What’s The Best Way To manage Your Projects and Goals?
This week, How should you be managing your goals and projects?
Script
Episode 143
Hello and welcome to episode 142 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, it’s all about managing your projects and goals and how to make sure you are focused on the right things.
Now before we get to that, don’t forget if you are enrolled in my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course, head over to your dashboard, there’s a very nice surprise for you. Your course has just become Your Digital Life 3.0 and it’s a huge update. I’ve updated the time management part to include the Time Sector System and I have re-recorded almost all of the videos so they are better quality and more educational than ever before.
If you are not enrolled in the course, you can enrol this week in the course and save yourself 20%. It’s a fantastic course that shows you how to manage your digital life including your to-do list manager, your notes, your email. Your goals and your digital files. There’s so much content in there and for less than $60 it is also incredible value. So get yourself signed up today and start building a digital system that will finally get you better organised and more productive without al the stress and overwhelm most of us feel today.
Ok, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Brian. Brian asks: hi Carl, There’s a lot of advice out there about how to manage your projects and goals. Is there a right way to manage everything?
Hi, Brian thank you for your question. I know this can be a dilemma for a lot of people when they start out on the road to becoming better organised and more productive. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there.
The problem I find is we are dealing with people, and all people are different. That’s what makes the human race so fascinating. However, it does cause a few problems when people like me try to help other people. Because we are all different we all think differently and we all like to organise things differently.
If my wife is putting away clothes, she bundles socks very differently from the way I bundle socks. I like to fold them together in the Marie Kondo fashion. My wife prefers to bundle them up and fold them inside out… Really annoying hahaha
And that’s my point. I have a preferred way and my wife has a preferred way. We are all different.
So we have to know how we personally like to organise things. Are you a linear thinker or a visual thinker? Or are you, like me, a little bit of both?
You see if you are a linear thinker, then managing your projects and goals in an app like Asana or Trello is not going to be the most effective way for you. Likewise, if you are a visual thinker, apps like Todoist and Things 3 will not be the best way for you.
This is why following the latest trending productivity apps is never going to satisfy you. Each new app on the market will always be built on the developers own preferences and not yours. I know these developers do plenty of research asking where the ‘pain points’ in users’ current apps are, and we, as users, are very happy to tell them. But, these extra features are not going to improve your productivity—they don’t make your work any easier and they don’t help you to do more work in less time—often the reverse.
Let me give you an example of this. Snoozing emails. I know a lot of people who want this feature and use this feature, but let be perfectly honest here, it’s a useless feature. What does it do? It delays the inevitable. Someone has taken the time to write you an email and because you believe you are busy you hit the snooze feature and the email disappears. And then what? You now cannot deal with it if you get a few spare moments, and you know it is coming back. It’s just lazy. Instead, a more effective way of managing email is to just make the decision “what is it?’ And “what do I need to do with it?” Then just move it to the appropriate folder. Simple really.
Okay, so once you know what kind of thinker you are when it comes to managing projects your need to know your outcome. What exactly is it you want to accomplish?
Now with respect to goals and projects, you should adopt the same approach. That is to have absolute clarity on what you want to achieve.
Ask the question: what’s my outcome here?
Without absolute clarity on what it is you want to accomplish you will find yourself running around in circles and not really knowing when or if you have completed your project.
When that happens you won't want to review the project and when you do review it you won't really know what needs to happen next which creates a vicious circle of not knowing what to do next and not wanting to review the project because of that.
This is why if you ever learn about leadership, one of the most important skills in leadership is to be able to communicate, with absolute clarity, what you want your team to do. All great leaders know how to communicate their outcomes with absolute clarity.
So, step one whenever you begin a project or goal get really clear on what your outcome is.
Now, what do I mean about clarity? Well, let’s take losing weight. If you just say to yourself “I want to lose weight”, well that might appear clear, but how much weight do you want to lose? You see it’s very easy to lose weight. Weigh yourself just after you have eaten dinner, go out for a thirty-minute walk, go to bed and weight yourself again in the morning after you have been to the bathroom and before you eat or drink anything. I can guarantee you will have lost weight.
But I am sure that is not really what you meant when you said you wanted to lose weight. So be very clear. How much weight do you want to lose and by when?
The same principle applies to projects. I have an online workshop to do later this week. The topic of the workshop is how to manage and complete projects and goals. So what’s my outcome here? The outcome is to deliver an online workshop to around 100 people that is entertaining, educational and inspiring so the participants take what I teach them and do something with it to improve their project and goal management.
That description is at the top of the note I created when I began planning the project. Because I have that written down at the top of the note, I see it every time I work on the project. I never lose sight of my outcome.
As I develop the workshop, I keep referring to my outcome. I am asking myself does this meet my project’s outcome? I often break things down to a slide level too. Does this slide meet the project’s outcome? Could I make it clearer? Does this section inspire and educate? Will my message motivate the participants to take immediate action?
By having that clarity, working on the project is much easier. Certainly a lot easier than having a vague idea of what the workshop will be about.
So, before you start any project or goal, make sure you have absolute clarity on what your outcome is.
Once you know what your outcome is, the next step is to list out everything you need to do to achieve that outcome. Now at this stage, you want to be writing out everything and anything. This is, in a sense, a brainstorming session. What do you have to do to go from where you are today to where you want to be when the project or goal is complete? Where’s the gap and how do you close the gap?
Now, for me, this is where a lot of people go wrong. What most people do is they just transfer all those tasks to their to-do list manager. Now the problem with this approach is you end up with a lot of tasks that really don’t need doing and you end up with a long list of important and not so important tasks. It’s not a very effective way to do it.
A better way is to go through your list and decide which of all the steps you have written down in your brainstorming session would give you the biggest impact. Which of those tasks would drive the project forward?
For the workshop, that is developing the slide deck and the workbook. This means any time I spend developing my slide deck and the workbook is quality time. Time spent deciding on the slide deck theme—the colours, fonts and background—is not a priority. That’s the icing on the cake, so to speak, and can be done once the important content has been created.
The same with losing weight. What are the tasks that will move that goal towards completion fastest? “Eat less move more”. Trying to decide what exercise to do, what gym to join, what clothes to buy and how frequently to exercise will not move the goal forward. You want to lose weight? Eat less, move more. So anything that involves movement and eating less is where I would put all my effort and attention. I can always research gyms, decide on clothing and other stuff later—I could even think about it as I am going for a walk around the block. The only way to achieve my weight goal is to eat less and move more.
So, once I have decided which tasks will move the project or goal forward, only then will I add these to my to-do list manager. I don’t want the little, less impactful tasks in my to-do list because they will only distract me and often give me a false sense of progress. The little, less impactful tasks will get done as and when they need doing, but I do not want them distracting me. If they need doing fine, do them, but I only worry about then if not doing them prevents me from moving the project forward.
Now, I understand it can be difficult to decide which are the high impact tasks, but the extra effort is worth it because it is these tasks that move things forward faster and once you create momentum, projects and goals have a habit of getting accomplished without too much effort.
A final thought to add here is to stop over complicating and overthinking things. One way to prevent this is again absolutely clear what it is you want to accomplish. Let’s say you want to produce a newsletter for your organisation. Great! Where do you start? Often people start with trying to find the best newsletter platform. Why? You see when you start a newsletter you are not going to have very many subscribers at first so the platform does not matter. What matters is content. What are you going to put in the newsletter?
Once you know what you are going to put in it, start creating the content. What platform you use can come later. A quick Google search will give you the top ten newsletter platforms and when you have content you are going to make a decision much quicker. If you have no content, you will use deciding what platform to host your newsletter on as an excuse not to create content and I’ve seen so many people spend months talking about which platform and when (or if ) they finally decide another six months have passed. In six months you could have built up 500 or a 1,000 subscribers, instead, you wasted six months on a minor part and have less than ten people who once said they would be interested in your newsletter.
Another area of over-complicating things is dividing a project up into sub-projects and sub-tasks, Why? Why do you need all that complexity? For a project or goal to complete you just need to do the work. So all you need is to see what needs doing next. Most projects and goals will not get done in one day, so what do you need to do today to move it forward? Do that.
When you try to get clever and create sub-projects and sub-tasks you spend far too much time managing and organising the tasks and not enough time doing the tasks. Shuffling around your tasks does not complete projects and goals. You only complete these by doing the tasks. So do the tasks. Be clear each day what needs to happen and do it. That’s how projects and goals get accomplished.
I hope that has helped, Brian. Thank you so much for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering you can email at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.