A few weeks ago my manager said “I love your inclination to take on a new projects and your willingness to move your schedule around”. I thought that was great… till she continued on to say “what we need to figure out is how I help you get it all done in time”… ending with “once I get something from you I do know it will be good work”.
Yes! You probably noticed that I had just been sandwiched. While I would have have preferred a more direct feedback method, I do agree with her remarks. I need to get better at managing my projects so I can more consistently deliver on time. To be completely transparent, this is not the first, second or 100th time I have heard that. It’s time to do something about it…which based on past efforts isn’t going to be easy.
Now that I’ve identified the issue at hand, I need to go gather data, analyze it and come up with a solution (sound familiar?). I decided to start by speaking with people I had worked with in the past to get more feedback. I’m sorry to say they all said the same un-helpful thing “Omry, that’s just who you are…”, only strengthening my thoughts on how hard making this change is going to be. I continued by comparing my project management style to others doing similar work. I noticed the expected… they all have project lists, they all have clear due dates/schedules set for each project and they all get their projects in on time. I may not be great at it but I do have lists and schedules, I just apparently have trouble sticking to them. I needed to search more and decided to turn to my trusted searching tool “Google”. I searched and searched through what seemed to be hundreds of pages… till I came to a page called “50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily”. 50 was a bit much, especially for someone who already can’t find time for everything, but a few tricks caught my attention:
Ubiquitous Capture: Everything needs to be documented! Whether I have an idea for a project or think of something that needs to get done, it needs to be written down. At first this sounded like a lot of work, but because I can do this on my phone and don’t have to care about grammar, it only takes a few seconds and I can jot things down anywhere I go.
80/20 by 50-30-20: This is a combination of two tricks. The first is the realization that 80% of results come from 20% of the work and therefore I should spend my time accordingly. The second is that in my project prioritization I should take my own life/career goals in mind. Spend 50% of time on tasks that will have the largest impact on my career, 30% of time on the tasks that advance my middle term career and 20% on everything else.
Do your worst: I shouldn’t expect perfection in every task on the first run. I can always go back to improving it later. Put pen to paper and start a project to see where it goes. The end result will only reveal itself after I have started the process. In simpler words, Stop Procrastinating.
More tricks for getting things done: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/50-tricks-to-get-things-done-faster-better-and-more-easily.html