Growing up, I would hear my step-father say, “one person’s ceiling is another person’s floor”. He isn’t a project management guru or anything like that, and like many of the things he said, I did not have a clue what he was talking about at the time. Turns out, he was on to something big.
One of the first questions to think about when you’re trying to get organized is what to do with a bunch of tasks that are all related? Easy, if you have a bunch of tasks, and they are all related, it’s called a project. But, there’s a catch. Often, what is a project to you is considered to be a task by those further up the chain. We even heard McCain and Obama recently go back and forth on what the difference is between strategy and tactics. I say “who cares?”
It turns out that lots of people care. That’s why there are tons of books, philosophies and methodologies that talk about esoteric definitions of projects, tasks, action items, work breakdown structures, work packets, and things like that. You should read all of them, because while you’re busy reading about doing things, the rest of us will be busy actually doing them. For personal project management, the only definition you really need is this: “projects are things you want to do and tasks are the actual physical actions you need to take in order get the things you want to do done.”
A side note to project managers. You folks have a very different job, and I have an enormous amount of respect for what you do. In this blog I’m talking to and about individuals managing their own stuff. You wrangle teams of people trying to accomplish things together, and deal with all kinds of interpersonal, communications and reporting issues. I come from the individual perspective. I’m not trying to claim project management expertise, disparage it, or reinvent it. I hope you can still find this blog useful.
For example, if you own a car, you should change your oil every once in a while. You put “Change Oil” on your to do list–it’s the thing you want to do–but it somehow never seems to get done. What if you took “Change Oil” and thought about it as a series of physical actions–the tasks you need to do to get the oil change project done.
Your oil change project might look like this:
Change Oil Project with One Task
If you do it yourself, it might look like this:
Change Oil Project with Three Tasks
If you’re doing it yourself for the first time, it might look like this:
Change Oil Project with Five Tasks
Get the idea? The project “change oil” is different for everyone, but the key to actually getting the project done is breaking it down into a series of the actual physical actions you need to take. This is a little academic, but it’s important. If you break projects down into a series of actionable steps, you’re more likely to be able to tackle the project a little at a time. Look at the oil change project broken down into 5 steps. if you have 10 minutes, you can do one of these steps, and make a little progress. If you don’t break it down, you’ll have to wait until you have several hours in your schedule to do it all. This is a recipe for procrastination.
But you know all that, why bother with all this? When you’re choosing a system to manage your stuff, it’s critical to make sure you can track both projects and tasks, and that the system has a good way of breaking projects down into tasks. Most To Do List managers out there fail in this regard, and that makes them pretty useless in my book. If you want to stand a chance with even mildly complicated projects, you need to find a system that does this well…really well.
As always, let me know what works for you.
-Adam