My Run-in with the John Flaherty Approach
Alright, so I wanted to share something I fiddled with recently. It involves this name, John Flaherty. Not sure if you’ve heard of him, maybe you have. His name came up when I was trying to solve a particular problem I was having with organizing my project notes and tasks. Things were getting messy, you know how it is.
Someone mentioned this ‘Flaherty method’ or something like that, sounded simple enough, so I thought, why not give it a try? Didn’t find a neat manual or anything online, just bits and pieces here and there. Seemed like everyone had their own spin on whatever John Flaherty was actually doing.
So, here’s what I did, step-by-step:
- First, I just dumped everything I had onto paper. All the tasks, ideas, notes, everything. It was a real jumble.
- Then, I tried to group things like I thought this Flaherty guy might have. Based on the whispers I heard, it was about keeping related things super close together, almost physically.
- I started using different colored index cards. Yeah, real old school. One color for urgent stuff, another for ideas, another for contacts related to the project.
- I laid them all out on my big table. Tried arranging them by project phase, then by priority. It felt a bit weird, moving pieces of paper around instead of clicking stuff on a screen.
- Spent a good couple of hours just shuffling cards, grouping, re-grouping. Made piles, spread them out again.
Figuring It Out (Sort Of)
Honestly, it took a while to get into a rhythm. At first, it felt kinda clunky. Like, why am I doing this manually? But then, something clicked. Seeing it all laid out physically, instead of buried in digital folders, actually helped.
What I ended up with wasn’t exactly rocket science:
- A stack of ‘urgent’ cards I could tackle immediately.
- Project-specific clusters, so I could see everything related to one thing in one glance.
- An ‘ideas’ pile that I could dip into when I had free time.
I don’t know if this is what John Flaherty actually intended or preached. Maybe he had some complex system, maybe it was super simple. Who knows? But the process of just trying something, getting hands-on with the mess, that was the useful part for me.
It wasn’t about finding the perfect ‘John Flaherty’ system. It was about taking the core idea – simplifying and visualizing – and making it work for me. Sometimes you just gotta try stuff, you know? Get your hands dirty. That’s how you figure things out, I guess. It’s still working for me, more or less. Keeps the chaos down a bit.
