Get clear on the true purpose behind the project to motivate, to simplify, and to have the insight to recognize opportunities later.
Idea generation, writing out all the tasks you can think of that will help the project’s purpose. Best when quick and spontaneous to silence the inner-critic and leave you with a pile of possibilities.
Rounding up similar tasks into folders to reduce complexity.
Defining what you will judge the importance of tasks by.
Evaluating how much potential a task has towards the project’s purpose.
Estimate how long a task takes.
Finished, with this information ROI prioritization takes your list and orders them with tasks having the “biggest bang for the buck” on top, so you always know what the next action is.
You begin a project by getting clear on exactly what it is you are after. What is the direction that you want your life to take by undertaking this project? You can begin to uncover this with a short list of questions associated with each project that you can answer. There are also questions designed to build motivation.
When you are clear on the direction, or the purpose behind the project, tasks that no longer fulfill that purpose will jump out as being wrong. So that if the plans fall apart, or your assumptions turn out to be incorrect, or new opportunities arise, you will have that insight to step back and make great decisions that get you results on that direction that you are after, instead of blindly following a plan that no longer applies.
The way to have good ideas is to have many ideas. The people who tend to freeze when seeing a blank project are the ones who are trying to come up with a good plan in their mind before they put it down. The problem is that coming up with ideas, possibilities is a different mind process than evaluating if an idea is good, doing them at the same time is inefficient.
It is like trying to excavate an Egyptian burial site and at the same time try to figure out if each solid object that you find has value. You get so used to seeing rocks that you might toss some artifact hidden in clay. You probably won’t be a very good digger if you pick up each rock you uncover.
So first dig for the artifacts, don’t worry about which ones are good artifacts or bad artifacts, collect all of them. Then later, you can evaluate them. Keep these processes separate.
To do this with tasks, quickly write out a list of all your ideas for what you can do to move your project forward as quickly as you can. Even put down some ideas that you know are bad on there, getting them out into the system will prevent you from coming up with them. Sometimes these silly ideas can end up being your best ideas, or they can be the stepping stone to your best ideas. Either way, the faster you go, the more ideas you will get past your internal critic.
Now that you have a long list of tasks from the collect stage, you want to begin to package them into folders. A folder can be thought of as a mini-project that belongs to the project that it is inside. They can have their own priorities and estimates and moved around as a unit.
By working with folders, you ensure that you won’t lose track of any tasks as they are associated with small lists of related tasks. The longer the lists get that you are working from, the easier it is to begin to lose track of items.
After we know what possibilities there are for making progress towards our project, we want to rank them so that we are always making the best use of our time to maximize the goals of the project. We do this by determining the time estimate for a task and how much impact the task has for the project. We keep these values separate so that they don’t influence each other when we come up with them.
With a list of folders and tasks you can begin to analyze why they are important to a project.
You already did some of this work when you began by determining why you are doing this project. However now you can get clear on why a task helps out a project. This will make prioritizing them easier.
If each task was an Olympic diving contestant, how would you rate the dive that they do for the project? What would be the things that you are looking for? What qualities would be most important?
A good way to check that you have all your metrics accounted for is to think of the reasons why the tasks that you have written out would help your project. And write those down. Perhaps you write a blog because of the following reasons:
Next to each reason I came up with a rough importance.
Now I’m clear on what makes a task important to a project, I can now set the impacts.
Once I know what criteria I’m looking for in a task. I go through all of the tasks and begin to give them an impact, the value that they provide towards the project.
To begin, I select a task that I’m familiar with that is about average. I use this as my yardstick task. I start by giving it a default impact value of 100.
Now I walk down the list of each task and I compare it to the measuring stick task. Which one is more important and by how much?
If my project is eating healthy, my yardstick task might be a turkey sandwich, with whole grain bread and light mayo. A hamburger might have more fat (70% lean ground beef) and more carbs (not using a fancy unrefined bun), so I might give it an impact of 20 towards eating healthy, meaning it is only 20% as healthy as the sandwich. I may find another meal, like sardines with brown rice to be twice as healthy as the turkey sandwich, so I would give that task an impact of 200, twice the impact of the turkey sandwich’s 100.
It is important that I don’t take into account how long I think the task would take me, only how much impact it has towards the project. You can imagine it as how much value does it provide to the project, to the real reason that you are doing the project, if it were magically completed?
Now you want to run through all the tasks and give them your best estimates for how long you think they will take. If how long it will take seems vague, try breaking it down into smaller tasks so that it becomes easier to tell how long it will take. As you do this, you will envision the steps more clearly and it will become easier.
How much work does it take to roast a chicken? No idea. Let’s break it down:
Filling this out in the planner gives me something like this:
Figure 1. Sketching out estimates for project: Roasted chicken.
Folders can be given estimates as well representing the total estimate for all the tasks within. The folder will use the longest estimate, either the estimate given to the folder itself, or the sum of the child tasks’ estimates. Using folders with estimates you can quickly sketch out areas even if you can’t think of all the detailed tasks and their estimates.
Once a task has both a time estimate and an impact, it is automatically ROI prioritized.
Tasks that have a strict order can be dragged and dropped into their proper order. This order will stay no matter the impact and task estimate, until the manual priority is removed.
You now have a list that is prioritized with the most important tasks are the ones on top. Your next action is always the task that is on the top of the list, the next action after that is the one below the top item in the list, etc.
As you work through the list, re-evaluating the impacts of tasks and re-adjusting estimates, the order may change to reflect what makes the most sense with the updated information. Using the prioritization this way, you will be able to focus single mindedly on the details of the current task without having things slip through the cracks.