In this eighth part of a nine-part series, we’re going to focus on Projects. What are projects? How do we complete or ‘do’ projects? How do we plan and manage them?
Projects are anything you want to get done that takes more than one step to complete. Project planning, then, is basically defining an outcome and breaking down the big picture into small, actionable steps or tasks. Project management is doing or delegating the tasks and action steps.
Think of it this way. You can’t ‘do’ a project. You can only do tasks. The key, then, is doing the right tasks at the right time to arrive at the defined project outcome.
The key to projects, then, is planning and managing them. Once a project is planned—you have a list of actionable steps, who is responsible for doing them, and what ‘done’ looks like—then you can return to parts five through seven of this series for managing the tasks and action steps.
Project Planning
My project planning method is inspired by David Allen. He ‘stole it’ from neuroscience. That is, how neuroscience has determined our brains naturally plan. Allen (and therefore I) call it the “natural planning model.” Over the years, I have refined the concepts presented in Allen’s book.
Most of your projects don’t need front-end planning; rather, you just come up with the next action in your head. Some of these are routine. Cleaning the house is a project—there are several steps/actions/tasks between here and completion—but you probably don’t sit down in front of a whiteboard and brainstorm before you get to work.
Checklists
Here’s as fitting a place as any to mention checklists. If you have projects that repeat, then checklists remove the drudgery of project planning. Save the project planning from the first (or next) time as a template for each repetition.
Until it became a habit, my weekly review, process, and planning routine was done using a checklist. Work travel planning was a checklist, so too was bi-weekly pay administration. Today, cleaning the house and hosting dinner parties start with a checklist.
BIG, New Projects
Now what about those ‘big, new, shiny projects’ for which you have no precedent? There are five steps to successful project planning:
- Define purpose and principles—the ‘why’
- Visualize outcomes—goals
- Brainstorm ideas—strategy and tactics
- Organize your thoughts
- Identify next actions and assign responsibility and accountability
This process should seem familiar if you read parts I-IV of this series, which details Personal Leadership.
Define Purpose & Principles
Most people want to jump right into an outline of what we need to do. This is the biggest mistake in project planning.
Ignorati quem portum petat, nullus suus ventus est.
(If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him.)
Seneca the Younger, Epistolae LXXI, 3
Project planning should start with ‘why.’ I’ll let Simon Sinek explain.
Along with defining the project’s purpose, we should define our principles. This is especially important in group projects. For personal projects, refer to your own principles (see parts III and IV). But when working in a partnership or group, it’s best to clear the air up front: what are the rules of engagement? How do we act so that we don’t piss each other off and thereby conduct this train successfully into the station?
Visualize Outcomes
This starts with a simple question: “What does successful look like?” Write out the answers to this question. These answers may be very castle-in-the-sky, fantastical, high-minded, and need to be brought back down to earth. The best way to do that is with the research-based “WOOP model.” WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle(s), and Plan(s).
You’re probably familiar with the idea of SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This concept was first introduced in a George Doran essay in the November 1981 issue of Management Review. Though the acronym is commonly used, research suggests that the framework’s effectiveness varies depending on the context to which it is applied. Criticism focuses on a lack of scientific foundation and empirical support.
Psychologist Gabrielle Oettingen’s WOOP model, on the other hand, is research-based with a scientific foundation in the psychological principle of mental contrasting—mentally focusing on the contrast between the positive aspects of your goals and the negative aspects of your obstacles or current situation.
WOOP adds “implementation intentions”—a self-regulatory strategy in the form of if-then planning introduced by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer in 1999. Studies by Gollwitzer show that the use of the if-then algorithm (“if this happens, then I will…”) can result in a higher probability of successful goal attainment.
Oettingen plus Gollwitzer equals “Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue and wouldn’t sell very many books. Therefore, in Oettingen’s book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, the catchier acronym WOOP was introduced.
Long story short, it’s more like how your brain really works and therefore more useful to the “natural planning model.” You can still draft SMART goals, and those can be helpful. WOOP, by recognizing obstacles and then making a response plan (implementation intentions), moves our thinking from dreaming about a better future to making plans and identifying next actions.
Brainstorming Ideas
There are lots of ways you can brainstorm ideas—brainstorming, fish-boning (whale-boning?), mind mapping—and one surefire way to screw it up. The mistake here is judging the quality of ideas and thereby getting stuck in a debate over value. You want to go for quantity over quality at this stage. You can save the hunt for diamonds in the rough for the next stage. The little brother to this mistake is getting linear. Save that too for the “Organizing Your Thoughts” stage.
Depending on the size of the project, I like a blank sheet of paper (no lines is better) or a whiteboard and 2×2 sticky notes. The 2×2 size limits the idea to a short statement, forcing you to be concise. The sticky notes allow you to move them around, group them, and organize them in the next stage. The whiteboard allows you to draw connections, add notes, and get creative with color. I like using a chalkboard for the same reasons. Easel pads work just as well, only with less space.
Pro tip: Whiteboards are expensive—$200 to $350 for a 4’x6’ board. Wall paneling, however, which is available in laminated glossy white and functions like a whiteboard, is affordable—less than $20 for an 8’x4’ panel.
I use a single piece of paper for smaller projects where I already have a sense of action steps—usually from a checklist or having done a similar project before. I do my Why-How-What at the top. WOOP it, and then brainstorm ideas. I’ll get linear, organizing my thoughts (sometimes into an outline), and then listing identified action steps.
Organizing Your Thoughts and Identifying Next Actions
Here is where you can start outlining. By now, you will have a sense of what needs to get done, a chronology, who is responsible for what, and whether or not certain ideas of sub-projects need to be fleshed out (return to stage one and repeat).
Next actions should also start floating to the top of your thinking at this point. You can either list them, group them by context or responsible party, or start putting them on a timeline (or all three). Either way, like all actions or tasks, you need to plug them into your trusted system so they can get done, delegated, or deferred. As discussed in Part VI, processed into your daily workflow.
What About Project Management?
Well, all those thoughts, actions, and tasks developed during planning get plugged into your trusted system so they get done, delegated, or deferred into your daily workflow. See Part VI of this series for all the details of that.
To summarize, the five stages of the “natural planning model” merely articulate how the brain naturally plans to get anything done. We apply the natural planning model to ‘projects’ which we define as anything you want to do or get done, that’s not done yet, and requires more than one action step or task to complete.
Up next in Part IX—the final (thank goodness) installment of the series—I’ll talk about tools. I’ll give my two cents on digital versus analog tools. I’ll also detail how I do reference filing and how I set up project folders. Lastly (because it really is the least important thing), I’ll drop a list of the contents of my ‘toolbox’.
