past few months like I have no doubt in my mind that all these things will get accomplished in time.” Yeah, I do that just by looking at everything that we’ve accomplished. And then I’m reminded that, “OK. In a few months, all these things will have moved down to the accomplished section.” So yeah, so that’s why I have an accomplished category at the bottom.

What else was I going to say here? Oh, we’ve kind of called this our Tetris board. Like if you stand back, it kind of looks like a Tetris board like all these things are blocks and like down there is like the blocks where they fall into. I don’t know if that makes sense. But that’s what Ed and I always think this board looks like.

So I love these project boards. It’s just a place to write everything down like write down all the projects that we have going on or that we want to tackle in the future. Like maybe I’m not going to tackle like this project next week. Maybe I’ll be ready to tackle it in three months down the road. But now that I know it’s in the safe place on these boards where it’s not going to get lost, the idea is not going to be forgotten about, I know that it will get done when the time is right.

And so, this by far is not my to-do list. My to-do list is separate from this. I have a different process that I use. This is just where I manage all the projects that we have going on in the business.

So one thing I do here is I color-code all of the master project categories. So for example, the YouTube category. These are all YouTube projects or YouTube videos that I will get done. These are all ideas that you guys have given me or ideas that I came up with of videos that I’m going to do.

But anyways, I used orange for YouTube so when I come to the project planner, I know that I’m responsible for all the orange post-it notes while Ed, Ed is our tech support guy, he’s responsible for all the blue post-it notes and so forth. So we color-code them so it’s easy to distinguish who is responsible for what.

So now that you guys have seen my project planning boards, now that you guys know what I do with all the post-it notes if you guys watched my post-it note video that I did a few weeks ago. A lot of people were like, “Why do you have so many post-it notes? No one in the world needs that many post-it notes.” But yeah, this is just one area where I use post-it notes. I use post-it notes like everywhere in the house. This is just one big area where I use them all the time.

So if you want to do the same thing inside of your house or your office but you don’t have the wall space to do it, you can totally do the same thing and do like a digital version in Excel or whatever like spreadsheet software that you use.

I am such a creative visual person so I like to have something like physical to be able to touch and see and like always have it in front of me because I’m like out of sight, out of mind. Once it’s gone, once like the file is closed then I tend to forget about it. So having something that I can see every single day and like peel off when things are done or put it up is just very helpful for my organizing personality.

OK. So that’s our project planning board in the Alejandra.TV office. I hope this video was helpful. If you want more information on where to get these cool whiteboards that I showed you guys with the post-it notes, I will put a link to the website at the bottom of this video in the description. I’m sorry, the last video I did, I don’t think the link showed up. So I will make sure that the link works this time. And if you do something similar in your home or your office related to like managing projects then leave a comment below or create a video response and let see exactly what you do.

And that’s everything I have for you guys. I will see you soon. Bye!