On the dismay (and hopeful joy) of a “snag log”

One reason for my prolonged absence from posting is that I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time overhauling some of my processes at work. Mainly, this has involved rethinking several steps of my production process for a proposal package through InDesign.

But rather than get into the nitty-gritty of InDesign updates, I wanted to credit the reason for this progress: my “snag log.”

I encountered the idea several weeks ago in a piece by Brie Wolfson, “Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact,” a wonderful overview of the documents (and the strategies) behind them that she uses in her personal workflow.

One of those documents is her “Snag Log.” As she explains it:

A snag log…covers the things that bogged me down instead of the things that lifted me up. Or, as a colleague once phrased it, “the things that give me the ickies.” You know what these things are — the things that made your tummy turn or maybe made you want to throw your laptop out the window or scream into a pillow. (emphasis mine)

I loved this idea—tracking those “things that give me the ickies” (even if I would never put it that way)—so I immediately started a list.

One thing I noticed right away was the number of items involving InDesign processes. It was the mundane, repetitive stuff that I noticed:

• Resizing headshots to fit image frames on resumes
• Digging up signature blocks for cover letters
• Playing with the formatting of divider pages
• Inputting pursuit name on the footer of every parent page

Unfortunately, unlike other “snags” I’ve noted, the above list is all stuff that I have to keep doing. I can’t assemble a proposal submission without doing these items.

But what if there were a way I could make doing them…less painful?

It was this question that sent me on a weeks-long quest to eliminate some of these snags, cleaning up the overall process so that I could focus more on the stuff that’s really important—the overall strategy and team differentiators, the specificity of resumes, the wording in the cover letter.