Are you struggling to turn your big ideas into actual accomplishments? Do you wonder how successful people map out their projects from start to finish?
Planning a project doesn’t have to be overwhelming. In Start Finishing, Charlie Gilkey explains how to plan a project by breaking it down into manageable steps that anyone can follow. He shows you how to arrange tasks, create logical sequences, and build realistic timelines based on your actual capacity.
Read more to learn Gilkey’s two-step approach that will help you finally start finishing what matters most.
How to Plan a Project
Gilkey stresses the importance of making a detailed and specific plan for tackling each of your projects. By doing so, you turn vague to-do lists into concrete timelines, which will provide much-needed guidance and support as you work toward your goals. Gilkey explains how to plan a project in two steps.
Step 1: Break Down the Project and Arrange the Pieces
Gilkey’s first step toward making a realistic plan is to break the project down into tasks or groups of tasks that will carry you from your starting point to your goal. You may also find that those tasks can, themselves, break down into smaller tasks, so get as specific as you need to during this step. Aside from enabling you to turn a goal into a plan, this process will give you a more accurate idea of how much time and work your project is likely to take.
Once you’ve identified the individual pieces of your project, you can determine how they connect: which tasks have to be handled first, what those tasks enable you to do next, and so on. By arranging and connecting the pieces in this way, you’ll be able to come up with a logical action plan to carry you from your starting point to your goal.
| Deconstructing a Project Beyond improving your time and cost estimates, breaking down a project as Gilkey suggests can enhance accountability among your team members (if you’re working on a team project). This is because it allows you to assign specific tasks to specific people, with reasonable deadlines for each. This strategy also helps protect you from scope creep, a situation where your project’s needs (and therefore costs) expand beyond what you predicted and budgeted for. Clearly defining and laying out each task ahead of time helps you avoid that pitfall—you’ve already planned out how you’ll get from the project’s starting point to its endpoint, so it’s unlikely that you’ll need to put in a lot of unexpected work or money. However, Gilkey’s method does run the risk of overplanning. In other words, breaking down a project too far can lead to a rigid plan, making it difficult to adapt to unexpected problems or take advantage of new opportunities. |
Step 2: Make a Realistic Timeline
The author challenges the common approach of starting with a deadline, then working backward to create a plan. He argues that you’ll get more realistic timelines by planning based on your actual work capacity, meaning the amount of work you (and your team, if applicable) can realistically and consistently get done. In short, he argues that it makes more sense to create a deadline based on your plan, as opposed to creating a plan based on your deadline.
(Shortform note: When making a project timeline, consider how many productive hours of work the average person can put in each week. This will vary depending on the individual and the type of work they’re doing, but research has provided a couple of useful benchmarks: You’ll see greatly diminishing returns after working more than 45 hours in a week and the maximum number of productive hours for the average person is around 55 per week. Any time beyond that 55-hour benchmark doesn’t result in more work getting done, because the worker is too exhausted to be productive.)
Gilkey also notes that projects involving more than one person will inherently have periods of downtime, and people often overlook this fact while planning. This commonly happens when team members can’t start their work until other team members finish theirs—for instance, an editor can’t do their work until a writer gives them something to edit.
So, while creating your timeline, try to anticipate these transition periods and bottlenecks. However, the author says you should also be prepared to adjust your plan and push back your deadline as issues like this arise.
(Shortform note: As risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in Antifragile, predicting the future—such as estimating how long a project will take to finish—is practically impossible. Furthermore, predictions become less accurate the farther into the future they go and the more variables they have to contend with. Therefore, a long-term project involving multiple people is practically guaranteed to run into delays and problems that you weren’t able to predict. Taleb’s suggestion is to prioritize adaptability over efficiency. In other words: Keep your options open and be ready to adjust as the situation changes, rather than locking yourself into an idealized plan that assumes everything will go smoothly. This echoes Gilkey’s advice to be prepared to push back deadlines as problems arise.)
