Patterns of prioritisation and planning workload
My client and her manager often had conflict concerning the way she prioritised her workload. Working to deadlines was difficult for her and she found that she often forgot important tasks. Her role involved collating documents and preparing evidence for courts, and so it was important to be neat and accurate, creating and maintaining cataloguing and payment systems. Clean Language was used to elicit metaphors for how she currently managed her workload and organised her paperwork.
Tasks that had to be done would suddenly "pop" up in her mind and then she knew they needed doing. However, she would then find that they had disappeared by the time she sat down or went to the file. She wasn't able to "pin them down", and would often think of other things that needed doing that were connected so that she ended up panicking about how much she had to do.
It was like the bubbles rising up inside her were so fast that she had to let them off. As her colleagues asked her where certain pieces of work were, or when she would have something finished, the bubbles would rise faster and faster and then she would ‘pop’. This resulted in conflicts with her colleagues who thought she was aggressive and snappy.
To enable her to keep 'an eye on' her workload and to remember things that 'popped up', she organised a magnetic board next to her desk that she could ‘pop’ post-its on to whenever things occurred to her. She was also able to view her entire workload at once.
This had a secondary benefit, in that her manager could also see which things were in her awareness so that she could remind her if necessary and relax when she saw things were going to be done.
Creating a workspace that fits how you work
My client had difficulties organising her work space. She was forever losing things and felt 'overloaded' with information. Clean language was used to elicit her pattern of organisation.
Nancy: What is it like now?
Client: If seven maids had seven brooms and swept for seven years, do you suppose in all that time they'd ever sweep it clear?
Nancy: What would you like it to be like?
Client: Order, organisation, a place for everything and everything in its place, easy system to locate and remember.
The first response demonstrates the sense of futility experienced and the effort expended by the client as she tried to tidy and organise her workload and space.
She had a pattern of losing things, not being able to access resources as and when she needed them and putting things away in strange places. She had a friend who had created a filing system for her and this was what was causing the problem. Her friend had organised her office space in a way that made sense to her friend, in a linear alphabetic order. My client, however, had a spatial thinking style and could not make sense of her office at all.
Using clean questions and metaphor to draw her attention to the different areas and aspects of her preferred model she created a model of how she would like her office to be. When she had finished, she made a 3D model of the metaphor using card and a shoe box.
Doing this enabled her to see all of her resources at the same time and used her skill of 'big picture' spatial thinking to solve her problem.
Patterns of organisation and where they come from
The client’s metaphors about how she would like her organisation skills to be all had a military theme.
“Organisation needs to have a strong, even rhythm, like marching ‘left right, left right.”
She had devised many strategies and plans for changing her working space and practice, although none of them seemed to stick. She was set the developmental task of finding three people whose organisation skills she admired.
The next week, she came back with the revelation that all of those people were 'boring' and that spending that much time planning and filing information was a symptom of being uninteresting. She explored this value using the military metaphors generated in the context of the new value.
Nancy: And when ‘left right, left right’, what happens to ‘boring’?
Client: It’s all over
Nancy: And when ‘boring’, and ‘left right left right’ are ‘all over’, what would you like to happen?
Client: I’d like to jump up and down
Nancy: And when ‘I’d like to jump up and down’, what kind of ‘I’ is that ‘I’?
Client: It’s a five year old I and she wants to play
The client realised that she was generating this information from her childhood, her father was a military man and had disapproved of her creative imagination. With this knowledge, the client realised that she had to shift her organisation pattern by creating an imaginative, unusual system. She rearranged her model to fit her working style and habits rather than economising on space. For example, she realised that the best way for her to work was to keep copies of resources in each of her files, rather than keep going in and out of one place for the same resource. She had resisted this move initially, because "that would be a waste of paper". She had realised that that statement belonged to her father and his model of what was important, not hers!