Week 3 – Adding System Pages

Week three of my month-long project. Check out my first week update here and my second week here! The project I am building is a digital brain for a quilt shop called The Quilted Windmill. I am creating a digital space where they can store information, procedures, and systems. My goal for this project is to:

• Help the owner to manage her business and customers
• Help current and new employees get information and maintain consistency

This month I am going to be:

• Gathering and organizing information
• Creating an easy to manage system
• Managing a large project
• Building a system that can be added to overtime
• Documenting my work 

What Have I Done This Week?

This week I worked on the other pages of my project. I created an: 

• Product Requests Page
• Block Of The Month Spreadsheet Page
• Employee Hours page

First, I built a Product Requests page. The Quilted Windmill gets new products in all the time. They get customers who want a specific product to be held for them when it comes in and specific product requests. 

I made a table with the information necessary to store these requests. The Quilted Windmill currently has these requests in a folder. This information on a digital brain would be easier to manage and use. An employee can:

• Quickly type in the information for a customer
• Lookup a keyword or name when a product comes in. This will make finding a product request easier and faster.

The next page I created is the Employee Hours page. The current system is pieces of paper that the employees write their hours down on. I created a table where the employees can easily type in their hours and the owner can mark what is paid or not. The hours can be kept or discarded after they are paid. These pages are flexible and easy to adjust to whatever the owner needs. 

The final page I build is the Block Of The Month (BOM) page. The BOM is an event where a customer signs up to receive a block of a quilt every month for a year. At the end of the year, the quilt is completed. The current system is on paper and is not easy to adjust. I created this page so that the customer information can be easily stored and maintained. This also allows for sections to be added or removed. 

What Did I Do Well?

• I focused on making the system easy to use. I did this by making the tables clear in their uses. Notion makes the columns easy to change and sort. 
• I thought of and executed the different pages. I chose systems that would operate better in a digital brain and applied them to this project. 
• I organized my thoughts for these systems and laid out my plan.

What Could Be Improved?

The time management battle continues to wage. I miscalculated my productivity. Next week, I’m going to use the Pomodoro method. The Pomodoro method is focusing for twenty-five minutes and then taking a five minute break. I am going to do this to help me stay on top of my focus time and not split it up into small sections. I am also going to do the most intimidating task first. 

What I’ll Be Doing Next Week 

Next week I’ll be focusing on:

• Putting the finishing touches on my project
• Documenting my progress
• Posting my progress to my advisors
• Updating and finishing the SOP
• Updating and finishing my landing page
• Week 4 update post!

Check out my full project here!