Scheduling, planning and follow-through. Some questions

Posted by Dr Andus
May 22, 2014 at 10:14 AM

Ken wrote:
>And the part that is truly frustrating to me, and I am sure many here
>can relate to, is that while I understand how many of these task
>managers work in theory, I find many of them hard to actually use on a
>daily basis.

>Having said all that, there is a part of me that wonders how much
>further along I might be if I just worked and did not spend any time
>trying to organize/reorganize/prioritize.

I think part of the difficulty is that planning affects multiple overlapping temporal planes (and not many tools can handle that, if any). There is the long-term time scale of a project that can take several years (e.g. writing/planning a book). Then there are the smaller, intermediate phases (writing/planning the chapters), and then the actual writing, which continues to be a simultaneous planning, as one constantly needs to revise the plan, break it down into smaller parts, abandon or merge sections etc.

Here you can substitute planning with outlining. The two are synonymous to some extent. And outlining is also synonymous with project management to some extent, as outlining effectively consists of constructing a “work breakdown structure” (WBS), i.e. breaking down a larger task to smaller bits, until the tasks become actionable. Then if you add deadlines to the outline, it becomes a project plan (I realise there is more to PM, such as when you’re constructing a bridge or an airplane, I’m just concentrating on the basics here).

What I’m getting at is that even if one tries to ignore the long-term and medium-term planning horizon, it’s impossible to ignore it during the execution of the tasks because the tasks continuously need to be broken down and outlined and re-outlined, to be able to carry them out.

What really matters for the medium and long-term planning is whether the workload (and other material resource requirements) has been estimated realistically enough and whether there is some institutional mechanism that can make the deadlines sufficiently scary, so that they force you to abandon perfectionism and focus on delivering the essentials.

BTW, I like WorkFlowy partly due to an almost complete lack of structure. It’s just a blank canvas, and you can design your very own project management system by just labelling any item whatever you like. And if you don’t like it later, you can easily restructure it. Of course this also makes it more challenging to use, as you really need to design your own system (although an existing system of course can also be implemented). It’s a similar problem that people tend to have with ConnectedText. It’s so much of a blank canvas that it’s difficult to figure out initially what to use it for exactly. But such software can be a solution to the other extreme, when a software imposes its own single system on you (such as a Gantt chart or a Calendar view or indeed a hierarchical tree), and there is no other way to organise or visualise things.