Getting into trouble is one thing — getting into trouble without learning why you’ve gotten into trouble in the first place is quite another. One of the key components of any Flow experience is receiving feedback, allowing you to optimize your performance by knowing that you are doing well or badly. This is fine for immediate tasks — like, say, writing a song or creating a CSS stylesheet — but what about rare and irregular activities like project management.
The feedback from undertaking project management is less clear, not least because you are coordinating actions more than actually taking action. And, unless you have been schooled in project management, it doesn’t occur to you that your system could be making everything run sluggishly. As a student, the closest I came to getting project management skills was, upon walking into my tutor’s office to ask her to have a look at a draft of my essay, being told that it had to in at 4pm that afternoon. Lesson 1. Make a note of the due date.
Bearing this in mind, it is unsurprising that having discovered that there was such a thing as project management, I dived in head first. At present my mind is awash with Gantt charts, SMART goals, and weekly reviews. It’s a wonder I get anything done! It’s also true that I’m still finding my way, but I am determined to get there (there being a place of seamless efficiency). For example, I recently added a section at the bottom of each project reference files called “Lessons Learned“ — simply remembering what went wrong and thinking how I can stop things going wrong in the future — has been a revelation.
Take my magazine, TMCQ, clearly a project that could have worked better. When I published the pilot issue (issue zero) I had virtually no responsibilities at all — I could concentrate all of my resources and just get things done one by one. The idea of actually planning never occurred to me because I hadn’t done it before and didn’t really know the process involved. When I came to make Issue One, I was in the middle of a number of freelance projects, I had changed my conception of what it was going to be like and I was still doing it all on my own.
None of these things should necessarily have brought the project to its knees — though they didn’t help — the decisive factor was, I think, not having any clear goals or milestones.
Work is fractal — you can spend as much time writing a sentence as you can writing a chapter. Without milestones, there is a tendency to magnify the smallest issue until it overwhelms you. With the magazine, I really should have reminded myself not to spend days playing around typography.
Closely aligned to this is the destructive habit of setting oneself unrealistic targets. Every weekend I tell myself that I am going to complete all of my freelance jobs and every weekend I am disappointed — even my accomplishments look insignificant in comparison. If the magazine had been given generous but strict Gantt chart it would have helped enormously.
Last, I really ought to have included regular reviews of progress and direction. Sometimes at work it seems that we have meetings to arrange meetings, but they do provide assessment opportunities and emphasizes that people do have responsibility to others.
None of these lessons really had much impact until I stopped to think about them. All too often, we deny and repress experience and persist in making the same mistakes.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
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