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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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 I agree, most of the...Submitted by brownstudy on November 7, 2006 - 11:19am.
I agree, most of the learnings that fall out of big projects get incorporated into checklists or reminders or templates that takes the guesswork out of doing all that work again. I don't have any big projects like what's facing you, but you might be feeling anxiety because you see the whole enchilda at once and so you're overwhelmed by imagining the entirety of that effort. If you can break the tasks down to more manageable pieces, it may reduce your anxiety. The work-backwards advice is good, along with sitting down with a calendar and working out when each thing has to be done by. If it relieves your anxiety, type out all the lists that are clogging up in your head. I'd probably dump them all unordered into a Word file, then create headings and drag and drop items to where they need to do go. And then maybe drag and drop the headings so they're in rough chronological order. And then sit down with the calendar and work out the dates. Needless to say, the weekly review (or maybe a daily review) will help you stay on top of things and realize what's in your control and what isn't. Perhaps a high-level project outcome would be "I and my family have enjoyed a wonderful holiday season and I have felt relaxed and confident throughout." Yeah, it sounds a little silly, but by reading that at every review, your brain may find opportunities to suggest ideas or other outcomes that might just make things run a little more smoothly. Sorry for the jabbering! Don't know if any of this has been helpful, but the first thing to do is to definitely get it out of your head and onto paper. Good luck -- mike » POSTED IN:
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