Do You Have Too Many Projects?

According to David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (GTD), an average person typically has between ten and a hundred current projects. If this is the case, is it any wonder so many people are stressed out and overwhelmed?

David defines a project as: “anything we want to do that requires more than one action step”. This will likely cause us to treat almost everything we do as a project. For example, booking your car in for a service will, by this definition, be a project;

You decide when to take your car in, call the service centre, and finally take your car in on the assigned day. That’s three steps.

When we break things down so small, we start to overcomplicate things. For example, when I booked my car for its last service, all I needed to do was call the service centre, with my calendar open, and book it on an appropriate day. It was a single step that took less than five minutes.

Over the years, I’ve worked in several industries. Beginning with hotel management, then car sales, law, and teaching. I cannot think of any time I considered doing my work as a project in all these jobs. In hotel management, preparing meeting rooms or organising a wedding was never considered a project. It was our job. The banqueting manager’s job was to ensure there were enough staff to cover the wedding reception and the bar for the following weekend’s wedding. When the banqueting manager came into work on Monday, she would look at the diary of events for that week and spend the rest of the day calling staff to see if they could work that weekend.

The manager never considered each wedding as a project. It was her job to ensure there were sufficient staff, and it was the task she did every Monday.

Similarly, when I worked in a law office, no lawyer considered a case as a project — no matter how big the case was. Our law firm had a process for dealing with cases. Each day, we followed the process. It was our job.

I saw this when I was teaching English in Korea. I worked with a well-known marketing company, and the designers and copywriters never considered each new campaign a project. When they came to work, they just got on with the work they were working on. Once that was finished, they handed it over to the next person and began work on the next piece.

The problem you will likely face when you treat everything as a project is that each new piece of work will cause you to treat it as something unique instead of following a process. Treating every new piece of work as unique will slow you down because each step will be separate from a process.

Each wedding held in the hotel was different, but the process was not. The banqueting manager needed the right number of staff, the bar manager was required to order the wine and champagne, and the chef ordered the food. None of these people considered these tasks as being part of a project. It was their job. They just followed a process each week.

When I think about my work today, writing these blog posts, creating videos for my YouTube channel and producing my podcast, I don’t treat each piece of content as a project. Instead, I follow a process. It’s what I do each week.

Looking back over the last five years, I have moved house twice and bought a car. I would consider those as projects. I don’t move house or buy a car every week; therefore, I don’t have a process for doing it.

For each of these “projects”, I made a list of what I thought we would need to do and then created a list of tasks to follow to achieve my desired outcome. That’s three projects in five years.

Instead of treating everything new at work as a project, look at the process for doing your job. When you follow a process, you become quicker at doing your work. When you become quicker, you have more time for other things.

The other advantage of not treating everything as a project is you have a lot less to “review” each week. If doing your work is part of a process, all you need to do is look at where you will be doing your work each week. For example, I have a process for writing my client feedback notes. I do a coaching call, during which I take notes. Those notes are added to a list of feedback to write, and I sit down and write the feedback at a given time in the day. If I write three feedbacks daily, I will always be on top of writing the feedback.

Likewise, writing and producing my content each week is a process. I have a two-hour block for writing on my calendar on Monday and Tuesday morning. This gives me sufficient time each week to write these blog posts, newsletters, and podcast scripts. None of these pieces of content are projects. They are just a part of a process I follow each week.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, and resist doing a weekly review because you fear the amount of “projects” you have to review, try developing processes for doing your work. What do you do each day that moves your work forward? That’s a process. Focus on that process and see what happens over a week.

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