October 23, 2020 – Planning for the end and success

If you are like me, then you then you tend to prioritize the things that you want to do over the things that you don’t want to do. Or maybe said a better way, I deprioritize the things that I don’t really want to do and find lots of reasons to not do them. This has lead to projects literally sitting around in the shop for years.

Sometimes, when these projects are personal you want to get away from rigidity, accountability and structure. It is OK not to proceed with a plan because that is part of the escapism or hobby aspect. Other times, even when the project is personal the shop space is used for business purposes and having partial built projects is going to be in the way.

Today, I am going to talk about building a project plan to get things accomplished in your life. These are the techniques that are working for me.

• Visualize the End State

This probably seems self explanatory, however you need to know what the end state looks like. What is this job going to create, look like, function or how is this going to benefit me? It helps to have an end in mind when starting a project. Without a definable benefit, I would question that there is value to this project.

For wood working projects, I like to sketch out what I think the end state is going to look like. This helps me select the right lumber I am going to need and keep track of the sequencing as I work through the sub steps.

• Be Realistic About Your Tools, Space, Skills and Available Time

For me, the biggest gotcha here was not looking at the overall time commitment and just starting on something without regard to how long a project was going to take or even whether this was a priority. I would suggest, look at your schedule and determine what available blocks of time do you have consistently. A 1000 hour project is a lot of nights and weekends.

The reason this step is important and in this order is that later, when you are determining your work segments, you are planning to make success within the time that is available. Let me try to be a little more clear. If you only have one hour a day available, your tasks need to broken down to the point that you can succeed within an hour every day.

• Create Work Segments That Fit Your Available Time

If you only have one hour a day to work on a project, then your planning needs to be to that level. Since I am probably largely going to work on this project as part of working time, I won’t have that short of constraint. I will use it as an example.

1. 4hrs – Rough Mill lumber 4x 6″x72″

or

1. 1hr – Find the rough boards in the lumber pile that will yield 6″x72″
2. 1hr – Rough cut four boards 6″x72″
3. 1hr – Joint the four rough cut boards
4. 1hr – Plane the four rough cut boards

• Create Your Own Deadlines Using Your Work Segments

You can add up all the job parts and put them on a calendar. That will essentially give you a project time line for completion. Just remember that life is here, I don’t live on an island. I don’t have the luxury of every weeknight and all weekend all the time. I suspect that most people don’t either, so don’t build that in to your plan.

Do also build some extra time into each task if possible to correct mistakes. Unless you are an expert (in which case you probably don’t need this help) you are going to have some things to correct. This is time that can be used to jump ahead in the plan if everything goes well.

I know that once I get things planned, I now want to meet or exceed my own deadlines. That is OK. The point of this whole exercise is to get things done and feel good about it.

• Socialize Your Plan for Personal Accountability

It is pretty easy to do all the previous steps and still not get things done. You have to be on edge a little bit about whether you are going to succeed to keep you engaged. A spouse pushing is a pretty big motivator, but a social media post or a friend could also work.

• Keep Track of Your Progress for Future Use

Maybe you just guessed at how long something would take and you were badly wrong. You would want to account for that next time. There is also a piece where experience and familiarity can speed things up so it is helpful to keep track of progress for better future estimating.

There you go, you have just project managed your first project. That is all there is to it. I have used this technique to get un-stuck on projects very successfully. It is also a similar mindset to building estimates for my business.