Siliceous and Delicious

After a couple of days of ludicrous procrastination, setting up my DropBox synchronization system, booking flights to go home for Christmas, and researching a potential move (among hundreds of other diversions), I spent some time today experimenting with a trial version of OmniPlan. It’s a great program, just as easy to use, well thought-out, and powerful as all the other Omni productions I’ve come to know and love. I walked through the help menu’s quick-start tutorial and created an overview for the diatom diversity project with Charles. It worked a charm, but the resulting chart is kind of simple:

The best part is definitely being forced to visualize the entire sweep of the project, from start to finish, and being forced to realize how long the whole thing is going to take as a sum of its constituent parts. Given that the only resource being utilized is me, and I only have so much labor time to offer (one person’s time, that is), it makes for quite an uncomplicated chart, one task after another, basically. This doesn’t justify shelling out for the program, but the thing I’m much more scared of is setting myself elaborate goals and timetables using this thing, and then getting depressed (again) when things don’t happen to schedule. Is that a fear I should avoid, by not planning, or confront and tackle, by planning anyway and reaping the potential benefits (such as paring a project down to realistic size from the outset, or abandoning excessively detailed work in the interest of ‘keeping on schedule’)?

I am tempted, but afraid. How this program would have helped at this time last year, when I spent so many weeks putting together those ridiculous flowcharts in Adobe Illustrator, which did nothing for me other than subtract time from doing actual research. That’s probably what I’m most afraid of: sinking a large amount of time into planning these projects, rather than doing them… Perhaps, then, I just need to set myself a strict time limit on setting up these plans (say, two days), after which I move on to begin work, regardless of how far I’ve gotten. Obviously I’ll need to schedule some time each week to review the plans, see how I’m doing, and make changes where necessary. This might be good preparation for DSA each week.