Then process those notes. Decide whether what you wrote down is something you really want to move on or not. If not, throw the note away, or put it on a "Someday/Maybe" list or in a folder called "Dreams and Goals I Might Get Around to at Some Point." Perhaps you want to continue accumulating more of this kind of future thinking and would like to do the exercise with more formality — for example, by drafting a new business plan with your partners, designing and writing out your idea of a dream life with your spouse, creating a more specific career map for the next three years for yourself, or just getting a personal coach who can lead you through those discussions and thought processes. If so, put that outcome on your "Projects" list, and decide the next action. Then do it, hand it off to get done, or put the action reminder on the appropriate list.
With that done, you may want to turn your focus to develop-mental thinking about specific projects that have been identified but not fleshed out as fully as you'd like. You'll want to ensure that you're set up for that kind of "vertical" processing.
10. Getting Projects Under Control
CHAPTERS 4 THROUGH 9 have given you all the tricks and methods you need to clear your head and make intuitive choices about what to do when. That's the horizontal level — what needs your attention and action across the horizontal landscape of your life. The last piece of the puzzle is the vertical level — the digging deep and pie-in-the-sky thinking that can leverage your creative brainpower. That gets us back to refining and energizing our project planning.
After years of working with thousands of professionals down in the trenches, I can safely say that virtually all of us could be doing more planning, more informally and more often, about our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative out-put with minimal effort.
I've discovered that the biggest improvement opportunity in planning does not consist of techniques for the highly elaborate and complex kinds of project organizing that professional project managers sometimes use (like GANTT charts). Most of the people who need those already have them, or at least have access to the training and software required to learn about them. The real need is to capture and utilize more of the creative, proactive thinking we do — or could do.
The major reason for the lack of this kind of effective value-added thinking is the dearth of systems for managing the potentially infinite amount of detail that could show up as a result. This is why my approach tends to be bottom-up. If you feel out of control with your current actionable commitments, you'll resist focused planning. An unconscious pushback occurs. As you begin to apply these methods, however, you may find that they free up enormous creative and constructive thinking. If you have systems and habits ready to leverage your ideas, your productivity can expand exponentially. In chapter 3, I covered in some detail the five phases of project planning that take something from the idea stage into physical reality.
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
— Rosabeth Moss
What follows is a compilation of practical tips and techniques to facilitate the natural, informal planning processes I recommend. Although these suggestions are all based on common sense, they're not followed nearly as frequently as they could be. Put them to use whenever and as often as you can, instead of saving up your thinking for big formal meetings.
You need to set up systems and tricks that get you to think about your projects and situations more frequently, more easily, and in more depth.
Most of the outcomes you have identified for your "Projects" list will not need any kind of front-end planning, other than the sort you do in your head, quickly and naturally, to come up with a next action on them. The only planning needed for "Get car inspected," for example, would be to decide to check the phone book for the nearest inspection location and call and set up a time. There are two types of projects, however, that deserve at least some sort of planning activity: (1) those that still have your attention even after you've determined their next actions, and (2) those about which potentially useful ideas and supportive detail just show up.
The first type — the projects that you know have other things about them that must be decided on and organized — will need a more detailed approach than just identifying a next action. For these you'll need a more specific application of one or more of the other four phases of the natural planning modeclass="underline" purpose and principles, vision/outcome, brainstorming, and/or organizing.
The second type — the projects for which ideas just show up, ad hoc, on a beach or in a car or in a meeting — need to have an appropriate place into which these associated ideas can be captured. Then they can reside there for later use as needed.
Projects That Need Next Actions About Planning
There are probably a few projects you can think of right now, off the top of your head, that you know you want to get more objectified, fleshed out, and under control. Perhaps you have an important meeting coming up and you know you have to prepare an agenda and materials for it. Or you've just inherited the job of coordinating the annual associates' conference, and you've got to get it organized as soon as possible so you can start delegating significant pieces. Or you've got to clarify a job description for a new position on your team to give to Human Resources. If you haven't done it already, get a next action now that will start the planning process for each of these, and put it on the appropriate action list. Then proceed with further planning steps.
Typical Planning Steps
The most common types of planning-oriented actions will be your own brainstorming and organizing, setting up meetings, and gathering information.
Brainstorming Some of the projects that have your attention right now will require you to do your own free-form thinking; this is especially true of those for which you were not clear about what the next action would be when you made that decision. These should all have a next action, such as "Draft ideas re X."
You need to decide where and how you want to do that action, in order to know which action list to put it on. Do you do this kind of thinking best on a computer, or by hand-writing your thoughts on paper? I may choose either medium, depending on what my intuition tells me. For me this next action would go either on my "At Computer" list or on "Anywhere" (because I can draw mind-maps wherever I am, as long as I have pen and paper).
Organizing You may have some projects for which you have already collected notes and miscellaneous support materials, and you just need to sort through them and get them into a more structured form. In this case, your next action would likely be "Organize Project X notes." If you have to be in your office to do that (because that's where the files are, and you don't want to carry them around), that action should go on your "At Office" action list. If you're carrying the project notes around with you in a folder, or in a portable organizer or on a laptop, then the "Organize. . " action would go on an "Anywhere" or "Misc." action list if you're going to do it by hand, or on "At Computer" if you're going to use a word processor, outliner, or project-planning software.