Holy Crap! You Want It When?

Deadlines rule your life?  Feel like someone is always chasing you?    Having dreams about getting to the airport just as your plane is leaving? 

Oh, I hear you.  Do I ever.  My whole life is about deadlines – so I’ve learned something about how to manage complex projects in a short time frame.  Some of this you’re not going to like hearing, but here goes…

My first tip is this:   Control your project.  The temptation to farm out pieces of a project to other people is huge.  Susie Q is a researcher – hey, she should be able to write the evaluation section.  So Susie Q tries, struggles, and then gives you a draft the day before the due date.  And it’s junk.  Then what?  You end up re-writing someone’s junk which, believe me, is far worse than writing it from scratch yourself.  My advice is meet with Susie Q early, get everything out of her brain you can, and write the section yourself.  In other words, control your project!

Second tip:  Keep the decision-makers in the loop. On a big project, you need to meet with the key people at the beginning of the project, when you have an initial draft/findings and then at the end.  In between, you want to keep good email/phone communication to make sure they are comfortable with the strategic decisions you are making.  Don’t go to them with the ticky stuff – then they will (rightly) think you are over your head.  Critical thing is to manage the people who will need to sign off/accept/endorse your product.  If you don’t, they’ll jam you at the end and you will have big deadline issues.

Third suggestion:  Manage yourself.  First thing to remember is that “panic is the enemy.”  Panic generates hysteria which generates junk.  Do what you need to do to keep your wits about you – deep breathing, a walk, commiseration with colleagues – but do it quickly.  Don’t spend hours calming yourself that you ought to be spending on your project!  Another thing to remember is to force yourself to focus on what’s most important.  Keep asking yourself — what really matters here?  What will make this product successful and useful?

I have a bunch of other little tricks:

• Starting work at 4:00 a.m.  You can get more done by adding a 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift than working in the evening.
• Keeping information for a project in folders — a proposal might have 8-10 different folders.  This keeps me from shifting into an hysteria-producing top of my desk search mode.
• Not responding to tickiness.  I don’t like getting whipsawed by different people sending me comments.  So I figure out who’s a) the smartest reviewer; and b) the reviewer in charge and just listen to them.
• Physically laying out a project on a table top.  It is so easy to get lost in a document when you’re only reading it on the computer screen.  Print it, lay it out page by page on a big table, and walk around the table and read it.  Assess how it looks, how much attention you’ve paid to various topics, how it hangs together.  This exercise will tell you where to focus your limited time.
• Pretzels and Diet Coke.  Need I say more?