I recently attended a project management workshop run by an Ann Arbor company (Menlo Innovations). While their company does software development, the techniques we learned are useful pretty much any time you can't do everything you need to, by yourself, in a day. The main takeaway was that by doing any particular thing, you are implicitly choosing not to do other things. Instead, you should try to make those choices explicit.
The tool he gave us for this purpose was to write every possible task on index cards along with estimated time to complete them. The idea is that now you have a physical representation of the trade-offs. You can choose card A which takes one week, or you can choose cards B and C which also add up to one week. He also talked a bit about what our brains are naturally good at:
- Making an initial plan is hard. Poking holes in a plan is easy. Therefore, you should do whatever you can to not work with a blank page.
- If you scale the size of the card to the length of the task (i.e., set your scale as one card = one day of work, so a task that takes half a day you use half a card for), our brains intuitively do the trade-offs.
- Taking away the technology leaves our brains free to just focus on the other aspects. There are definitely advantages to using technology some of the time. But most of the difficulty of project management is these trade-offs, not software giving you a better estimate of how long a particular task will take. Pretty much any estimate will be bad, but some estimates will be useful.
In implementing this approach for my thesis, I am finding that the most critical thing to be working on in the moment is obvious to me. But before I had this system I had no good way to lay out everything left for all of my projects. It would still be nice to have twice as many hours to get everything done, but I am finding a lot of peace in seeing how my current task specifically fits together with the bigger picture.
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