Having too much to do and not enough time in the day are very real restrictions museum staff deal with on a day-to-day basis. While I don’t advocate for working beyond your capacity, I do recommend making the most of your workday to complete important collections management tasks. In other words, having strategies at your disposal for effective collections management work helps you use the time you do have more effectively.
In the last few weeks, we’ve covered How to Create Time for Effective Collections Management Work, Ways to Protect Your Time for Collections Management Work, and How to Batch Museum Collections Management Work. Together, these posts offer guidance on how to carve out and protect time, how to batch collections management work, and how to leverage your museum Collections Management System (CMS) for this work.
Today, we’ll conclude the series with advice for how to prepare for the focused work you’ve planned for.
What You Should Have in Place Already
If you’ve followed along in this series, you’ll have already performed the following:
- Created time in your weekly schedule
- Protected blocks of focus time
- Gathered tasks that can be batched together
- Learned how CMS functionality can be leveraged
If you have these items in place, you are ready for the last step: preparation.
How to Prepare for Focused Collections Management Work
When preparing for a block of focused collections management work, we can increase our effectiveness with a little bit of preparation. Before I offer specifics, I want to offer a broader piece of advice: Set an intention.
Set an Intention to Improve Your Focus
Setting an intention for your time will help you make faster and smarter decisions on the tasks you assemble, how they may synergize for batching, and what a successful end of your time will look like.
Intentions are meant to be broad—like a mission. For example: For my next block of focused time, my intention is to cleanup data in the CMS that will improve collections search results. There are a number of areas I could focus on, but the broader intention has been set.
Setting an intention can also come in handy if you feel overwhelmed by the length of your to-do list. Even a broad intention helps eliminate a chunk of options and hopefully decrease the stress of making a decision.
Spend 15 Minutes on These Preparation Tasks
You are on the home stretch now. The following steps are small, but important. These preparation tasks will make it easier for you to deep dive into your focus time for collections management work without delays. Each step is intended to gather the information and decisions you need to get right into the work at-hand. The goal is to spend no more than 15 minutes on these preparation tasks.
These steps ensure that when your focus block begins, you can get to work immediately without the preparation working eating into your protected time.
Preparation tasks include:
- Creating a clearly defined scope of work
- Intentionally selecting and listing tasks or activities
- Identifying the end goal or deliverable
- Designating relevant workflows to use
- Gathering instructions and any needed reference material
With 15 minutes of preparation, you remove friction, strengthen your focus, and set yourself up for a productive session of collections management work. And the good news is, the more you repeat the preparation process, the easier and faster it will become.
Pro Tip: For activities with downtime, have another, lighter, task available to help maximize your time.
For example: Importing bulk data changes into a CMS can often take several minutes. Seize the opportunity to do a light-intensity activity like responding to short emails or updating your project management board. This helps maintain momentum without pulling you into deep work that would be disrupted by returning to your original task.
Develop Basic-Yet-Versatile Strategies
Strategies for effective collections management work aren’t flashy, nor are they complicated. That’s the point. As collection stewards with so much on our plates already, we need to have simple, repeatable approaches that can be adapted to any collection type or museum size. The skills you develop in effective collections management will serve you well in any museum setting and make the work more sustainable over time.
0 Comments