Organising projects so the work gets done

Work, in the 21st century, is never really done.

Most of us are juggling far too much. We are on-call 24/7, and there’s always one more thing we could do. It’s no wonder we all have to-do lists longer than our arms and a constant feeling of falling behind.

Organising our work into projects helps with this.

• It’s easier to get things done, and gain momentum.
• You’re clear what we’re working on – and why.
• You know when you’re finished, and ready to move onto the next thing.
• You’ll feel less overwhelmed. You’ll always know what to work on next.
• You’ll stop over-complicating and get your ideas out into the world.
• And you’ll feel like you’re making progress even when the project is huge and might take months, even years.

So let’s start with some definitions.

A project is a creative task with a clearly defined beginning and end, that can’t be completed in a single work session (otherwise it would just be a task on your to-do list). 

As well as projects, you also have more on-going, permanent parts of your life: your job, your business, your health, your home, your family and friends. 

I like to call these Areas of Responsibility. These are important, but never fully ‘done’, and crossed off your list. 

• Writing a book is a project. Building a sustainable writing career is an area of responsibility.
• Planning a family holiday is a project. Raising your children is an area of responsibility.
• Refurbishing your kitchen is a project. Looking after your home is an area of responsibility.
• Training for a marathon is a project. Staying fit and healthy is an area of responsibility. 
• Promoting an exhibition is a project. Looking after your assets – all of the art you’ve created – and making sure they continue to work for you is an area of responsibility.

Further distinctions

With a project, you set clear parameters so that you know when it’s done, roughly how long it might take – and what success looks like, for this version of it. (Because you can always go back to it, later.) When it’s finished, you put it out into the world for people to use or enjoy. And you move onto your next project. 

With areas of responsibility, it’s more about setting standards, a base level you try to achieve. It’s also about balance: you won’t be perfect in all areas, all the time. But you never want to neglect one of them for long.

You schedule in time for staying healthy; keeping in touch with friends and family; looking after your home, your family, your pets. But your standards in each area will vary, depending what else you have on. 

You might be willing, for instance, to have a messier house and miss a few social events while you get a big project over the line. But you might not want to compromise on your health and fitness, or the attention you give to close family. 

Whenever we start a major new project, we need to look at how it might impact on our areas of responsibility, and decide if and where we’re willing to make compromises. 

A project is only active if you’re working on it. 

If you have ‘Finish album’ on your to-list but you’re not writing songs, rehearsing, recording, it’s not a project. It’s a wish, a dream. Which is fine, but it shouldn’t be cluttering up your current to-do list. 

Keep a separate list of future projects, and review this list regularly, pulling new projects into your active list when you’re ready – and have the time and space – to take action on them. 

You can only juggle a few projects at once.

For me, the limit is five active projects, across my work life but also my personal life. For you, it might be less. If you think you can handle more, by all means try. But monitor it; if any of your active projects are not making measurable progress, then you’ve taken on too much.

Having to choose means you focus on what’s important, instead of ticking trivia off your list to feel ‘productive’. It’s paradoxical, but true: when you focus on less, you get more done. 

Projects will move in and out of your active list.

There are times when you can do no more on a project, because it’s waiting for input from others. When your book manuscript has gone to an agent, for instance. When your film is trapped in development hell. Or when a song has gone out to a collaborator. 

Here you decide on your next action – chasing up your agent in a month’s time, for instance, or getting in touch with your musical collaborator – and you schedule this, putting it on your calendar so it resurfaces at the right time. Then you move on to another project. 

Set milestones in big projects.

Everyone’s markers will be different. What’s important is that you have some means of measuring your progress. Set targets, and find a way to celebrate when you hit each one. 

If you’re writing a book, for instance, your milestones could be about how many words you’ve written, how many hours writing you’ve put in, whether you’re on the first, second, third or final draft. 

Choose your milestones carefully, and be flexible. Again, you’ll get better at this over time. 

One of my clients celebrated each time she wrote 10,000 words of her debut novel. This worked well until she reached the 70,000-word mark, when her count started to go backwards. Plot holes emerged, she cut a chapter and a couple of characters, the book got shorter and she felt she was working hard, but getting nowhere. 

I pointed out that this too was progress: the story was getting tighter, clearer as she realised what was needed to bring the action to a satisfactory end. 

So she changed her milestones and celebrated each time she’d put another 50 hours into the project. And slowly, the problems resolved and the word-count ticked back up.

She’s now researching agents, and her next milestone is sending her novel out to them. 

Set deadlines for each milestone.

But don’t be too rigid about it. No one dies if your first draft takes a month longer than you thought it would, if you set out to make five paintings but end up instead with three sculptures.

We’re not turning out widgets on an assembly line, and creative work can be unpredictable. It involves wrong turns, dead ends, interesting mistakes that turn out to be brilliant.

We often wildly overestimate how much we can do in a day, a week, a month. Tracking your progress helps you be more realistic when you set deadlines for the next milestone. 

The good news? We also tend to underestimate how much we can achieve over years of steady, consistent work. This is how a substantial body of work gets made, new directions are explored, reputations built: a few hours at a time.

Plan, but don’t over-plan.

Start before you’re ready. Don’t wait for conditions to be perfect, for the decks to be cleared, to get all your ducks in a row. (Because conditions never will be perfect: that’s life.) 

Getting stuck in the planning stage can be a form of procrastination. You mind-map, you research, you make lists, you clear your space, you buy tools and materials.. Yet you never really start work. 

If this is you, just jump in. Begin. Give yourself permission to do it badly at first, if needs be. You learn so much more in the making, the shaping than you do from over-thinking it all. 

But a little thought before you begin can be useful.

For a big project like writing a book or renovating a room, I might take an hour or so and answer the questions below in depth. For a shorter project (booking a trip; writing a series of blog posts), I’ll run through it much more quickly, giving short answers to the questions that feel most relevant. 

How does this help? It sets boundaries, gets you clear on what you’re making/doing, who it is for, what its purpose is for you, what success looks like. For me, writing that down stops me over-complicating (because given the chance, I always will).

Predicting how I’ll get in my own way means that when I start over-researching, writing more than I intended, or otherwise making the whole thing harder than it needs be, I notice faster. I remember that I set out to create a four-page PDF, not write War And Peace. Or that we’re only going away for the weekend, so I don’t have to spend weeks looking at every single hotel in a city, hoping to book the perfect one.

Below are the questions I use. You’re welcome to use them, and adapt them to your own work. 

Organising a new project:

WHY

• What am I trying to achieve?
• How does this relate to my wider objectives and goals?
• Who is it for?
• What’s it for, creatively? 
• What effect do I want it to have in the world?
• What do I hope it will do for me?
• What might it lead to?
• What will I learn?
• What would success look like – for this version of it?

WHAT

• Define the scope of the project, and add constraints 
• Write a quick outline, or list my next action steps.
• What else is important while I’m working on this?
• What will I need to say no to?
• What will this cost? (Time, energy, focus, money, opportunity.) 
• Is it worth that, or do I need to add more constraints?

HOW

• How will I over-complicate this and get in my own way?
• How could this be more simple? What would it look like it if were really easy?
• How can it be more fun?
• What do I have already that I could use? (References, research, checklists, interview transcripts, articles I’ve already written on this subject, similar things I’ve made before.)
• What are the models/frameworks?
• Do I need help/support? If so, who can I ask?

WHEN

• When will I do this?
• How long do I need?
• What’s my deadline, and do I need to add milestones?

I then check my calendar, and block out times to do the work. 

Constraints are important. 

When I was a journalist, the deadline was my constraint. There was a point when I’d have to stop reporting, stop interviewing people, and actually write.

Now that my projects are mostly self-directed, I’ve found that they will expand infinitely, if I let them. A blog post will turn into a book, a workshop into a two-month course. 

Which is fine, except they never get done. And I’ve no idea if anyone even wants them. Far better to get a short, imperfect version out first, to test the waters. Then if I want to revisit it later, I have real feedback, useful information to go on.

How this works in my creative life

Recently, I made a workbook to help people uncover the stories they were telling themselves about money – and change them, if needs be. 

Knowing my tendency to over-complicate everything, I set constraints on how much time I could spend on this, and how many pages it could have. I wanted it to help creatives shift unhelpful attitudes towards money, and the value of creative work. And I wanted it to attract new subscribers to my mailing list.

I remembered I’d done similar things twice before, with a set of journalling prompts I give away free on my website, and my planning workbook, Your Next Year.

Looking at these gave me design templates I’d left in Canva, checklists on how to set up a downloadable PDF on my website, even a to-do list with all the steps needed to complete a new workbook. This saved me hours of work. 

I did the whole thing in under a day, and it ended up being only two pages longer than I’d planned. It’s not perfect. But it’s up on my site, it’s driving new people to subscribe to my newsletter, The Creative Companion.

People have got in touch to say they found it helpful. One person also pointed out a couple of typos, which I was able to correct quickly, so putting it out there for people to use has already improved it.

Stop scope creep

Many of us never finish personal projects because they keep expanding. We keep tweaking, polishing, adding because we want it to be perfect, before we share it.

So it never gets done, never gets in front of an audience – and we rob ourselves of the opportunity to learn and grow, to see people enjoy our work, be moved by it, informed by it, or find it useful.

Again, constraints help here. I remind myself that this is just one version of my idea, a Minimum Viable Product or a stepping stone to something bigger. I can always go back to it later and improve it, expand it.

Finishing a project, and letting it go

Done? Take a few minutes to close the project out, before rushing onto the next thing.

Once a project is finished and ticked off my list, I analyse it, archive it, and file anything I might be able to reuse later.

If the project has stalled for some reason, or I no longer want or need to finish it, I’ll still close it down, adding some notes about why it was abandoned, what I learned, and what actions I’d need to take if I ever decide to go back to it.

For me, this is what closing looks like:

• I add it to my running list of completed projects. We tend to forget problems as soon as we’ve solved them, and diminish the work we put into something as soon as it’s completed. On days when I feel I’m getting nowhere, I find it useful to remind myself of all I have done that month or that year.
• I have a folder on my desktop called Archive. I create a new folder with the name of the project, and put everything I used in there: research, references, drafts, as well as the finished thing. If I have ideas to improve or expand it later, notes on that will go here too.
• If I’ve created anything that might be reusable – a how-to checklist, marketing copy, Canva templates – I’ll make sure they’re tagged or titled so I can easily find them again. Good marketing copy and anything else such as emails I might want to adapt and reuse will also go into my folder of marketing templates.
• I’ll also clear my physical space: papers and notes go into a labelled box or A4 envelope if there’s a lot of them. If there’s just a few, I scan them and add them to the project folder. Clearing my desk and the floor around helps me close a project mentally, too.

Then I answer these questions:

• What did I learn?
• What went well? How can I repeat or double down on that next time?
• What could have been better? How can I improve that next time?
• Were the project objectives achieved? Why – or why not?
• Was it worth the time, energy, focus put in? 
• If it was something I put out into the world, any useful feedback/information?
• If I’ve created an asset – a book, a course, something that might bring in income – what do I need to do to repromote it regularly?
• What areas of responsibility were neglected while I did this? Do I need to plan anything to compensate?
• What next?

Now the most important part: celebrate!

It’s important to enjoy what you’ve achieved and celebrate it before rushing on to the next project or task on your list.

For a big project like a book or film, perhaps this means a holiday, a day out, a fancy dinner. But completing even a small project deserves to be marked with a walk, a coffee, a chat with a friend, a dance around your workspace with music on loud.

Be playful. Treat yourself. Be proud of what you’ve done, finished, made. Life feels less of a grind when you do. Because this was supposed to be fun, no?

PS The distinction between projects and areas of responsibility comes from Tiago Forte’s book Building A Second Brain. If you want to know more, I wrote about it in detail here.