Brain dump everything that needs to be done

When your energy is high and your mood is poppin' it feels good to dive into a big project. If you're anything like me you know the feeling of investing a large chunk of a day into a big picture item on your annual plan. At the end of the day, you revel in your new found productivity and focus, giving yourself high fives as you shut down your computer. Now, the problem with this, if you had no plan, is the piece of the overall project puzzle doesn't really fit anyway and it's impossible to know what's next.

The first step in project breakdown is to take everything in your head and put it on paper. Not only does this clear space in your mind attic it allows you to edit out the non-essentials and see exactly what needs to be done in its entirety.

Create a map of tasks

Once you have dumped your brain content on to paper create a map of tasks that need to be done. Is there an easy way to break your project into steps or chunks?

If you were building a house you would break it down into planning, construction, interior fit out and finally interior design. Each of those steps would then be broken down further into jobs that needed to be done at each stage. Say you were planning a huge fancy dinner, you would break it down into menu planning, grocery shopping, preparation, cooking and .... eating! Once again, each of those steps could then be broken down further.

Before I wrote one bit of content for Create Your First Online Course I took my chaotic brain-dump and turned it into a map of tasks. Each task then has relevance to the overall project and as I work through them I can better estimate the amount of time the project will take.

Break each task down into less than one-hour tasks

If you are time poor or just poorly focused like moi' looking at that big old map of stuff to do is going to feel like a tsunami of work coming your way. The analogy of "how do you eat an elephant?" fits perfectly here. Do you live under a rock in the desert and don't know? Let me share the answer; one very small bite at a time, my friend.

What works best for my prone-to-chronic-day-dreams brain is a list of tasks that will take an hour or less to complete. It's not possible with every task, some tasks like writing slides can take 2 to 3 times longer but 70% fit into an hour or less. It is super easy to start and finish a task in a day while still doing all the other business stuff if that task will only take an hour. Half finished tasks get messy and remembering where you were at or what route you were taking can be befuddling unless you have a spanking good memory. Often we spend the first 5 to 10 minutes of any unfinished task trying to remember what the heck we were doing last time. What a waste of productivity right?

Thinking "but I don't have a spare hour a day!" well, think again! The reason you haven't tackled your big project is likely a perceived lack of time. Studies (and me forcing many, many clients to track their time each day) has proven that in an 8 hour day the average worker is productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes. You might be poo-pooing the research but in my experience those results are accurate.

I will talk more about making the time in a moment, but first...

Go public with your plans

There is nothing like a bit of public accountability to shame you into action. I noticed the other day that I had created my Asana project and task list for the re-write back in May 2017. It sat for over a year before I ticked off one task and I only got started because I publicly declared I was going to open for enrolment at the end of August. People are emailing me asking when they can join and now I feel obliged to meet the deadline. If I am honest I can't see me finishing everything by the date I promised but it will be 85% done which is 100% better than not started!

Going public to friends, family, customers or a bunch of strangers on the internet can help you feel like there is someone to be accountable too. There are plenty of business groups around where you might even find yourself an accountability buddy. If you're in Members Club or Create Your First Online Course don't forget to post your goals there, we will keep you on track! 

Schedule a morning Power Hour

My client roster has been full for 10 months. My diary has been totally booked and other important stuff (like marketing!) has been ditched in favour of the money making stuff (this is a terrible strategy, by the way). I have been reaching financial goals too so not getting the re-write done has delivered no immediate pain but has taken me back a few steps.

The course is evergreen and automated so I can invest my time in the group answering questions and offering advice and other than a webinar a few times a year there isn't a lot of "show up" type work involved. Missing out on this automated income has meant adding more one on one clients which is totally against my overall business growth plan.

Funny how little things like not finding an hour a day to work on a project can have huge long-term effects. 

It is a dripping tap, right? You don't deal with the slow small drops because they don't feel like a huge issue but collectively those drips could fill a swimming pool. Maybe you don't get to the small tasks that make up a project because you're only losing a few sales a month but what is it really costing you?

I knew I had to make the time (I hate saying "find" the time because it isn't lost, it is misspent) but I also had a full diary. Here is what I know for sure about productivity in business: We fill the time we have with the tasks we have, or as Parkinson's Law states a little more eloquently than me; "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". Often we will also prioritise urgent over important, so answering those emails and posting on social media becomes a priority over working on big-picture ideas that could change your business long term.

My new favourite productivity hack to overcome the sticky pickle of urgent vs important is to utilise the first hour of every day for my course re-write. I am even doing this on weekends at the moment because ticking it off the list early in the morning takes it off my mind for the rest of the day.

I do NOTHING else beforehand. I don't check email, don't pick my phone up, and I don't open social media. Nothing is more important than the one hour I invest in this project. If I have a super busy day ahead I get my hour done and then move onto other things. When I don't have much in the diary I can easily turn that one hour into 5 super focused and productive hours and still fit in emails and social media and Dr Phil.

The point here is I have added the work to my day and my day expands to accommodate it. An hour a day might not seem like a lot but let me break it down for you; even if you only use workdays that is 5 hours per week or 21.6 hours per month. Over 12 months it is a whopping 260 hours! Imagine what you could achieve in that amount of time.

So now do you still think you don't have time?

*UPDATE* I have increased to 2 hours and it's freaking amazing!

Track progress

Sweet Aunt Fanny, this re-write has felt like a marathon. The one thing that has kept me going is seeing a visual representation of my progress. I use Asana to plan and track my project and all the tasks involved. I log in every morning at the start of my hour (now increased to 2!) to choose my tasks and make sure I have updated completed tasks.

It's so important to track your progress, especially when you're working alone and there is no one to talk to or keep you accountable. The simple act of ticking tasks off a list can be hugely motivating, add in some colour coding and flying unicorns (Asana has automated unicorns that leap across the screen when you tick off a task) and you will be finalising your big project in no time.

If, for any reason, you need to bench your project for a few weeks or months your list will be your saviour upon your return. I have a terrible memory which means without my tasks list I can easily do the same thing a couple of times without realising. Asana is my memory prompt!

Reinforce goals

Every Monday morning I reinforce my weekly goals. I haven't set deadlines which I will talk about later but I do write a list of what I want to achieve in the week on my trusty whiteboard (the one I didn't scribble all over with permanent marker).

Once again seeing progress is key! In the afternoon I physically cross items off the list. It feels good and it keeps me focused on the important and not distracted by the urgent. I also suffer terribly from shiny object syndrome; I am easily sidetracked by other big ideas! If it's not on the whiteboard it isn't getting done. I make no room for any flights of fancy.

I know not everyone has space for a big whiteboard so you can do this by grabbing a diary, notepad or journal. Just make sure you keep it open and visible as a constant and sometimes annoying reminder of what you're supposed to be working on.

So now you have the steps let me share my best tips for completing large projects.