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Large personal projects
Herah | Nov 6 2006
The Holiday Season is a much bigger deal than it used to be. In my parents' family, when I was single, there was limited gift-shopping, a tree, houseguests, a church service of my choice. Now I have moved away, and married, and had kids, and things have changed. My kids have responsibilities at school and church -- there's Advent and St. Nicholas' Day and gifts for needy families. There are many more gifts to buy, and at least half of them have to be ready for the last day of school, or in time to ship, or before people travel. We set aside a special Saturday to trim the tree, and before that the furniture has to be rearranged and the tree assembled and the lights tested and strung and the candy canes bought. This year, it's our turn to host the big family Christmas (with some friends invited), which means cleaning the carpets, settling the dispute with the furniture store over the new dining table, finding someone who still fits into the Santa suit, getting the traditional decorations that are stored at someone else's house (not sure whose). And a big Italian fish dinner that I am not consulted on, because I'm not the Italian, but I'd dang sure better have the right dishes available. In other words, lots of tasks, lots of subprojects, lots of intermediate deadlines; chains of dependent tasks that have to be finished before different scheduled events; tasks that belong to more than one dependency chain; critical-path situations where letting one task slip can create a crisis further down the chain. Last year, I tried project-management software (a clone of MS Project) and it didn't work at all; it was too heavy, too difficult to update daily, and too inflexible. It wanted you to figure out the best time for a task, and do it at that time. So, two questions for discussion: 1) How do you work with something like this? Dependency chains are not a strong point of GTD. Neither is this kind of scheduling (how soon do I have to start X so I can do Z when I have to?). 2) What can I do with the Project file from last year? I could just export to Outlook, but then I lose the relationships between tasks. Should I just print the Gantt? -Herah 5 Comments
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 Reverse Planning?Submitted by jkenton on November 6, 2006 - 7:11pm.
Sorry if my advice sounds trite. Why not just sit down with a blank sheet of paper and work backwards from the intended result (i.e. wonderful, restful Italian fish dinner) and identify all the milestones that need to be met to get there? Once you have such a sheet for all of your holiday commitments, you can sit down with a calendar and schedule when they need to get done. And remember, if there is something that can be done in under two minutes, DO IT NOW! Then, here's the bombshell: keep the planning sheets someplace where you'll find them next year. This might even be a family activity, where everyone purges their cramped schedules into a master calendar. It might even help identify some cross-commitments, before they become unmanageable. I saw a terrific example of this kind of planning when I used to do tech support for a group of highly effective people. Each year, they had a very large scale conference. The planning for it was contained on a single sheet of copy paper. It basically broke down the deadlines for calling the room reservation service, the caterer, the linen service, the conference attendees, who has done the brochure printing in the past, everything. On one sheet of paper. And that sheet of paper was stuck to a corkboard in the office of the event coordinator. The tasks were listed as: I am sure that this sheet did not spring fully formed from the brainpan of the guy who ran the conference. And, I'm sure most of those deadlines were created through bad experiences (i.e. not reserving the rooms far enough in advance led to not having enough rooms, or splitting the conference into multiple venues), but they became teachable moments. I hope that helps. » POSTED IN:
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