I just finished a week of hard work and long hours. I want to share the experience with you because it clearly shows how stopping and planning can help you.

The task

We had to prepare a proposal for  a complex system.  The competition was expected to be high, so our proposal had to be high quality.  We have been working on the concept for this system for a long time, so we had a clear view of what the system should look like.

The challenge

We only had 3 weeks to prepare everything.  We had to discuss the solution with several areas in our company and with a subcontractor.  By the time we had everything agreed, we only had less than two weeks to produce the documentation.  The amount of required documents was larger than we expected, which made things even more difficult.

The plan

We knew all the documents we had to prepare and the clock was ticking.  So what does your body do?  It forces you into action!  For a second we were tempted to start working, because we knew already what we had to do.  But did we really?  We had a mental list of the documents and a preliminary distribution between the (at that time) 2 persons working on the proposal.  But we realized that wasn’t enough.  So we stopped, wrote all the documents on a whiteboard and made an estimation of how long it would take to finish each of them.  The result was shocking.  If our estimation was correct, we had to work over 16 hours a day to meet the deadline!!

Thanks to this 10 minute planning, we had the arguments to convince our boss to give us another person to work full time on the bid and distribute some tasks among other people in the department.

The execution

One of my colleagues had the idea to keep the list of documents on the whiteboard and write the progress at least twice a day to monitor if we were on track.  I have to say that it was a great idea, and not for the progress monitoring, that we could have done in a different manner.  But it was for the motivation.  Every time someone stood up and increased one of the percentages we had a rush of excitement and we knew we were making progress.  And whenever someone felt overwhelmed, we could look up at the whiteboard, check the status and see what the objective progress was.  And most of the times the situation was better than what our mind told us, especially when we were tired.

The conclusion

Even when you know that you should plan, it’s easy to rush into action without much thought.  And we should avoid it.  See what 10 minutes did for us.  Hadn’t we stopped then, we wouldn’t have had the extra help and our technical proposal would have been poor.

And this shows that planning is helpful for every task we have to do.  Some people tend to think that only project managers should plan and monitor progress.  But the truth is, if you plan your everyday tasks you become much more productive because you manage your time instead of spending it.

So, every time you feel overwhelmed by all the work you have to do, please don’t just jump into action.  Stop and plan first.

One of the most important jobs of the project manager is to delegate project tasks. This is specially important when the project manager has a heavy technical background. It these cases, the temptation to do something because you can do it (and you are comfortable doing it) is very strong. Most of us (if not all) have been there before, and we find lots of reasons to justify what we are doing:

• I can do it much faster than anyone else
• The quality will be better if I do it
• There is no one else who can do it, or they are very busy
• I don’t have time to ask someone else to do it

The truth is that all this reasons are excuses, and while in the short term it might work, the result in the long term is negative.

Think about it.  Are your reasons the real problem?  Or are there other underlying reasons?  Let’s analyze some of them:

• I can do it much faster than anyone else:   it might be true today.  But aren’t you doing it because it is easier than teaching someone else?  Or even worse, are you afraid that the person you teach will do it better than you in the near future?
• The quality will be better if I do it:  when you say better, do you mean your way?  or maybe you had bad experiences in the past because you didn’t specify well enough what you wanted.  And in that case it is normal that you don’t get what you expected
• There is no one else who can do it, or they are very busy:  was this task planned?  Was it assigned to someone?  In many cases this reasoning shows a lack of planning.
• I don’t have time to ask someone else to do it:  this sounds similar to I don’t have time to plan.  Teaching someone else to do something is not a waste of time, it’s an investment!  Think of the time you will be able to save in the future having this person well trained.

And you also have to think that the more indispensable you are, the more difficult it will be take advantage of new opportunities, such as a promotion or a new interesting project in your department.  Do you think your boss will let you go if there is no one ready to take over?

I hope I convinced you to delegate more.  It is not easy, but in the end it is very rewarding for you, and for the person you trust to delegate to.

Have you ever been to a meeting that meets any (or many) of these criteria?

• You don’t know why you were called to that meeting
• The meeting lasts way longer than the scheduled duration
• People digress and no decisions are made
• You contribute to the meeting for 10 minutes but have to be there for an hour
• The meeting started 15 minutes late because not everyone was on time

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been to many of those!  In my opinion, inefficient meetings are one of the biggest time robbers nowadays.  Every time we find a problem we tend to call a meeting with lots of people to decide what to do. Or the project manager calls the whole team to update the status of the project.  Or the boss has a new bright idea and wants everyone to listen to it.

Don’t get me wrong.  Meetings are a powerful tool if used correctly.  Try the following guidelines and you will notice an increase in productivity:

• Send an agenda with enough time in advance so that everyone can prepare the meeting.  This includes the material that has to be prepared beforehand
• Start the meeting on time.  Many people do not consider highly important to be on time for a meeting (in the end it is not a train that would leave.  The meeting will still be there if I am late).  I personally consider it a lack of respect for the ones that were on time.  If you can start the meeting, go ahead without the missing people.  If you can’t, let him/her know that you have been waiting for them, and they will probably be on time next time.
• Set a time limit for each item on the agenda.
• Call only the people that are necessary for the meeting.  And as you have set a time limit for each topic, you could have someone attending only part of the meeting.
• Do not discuss about topics that are not on the agenda.  Avoid going off-topic or you will lose control.  If the topic is relevant, write it down and discuss it either at the end of the meeting (if there is time) or in a future meeting.
• Make a short summary after each item on the agenda.  You have to make sure that everyone has the same understanding after the discussion.
• For each of the actions that arise, identify the scope of the action, the person responsible to do it and the deadline.  It’s very typical to hear something like “we have to do this”, and it usually results in nothing being done.
• Write the minutes and distribute them, identifying all the agreements and actions.

There is nothing is these guidelines that is difficult to do.  It is just a matter of getting used to it and educate your co-workers to do the same.  After a few meetings you it will become natural and you will have much more effective meetings.

Although the steps above assume you are the meeting leader, it also works when you are not.  In that case you are obviously more limited, but you can try to help the leader.  For instance, you can ask for the agenda when you receive something like “Project X meeting from 10:00 to 12:00″ or you can suggest to talk about that new topic at the end of the meeting if there is a deviation from the agenda.  People are usually smart and if they see that their meetings are better when they follow your recommendations, they will end up adopting them.

A few months ago, one of my days could be like this:

• I arrive in the office.  Check my to-do list and start writing a document.  It shouldn’t take longer than an hour.
• One of my sentences in the document reminds me that I should write an email requesting some information.  I have been thinking of writing that email for a few days, so I’d better write it now before I forget again.
• I am half way through the email I remember that the person to whom I’m writing asked me yesterday if I had 10 minutes.  I told him I would call him later… and I forgot.  I decide to go talk to him.  After 10 minutes I realize that there is some confusion in the team and call a meeting to make sure we all have the same goal in mind.  It shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes, but in the end it lasts 2 hours.
• Back at my desk.  I check the email.  There is a long mail from the customer requesting a lot of information.  I decide this is high priority and start gathering data.  I send an email to request the information I’m missing.
• While I wait for the answer I decide to go back to my document.  I have to read everything I wrote early this morning.  5 minutes after I start writing again, another phone call:  my mates are picking me up for lunch.  Lunch time already???
• Back from lunch.  I check my email, and 15 minutes later I decide to go back to my document.  I read it again.  I start writing, but I check the email every 5 minutes because I am waiting for the data for my customer.
• I finally get it half an hour later and continue with the email for my customer.
• Suddenly my heart starts racing!  I haven’t filled the spreadsheet that my boss sent me yesterday!  And he needed it TODAY!  (swearword)
• It takes me 2 hours to finish my boss’s spreadsheet.
• I check the time.  Is it really that late?
• Instead of going home, I finish the email for the customer.  I NEED to feel that I finished something today!
• I feel tired and start shutting the computer down.  I see the document I started this morning, and I sadly realize that I have written less than 25% of it.
• And then I see the email I started writing while I was with my document.  God, I could have sworn that I had sent it… and it is still there.  I finish it and send it.

My day is over, and my very first task is not done!  Something inside me tells me that I didn’t do a very good job today…

Have you ever felt like that?  Do you have days similar to the one I just described?  A project manager has to deal with very different issues, and that is normal.  But we are not designed for multi-tasking, and there is a huge difference between doing many things and having many things in your mind at the same time.

When you have many things in your mind, you keep switching between them and it is very hard to concentrate on one. Therefore you are not effective.  What is the solution?  Transfer all those ideas and pending tasks somewhere else.  It could be a piece of paper, your email application, a PDA, whatever you feel comfortable with.

But writing things down is just the first step.  You have to build a routine to check that list regularly so that your mind feels that anything there will not be forgotten.  This is the key point.  When your mind feels that anything on that list will be done, it will stop jumping from one thought to another.  And the day you get to that point, you will realize how much more productive you can be.

From the different time management techniques I have learnt, this is the one that has had a bigger impact on my productivity.  And not only that, it also helps you reduce the amount of stress you suffer.  I highly recommend it.