How To Manage ’Millions’ of Projects

This week’s question is all about managing multiple projects, a full calendar and incessant daily interruptions so that you stay on top of what’s important.

 

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Script

Episode 151

Hello and welcome to episode 151 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Now, this week I have a fantastic question about how to manage essentially a ton of stuff being thrown at you every day as well as making sure multiple projects are moving forward.

Now before I get to the question, just a heads up for those of you who are enrolled in the Time Sector Course. Last week, I added a new lesson on bringing your areas of focus into the daily mix of tasks. In that lesson, I take you through how to create your areas of focus and how they need to be filtering into the Time Sector System. 

Of course, if you are not enrolled in the course, then you can still do so. It’s an amazing course and will transform the way you manage your work by simplifying your structure and making sure that you are focused on what is important today, and not worrying about what’s coming up next week, later this month or next month. After all, what matters is the here and now. As long as you have done your weekly planning session, you should not be needing to worry about next week and beyond. 

Anyway. I hope you do join in the course. Full details are in the show notes.

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks: Hi Carl, I’ve watched your videos and agree that separating projects from to-dos would simplify my life significantly. However, as a school principal I have a million projects, some new and some repeating quarterly, and a full calendar. How do you advise using a notes app to help prioritise and see next actions that should go into your task manager? 

Hi Heather, thank you for this question. 

Let’s start at the foundations. There is only a certain amount of time each day for us to do our work. We are not able to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. Aside from the need to sleep and eat it is neither sustainable nor healthy. So, what we need to do is to build some structure into our day and really understand what our core work is. 

You see, knowing what work only we can do and what work we can delegate to our team helps with prioritising. If there is some work only you can do, as a principle, then, of course, this is going to be your priority. Nobody else can do it, so if you do not do it, nobody else will. 

This goes for any team leader or manager. If there is work your team can do, then you need to let go of that work and delegate it. This means, of course, you must trust your team. You must also ensure they are shown exactly what you want and that means you will need to allocate some time to train your team. 

Now, I’ve come across a few people who say “yeah yeah I know that, but I just don’t have any time to train my staff”. Sure, it’s a dilemma, isn’t it? But, if you are unable to manage your workload now, what is going to happen in the long-term? Something important is going to get missed, or you’re just going to have a breakdown. Either option is not a good option. 

In this case, what I would do, is schedule a day for training. 

How do you do this? first, decide what work you can and will delegate, to whom and have a clear set of outcomes for that work. 

Then set up a training day. For that, you schedule appointments with your team individually and allocate the work you have decided to delegate and make sure the people you are delegating the work to know exactly what you want—the outcomes—and when it is due each week or month etc. 

Can you afford to spend a day training your team? How about asking a different question: can you continue doing your work with its current workload? 

Okay, so how do you manage all this in a notes app.

Of course, this is going to depend on which notes app you use. The best ones are Microsoft OneNote, Evernote and Notion for this kind of thing. 

So, the first thing you will need to do is create a notebook called “Current Projects”. Inside there you create a new note or section for the project you are working on. 

Now, what you put inside that note or section depends on the type of project it is. For your delegated projects you can create a table to manage key information such as who you delegated the work to and when you expect the work to be done. You can also create tables to manage the outcomes and anything else you need that will be related to that project. 

I have a pinned note that lists all my active projects and where they are at, as well as information such as what the expected outcome is and milestones and deadlines. This note is used for reviewing and planning. 

With this note, I am very careful. Sure it would be very nice to be able to add all my projects and say they are all due this quarter, but the reality is you are unlikely to be able to complete all your projects in one quarter. So, I get realistic and spread these out so they are manageable and doable. And, yes, sometimes I do need to renegotiate deadlines. You need to get okay with that. Renegotiating a deadline can be done if you give the project owner enough time. Trying to renegotiate a project deadline one week before it is due is not going to help you. 

Just having a master projects list (for that is what I call this note) gives me a big picture view of what is due and when and that highlights any projects that I feel are just not going to get done by the deadline. I can then negotiate a new deadline. 

For example, I do a lot of online workshops and conferences. For these events, I deliver a lecture or presentation and I also give each participant a workbook. Now sometimes a conference organiser will ask me to provide the workbook materials a few weeks before the event. Sometimes that is no problem, but last month I had several of these workshops and getting the materials to the organisers by their deadline was going to be very difficult. So, I asked the organisers if I could provide the workbook a couple of weeks later. 

How did I know this was going to be difficult? It was because every week when I do my weekly planning, I review this master project list. I know what my core work is—the work only I can do—and I have that already blocked off in my calendar. So when I look at my week, I can see very clearly how much time I have available to work on these projects. As soon as I saw that in one week I had to prepare four workbooks I knew that was not going happen—well not if I wanted to complete my core work, which is non-negotiable—so I contacted the organisers and negotiated a few extra days to get the materials to them. In all cases, they were happy to accommodate me and I got the workbooks to them within the new deadline. 

This is one reason why your notes app helps. It gives you the big picture view that a task list manager cannot do. 

Another advantage of having this master projects list is you have a place where all the information you want to see, and in the way, you want to see it can be stored. A task list manager forces you to follow a template—which may not provide you with the information you want. Your notes app allows you to create the format you want. You have complete freedom. 

So how, and when, do you move next actions over to your task manager? 

For this, again I do it when I do my weekly planning session. But I also will add tasks when I am working on the project. 

For example, imagine I am doing some work on a new online course. Now, a lot of the prep work for that involves a spreadsheet. This is my outline document and so a lot of information is added to that. As I am working on it, I may decide I need to research something. I will add that task to my task manager immediately. I will decide what needs researching and when I will do it. For something like this, I will add it to either my “this week” or “next week” folder in my task manager. The details of what needs researching will be added to the project note if necessary. 

During my weekly planning session, I go through all my active projects. Inactive projects don’t need reviewing if they are not moving forward, but sometimes I do need to add a start date. That can be created as a task and added to one of my longer-term time sectors. For instance, I have a task in my task manager in my Next month folder that is dated that says “start work on Time And Life Mastery update” That task will come up on the day I have allocated and I can then decide if I want to, or need to, start right then. If not, I can re-date the task or I can start the project by moving the project note to my active projects list. 

So for the most part, my task manager tells me what work I need to work on today. Today, I have a task that says “Write podcast script”. When I did my daily planning session last night, I saw that on my list and I flagged it as a morning task because morning is when I do my focused work. 

Saturday mornings are when I work on my online courses. I have a recurring task in my task manager that tells me “work on online courses” and I have a direct link to the project note for the online course I am currently working on. So I see the task, click it and I am transported directly to the project note to start work on it. 

The glue that brings everything together is the daily and weekly planning sessions. Seriously, if you are not doing those you will never feel you are on top of everything coming at you. These sessions do not need to be long. The daily one, once you have a settled routine should only take you around ten to fifteen minutes. And the weekly planning session normally takes around thirty minutes or so. It could be longer if you have a lot of active projects, but remember, you only have 168 hours each week, and not all of those will be spent working. On average you will be working between forty and fifty hours. So, for your weekly planning session, you are only able to allocate so much time for your projects. 

That’s why your calendar is important too. If your calendar is already full, then there’s no hope. Sorry to be so blunt. But if you want to have time to work on your projects, you are not going to be able to change the laws of physics. Time just is. So, get control of your calendar. Do you really have to attend every meeting you are invited to? Would it not be possible to delegate some of those meetings to other people? 

As a school principal, Heather, you should be able to block some time out for focused work sessions. Choose those times carefully. Often the best time for focused work is in the morning when you are at your freshest, but here we are all different. Find a time slot that you can block each day for your own focused work. Ideally, two hours each day where everyone who works with you knows you are not available. 

Setting some boundaries is important. If you have no boundaries then other people will fill your time. In a typical working day, not being available for two hours is not a lot of time. But it is a lot of time to get focused work done. 

I hope that has helped in some way, Heather. Good luck and thank you for your question.

Thank you to all of you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.