Do you know where you're headed before you set off?

It’s all too easy to dive into your work head first without doing any kind of planning.

But if you don’t establish a direction before you start, how will you know where to go, how to get there, and what to look out for along the way? More to the point, will you ever get to where you want to be, and will you even know whether you’re done or not?

Using a five-step approach

The Organised Approach to Websites includes some vital ways to get organised with your blog or website. This approach can be modified for almost anything. Here’s how the five-step approach looks for Zen Working.

1. Identify the task.

What are you going to do? It’s important to write a clear objective, otherwise you won’t have a goal that you can work to without significant difficulties. For now, just get the basic task written down. The detail gets added next.

2. Plan and research.

How will you get the job done? For starters, larger projects will need to be broken down into multiple objectives. If you were going to write a new blogging system, for instance, a bad objective would be “Develop a new blogging system”. You’ll get sick of not being able to tick the item off your list, and it will just not get done. Having a list of tasks that need to be done is vital before you go any further. Establish a clear sequence of events, identify dependencies, and add in some milestones.

3. Do the job.

For a development project, this means writing the code. It’s quite likely you’ll add in some extra layers of detail prior to commencing this stage. The main thing to be careful about is not to code until you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you’re doing it. If you broke the task down into clear objectives, the code should be all the easier to write.

4. Quality control.

Test, test, test. Don’t do all the work then review it at the end. Test as you go. With software, this doesn’t mean “check it works”. It means break it, then fix it. You want to find all the bugs at this stage, not later on. Code, test, re-code, re-test, and so on. And get someone else to help with the testing.

5. Implement and review.

Just because the task is complete, doesn’t mean your job is done. Post-project support and keeping in contact with the customer is really important. Keep an eye out for any new issues, and fix them. Ask for new requirements so you can build on what you’ve already put together. Ask for feedback on how the project went. Document your findings and decide if there’s anything you would do differently in future. There’s always something new to learn, something to improve on, and another job to do. Ensure you establish a routine of continuous improvement.

Anyway, that’s enough from me - do you know where you’re headed before you set off? Do you keep improving your methods?

Mind maps can help to break down large projects into manageable chunks.

Managing your workload with online tools or a great to-do list is fine for smaller jobs, but what about big projects? Here are 5 tools and concepts that you should consider when managing a large project.

Mind maps

A mind map is a diagram that starts with one word or phrase at the centre, with various thoughts and ideas spreading outwards. The further out you go, the greater the detail becomes.

Mind mapping is a great way to get all of your thoughts down on paper without trying to do it in a conventional list. You can organise your thoughts into a list later, but if you start with a top-to-bottom list you may run out of room. Mind maps are better for using all of the available space, and are much easier on the eye mostly due to the use of colours.

Project scope

Some projects may be susceptible to “out of scope” requirements being included just to get them done. Establish clear goals for the project and consider small changes, but stay within the project scope: that is, evaluate whether the changes submitted will meet the project objectives. Surplus changes can be considered if you run ahead of schedule, but are not the highest priority and should not detract from the critical path.

Dependencies and the critical path

Once you’ve got your tasks written down, it helps immensely if you can organise each task to indicate any dependencies on other tasks. For instance, you might want to create a design on paper before trying to code it, and you might want to think of a solid niche for a blog before planning your first posts.

Some projects have far more critical dependencies than others. For instance, if you’re a property developer and you’re building a house from the ground up (literally), you can’t build until you have a solid plan, and you can’t put the roof on first. It may seem obvious, but if you’re project managing a team of builders, you’ve got to understand the dependencies so you can tell them what to do when.

The “critical path” refers to the tasks that must be completed for the project to meet its objectives. Note that if you have 5 tasks to complete but each of them has a dependency, the dependencies become part of the critical path too.

Milestones

A milestone can be used as a kind of checkpoint to indicate when a specific workstream has completed. Assigning a date to a milestone means you have a goal to work towards. Big projects usually have several milestones, which poses less of a risk than having one milestone for the whole project. That way, if a milestone slips, you can adjust the subsequent milestones accordingly. This means you have a much clearer idea of when the project will conclude.

Milestones can break up inter-project dependencies. For instance, in software development projects there can be milestones to indicate the start or end of requirements gathering, design, development, system testing, user acceptance testing and implementation. There is often some overlap between the tasks, and there may be dependencies that span milestones, but milestones can still be used to highlight that non-urgent changes will not be accepted beyond a certain date. This is important to avoid late changes throwing the project timescales out.

Stage reviews

A vital part of running a large project is reviewing progress along the way, not just at the end of the project. If certain tasks are not going according to plan, they need to be addressed before those tasks start impacting on the other tasks. Early identification and resolution of problem areas is an extremely important part of getting your projects completed on time.

What other tips do you have for managing a large project?

Since I posted my review of Todoist, I’ve been using it a great deal. There are some very good reasons to use this tool.

Combining several lists into one.

Whether it’s work for my day job, my three blogs, Injader, or Entrecard, it’s all in the list. I can use projects and sub-projects to split up the work. This is far better than my previous mess of Word documents, text files and notepaper.

I have even used Todoist to replace Eventum, an issue tracking package that I had started to use for Injader. It was taking so long to get everything into the system that I stopped doing it. On Sunday night, I sat down for a couple of hours, typed all of the remaining changes for Injader from my paperwork, and copied everything across from Eventum.

This is a massive benefit to me. Now I can keep track of everything, no matter which computer I’m on, or which project I’m tackling.

Breaking down large projects.

I’m going to look at this in a future post, but for now, I’ll just say that Todoist is starting to help me get stuck into larger projects with greater confidence. This is an unexpected bonus and something I’ve struggled with in the past. Previously, I’d get the projects done, but not without significant hassle and stress.

Scheduling your life.

I wouldn’t consider Todoist as a “lifestyle tool”, but when so much of my life involves working, it’s extremely important to manage my workload and keep on top of all the new and existing changes I’ve got to do.

Even when you have your fingers in as many pies as I do (and yes, I do like pie), Todoist allows you to see what needs doing on any given day or within the next few days across all that you do. This allows you to stay focused, stay motivated, and stay in control of your work.

Tools are important.

Using tools are an important part of our working lives. If you work from home - especially if you work for a small company, or you’re self-employed - you may need to find and evaluate your own tools. Todoist is a perfect starting point for anyone who needs to keep track of several different streams of work at once, or even just several to-do items on a single job. It’s highly effective, and is a recommended tool for Zen Workers.

• Give Todoist a try.

Todoist: much todo about nothing?

Thanks to fragileheart for suggesting this tool.

I’m a very organised person, but right now, my to-do lists are a complete mess. The list for my day job uses my tips for writing a great to-do list, but my other lists are all over the place. I have an online issue tracker for Injader changes, along with bits of paper, emails, text files, Word documents, the list goes on and on. Far too many things that I just keep losing track of.

To restore some order, I’ve decided to give Todoist a whirl. It’s a free tool that allows you to manage your work effectively. First you register and sign in, then you start adding projects. These are used for organising your tasks. Key features include: sub-projects, priorities, due dates, task schedule, task search, plus a few other things I probably haven’t found yet.

Some things I already like (bear in mind this is only after 30 minutes of use):

1. Adding projects, sub-projects and tasks is really quick and easy.
2. Shortcuts for setting event dates - such as “tomorrow”, or “next tue” - very handy indeed.
3. Collapsing projects is handy for when I don’t want to show you my private work
4. It’s a small thing, but I like the numbers that show me how many tasks I’ve got in a project, and I also like the way they add up when you collapse a project.
5. There’s optional Gmail / Firefox integration. Haven’t used it yet but it’s good to have!

Some things I would like to see:

1. Some better colours would be nice, or more of them. This is also a problem with labels in Gmail. Let me use a proper colour picker, and I’ll be much happier!
2. Better use of priorities, as right now they aren’t useful enough. I can view ALL priority 1 items, but not all priority 1 items in a specific project, and when viewing a project I can’t sort the items by priority. With Injader, dates aren’t really relevant, it’s all about the priorities.
3. I’d like to be able to drag an item to the left or the right as well as up and down. Reordering projects is handy, as is the way you can make a sub-project by indenting it, but it’s quite tricky if you want to do both.
4. Not so much a request, more of a small annoyance. Some of the shortcuts are weird and override standard functions. e.g. I often use CTRL + cursor left or right to jump between words. When adding a task or a project, I can’t do this because the same key combination is used to indent or outdent items.
5. The “add above” / “add below” terminology is confusing. Adding a project above or below the current item puts it at the same level, which kind of makes sense, except I thought it would actually make it a sub-project - so it appears at the level below the current item. An option to add a sub-project beneath the current project would help instead of having to add then indent it.

Overall, I think Todoist is a really handy application, and I’m going to try using it to see if it’s a suitable replacement for my existing methods.

Have you tried Todoist? What do you like about it? What would you change?

Before you kickstart your week, stop and take stock.

Every Monday at Zen Working, we’ll be looking at kickstarting your week. But before you can really kickstart your week, you need to stop - and review your techniques.

Was last week a good week or a bad week? What caused this? What would allow you to have a good week, and how can you avoid a bad week?

For instance, this time last week I posted 10 steps for writing a great to-do list. But there’s a lot more to Zen Working than reading about it. You actually have to do it. That’s why the first thing I did this morning was to revamp my old to-do list. I used a table instead of a straightforward list of items, moved the three main projects into their own table cells with headers, and put the rest under a Miscellaneous box.

Last week, I got ambitious with some big ideas, and that’s why I suggested doing a little dreaming on a Friday. Today, my wife and I took the weekend relaxation post and applied it to a Monday evening. We walked the dog and went shopping.

This week, I’d like to try and make Wednesday an email-free day, but instead of having another Ambitious Friday, I’d like to try and get some things finished by the end of the week. Perhaps next week I’ll try and address my long-standing difficulties with getting up in the morning - or maybe I’ll try and do it sooner.

In fact, I’ve already followed my own advice by writing this post - stopping to review the tips I’ve posted so far, looking at how many of them are already in place, and what I still need to work on.

So now it’s your turn. Have you applied any of these tips to your working life yet? What are you going to change this week?