An insider overview of project management

As you certainly know now, my day job is management consultant. If I had to choose one word to summarise it, I would use Projects. Every time there are proper projects in an organisation, some consultants are likely to be around. Consultants are professionals of carrying out projects, because projects are about change. And we all need to change to some extent, as organisations or individuals.

As change is everywhere, projects are everywhere, and consultants are everywhere. And among those consultants, the most emblematic category of them re project managers.

A project manager is a bit like a French Prime Minister : it is a very exposed position, which assumes all the responsibility in case of failure but which has a limited power of decision as the strategic decision makers are in the shadow: the sponsors, the ones providing the funding. The upside of the PM role is to get significant credit when a project is carried out end to end successfully.

What does success mean for a project ? Deliver the pre-defined scope, to the required quality, in time and in budget.

But the definition of failure is much more difficult to determine : has a project failed from the moment that any of this factor has been compromised, e.g if we deliver only 95% of the scope ? Sponsors would say Yes, the project team would say No. And they both have valid reasons to say so.

The major problem is the following : it is impossible to perfectly estimate the resources required in order to deliver a certain scope to a certain degree of quality. An estimation, per definition, recognises the idea that not all the required information was available at the time the estimate was produced, therefore it is non sense that this estimation is perceived as the golden benchmark against which the project performance is assessed on the way. And unless we already burn 30% of the project’s money by having the project team working on a more accurate estimate, the following is an absolute truth :

It is impossible to have a perfect estimate of the resources required to deliver any project.

Usually, a project burns more resources than initially planned because many problems faced on a project are unknown at the time of the planning. The only way we can take them into account is through a buffer called contingency, but estimating the right level of contingency is another difficult question to answer. It is actually the first one that a Project manager has to solve – before the actual start of the project – and he/she will then be committed to deliver the actual project within the resources provided (assuming he obtained what has been requested).

This is why the Project manager role is highly difficult : you may be the one digging your own grave if you are unable to deliver something that you committed to deliver based on the resources you asked for. In order to optimise the chances of success, a project manager better take the most appropriate approach in order to deliver his project.

Various competing approaches to project management or delivery exist and are documented, and I am going to try to present the main ones to you in a nutshell.

 1. Waterfall

Waterfall is the most traditional way of doing project management. Using a top down approach, it is logical to the human mind. What is the waterfall approach ?

1. We plan
2. We analyse
3. We design
4. We build
5. We test
6. We deploy
7. We support

Simple and easy. This approach is called waterfall because the Gantt chart of the Project Plan looks like that :

Now let’s remove the business jargon. Basically, waterfall means : First, I try to think of what I want at the end with all the details possible. Once I have a clear idea of that, we build it. Then we test it, and when we are sure that it is fine, we’re good to go with it. And it can be anything: a house, a painting, a book, a blog post, etc.

Sounds perfect doesn’t it ?

Well not really : just imagine that the project is about a painting a house in a mountain setting. And half way through the build you realise that you actually prefer the house to be next to the sea rather than in the mountain. However, your painter has already drawn the mountain perfectly, with all the details specified in your vision. Sounds difficult to now turn that into a sea…

Therefore, with a waterfall approach, in case of big problem on the way, it is very difficult to find tactical solutions to remediate to it. The dilemma is « should we go for the mountain or should we just scrap the current work and start it again from scratch ? »

That’s why many people in the project management community say that waterfall is bad.

But no, it’s not bad, not at all. It definitely has great advantages, such as :

• It forces you to think about your product first before building it, and clarify your vision
• It is definitely appropriate in situations where re-work is almost impossible, such as the construction industry : Once your house is designed, you just go for it, and there is no way back. Therefore you better spend enough time and money on the design.
• It may save execution resources if the design has actually been done in a neat way due to the very small amount of re-work.

So no, waterfall is not bad at all, it is just not the most appropriate approach in all situations, especially the ones where you may have to change the direction of a project quickly. In those situations, it is more suited to have a more Agile approach.

2. Agile (scrums)

The Agile approach is the absolute reference in the world of software development. Why? Because most software can be configured and reconfigured easily and on an incremental basis. And Agile is all about this: Deliver a product incrementally. Moving forward step-by-step allows the project team to easily change direction or even go backwards, without major negative impact on the project in terms of cost, timing or quality. So, instead of having long planning, analysis, design, build and testing phases, we have a sequence of multiple small cycles of development (=build) and testing, fueled by ongoing analysis and design.

Let me tell you more about Agile. In an Agile framework, the team is not called team but scrum. This is because in a scrum (appreciate the rugby analogy), every team member has a dedicated role, but everybody works together on the same items at the same time in order to ultimately deliver the targeted result (the end product). The scrum works together during cycles of set periods of time (usually two weeks) called sprints, during which they try to deliver a sub-set of the project scope. Ideally, this sub-set is a minimum viable product, which should provide the client with some tangible part of the project’s expected value. The purpose of the minimum viable product is to realise the project benefits on an ongoing basis, and not only at the end of the project, as it would be the case in Waterfall. Therefore, if the project’s sponsors decide to stop the project prior to the end date that was initially planned, they still get some value out of the work performed.

That’s an area where Agile is wonderful: you start the work not when you have a full and comprehensive idea of the end-product, but when you just know enough to get started in order to fulfill a part of the expected outcome.

A sprint works as follows (the timelines may vary from a project to another): 1 day of planning, 9 days of development (=actual work) and test.

You can visualise the benefits: you build your product step-by-step, which means that you don’t take the risk of f***-up the design once and for all. If things need to change, it’s not a big deal, it’s not too late to change it. And that’s how Agile is powerful.

At the end of a sprint, and before moving on to the next one, you want to show to the main stakeholder, the Product Owner (the one to decide what the end product should look like), what his/her current product looks like. If the Product Owner is happy, the scrum cracks on with the next items in the backlog (=list all of the items to be delivered). If the Product owner is not happy, the scrum re-works some items. The concept of backlog is key in agile. The backlog is the list of the incremental items that need to be delivered in order to complete the project. They typically represent 0.5 to 2 days of work for a scrum, and are prioritised in order of importance. The more critical the item, the higher in the backlog it is.

Each item is sized via a storypointing exercise: each item is associated a number of points based on the effort required to deliver this particular item. Points are only a relative measure. After a sprint or two, the scrum has an idea of how many points it can deliver during a sprint (e.g. 60 points delivered per sprint), which allows the chief of the scrum, the scrum master, to assess whether there enough resources available to complete the project. For example, if the full backlog left to be delivered contains c. 180 pts and there are 3 sprints left, then it should be fine to complete the scope of the project. If ever there were 300 pts to deliver but only 3 sprint, the scrum master or project manager better have a conversation with the sponsor in order to reduce the scope of the project or ask for more money to deliver it all.

Agile’s magic is its ability to incorporate change in the middle of a project without giving-up what has been already done. On the contrary, Agile considers change as an opportunity to make the product even better than initially imagined. If ever good ideas pop-up after the start of the project, it can be added to the backlog easily and delivered in due course. A project manager can therefore leverage on the the team’s creative potential by using an agile framework. Even better, the feedback on the interim product can be integrated into the backlog, in order to make the end-product even better than expected initially. Amazing, isn’t it?

However, don’t be mistaken, Agile is not perfect. Or, as for waterfall, it cannot be applied in all situations. For example, you wouldn’t take an agile methodology in order to build your house. Because a house cannot be consistently re-worked: if you build your bathroom on the first floor and then realise that you want it on the ground floor, it would be too late! On the other hand, for software development, if you change your mind about something, your developer just has to change a bit of code, which may takes only a few hours. Worth considering…

My personal view is that the benefits of the Agile approach can be realised much beyond the borders of the world of software development. And I deeply believe that Agile may be well suited for households trying to put their personal projects on track. But more on that point later…

3. Lean

Lean is not an approach of project management per se. Originally, it is more of an industrial approach (the method has been immortalised by Toyota) put in place to make physical products in the most efficient way, i.e. by avoiding waste along the whole supply chain. The underlying in Lean is that a product goes through a pre-defined sequence of activities, and only move from an activity to another when:

• The interim product has been tested and meets the requirements for the relevant activity
• The products ahead have been pushed to the next step as well –it is key to avoid bottlenecks in Lean as building-up inventories takes space and too much inventory is a waste of space.

The Lean approach can be summarised in one tool: Kanban – a Japanese word which means signboard. Basically, a Kanban is a sort of taskboard, divided in columns, with each of them representing one activity of the production process:

I am not an expert in Lean so I won’t spend too much time on it (the more I say, the more I take risk to say some rubbish!), however it is worth noting a few points:

• Lean and Agile are close to each other to some extent, particularly in the way they both divide a product into small pieces. Therefore the two approaches are not completely different from each other (some people try to reconcile both in a Lean Agile approach.
• A key feature of Lean – and it is a primary differentiator vs scrum
  Agile – is that it focuses on continuity, hence the concept of continuous improvement. As Agile operates in short sprint cycles, Lean goes a step further by removing any break in the development cycle: you constantly bring something new into the production line and you improve your processes on the go.
• Lean introduces the concept of limit of the Work in progress. It is forbidden to have more than x (pre-defined) items at a certain stage of the production. They have to leave the process step before bringing more things in (you can imagine here the benefits it could have if such methods could be applied in our personal lives)

4. Common sense

Ok, I admit… I made-up that one, Common sense is not a widely recognised project management approach. However, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t relate to some reality. Look, go on LinkedIn and check all your contacts who put Project Management in their skillset. I can promise you that at least 80% of them believe that their common sense and a bit of experience is sufficient to claim themselves as proficient in project management.

Again, as for the others, Common Sense is not bad per se, and it usually follows the patterns of the Waterfall approach, just a bit more informally: you do a bit of planning, you get started, following more or less the plan, and you follow your own judgement to see whether the result meets the expectations. Well, it works for small projects, the ones too small to justify the costs of external consultants. And it often relies on the dedication of the internal staff assigned to the project, usually on top of their day job, and who are usually torn between the desire to stand-out and the burn-out.

The limitation of Common Sense is when we start to speak about properly funded budgets, with very senior business sponsors, keen to make a strategic change in their organisation. Obviously, in those situations, Common sense does not offer enough guarantees, however, in my experience as a management consultant, I have to admit that I already worked with people with no project management skills, who were trying to rely on Common Sense as a last resort. But to be honest, it usually turns into another approach, very very close to Common Sense…

5. Absolute chaos

This is the Common Sense approach, but badly executed. This is the worst nightmare of a management consultant, and it happens regularly, even in highly renowned institutions. No vision, no plan, no consistency, and in the end: no result, no benefits delivered. Actually, there is one outcome: a de-motivated team, conscious that the work they do on a daily basis goes nowhere. The team members experiencing Absolute chaos usually end-up being disengaged, and many of them just resign.

Here is a visual of a project using the Absolute Chaos :

But here is what the client usually sees:

See below a few tips to recognise if a project you are involved in uses the Absolute chaos approach:

• As I said above, project team members are disengaged. They look frustrated or demotivated and don’t sound as they believe in the value of their project
• Usually, the same people don’t like their project manager
• The team spends more time and effort on project communication, like producing slides over and over again for the client rather than producing output and getting some value for the same client
• Priorities change all the time, even sometimes several time during the same day
• Project Plans are no more than just chevrons and arrows on a page, and have no real meaning whatsoever
• Asking questions is badly perceived (whereas it is usually valued in more normal environments), as if you were suspected of having the intention to destroy the projects rather than contributing to its success
• At 7pm, you are asked to stop what you do and start a presentation (which relates to point 3), which needs to be ready for tomorrow morning (of course), so you stay til 11pm (byebye the birthday dinner with your fiancée) to finish the slides and you are summoned to attend the 8am meeting the day after so that your manager can blame you in front of the client in case your slide doesn’t say what they expect to hear.

Well, you got it, right?

Conclusion: what was the point?

I could speak hours and hours about project management both the theory and my experience of working in various projects. The real purpose of this post is to ask the question on how personal projects could benefit from the approaches described above. And the conclusion is:

• We all agree that we don’t want Absolute Chaos in our household (there is usually enough chaos as it is already!)
• Common Sense is the approach we usually take. But as mentioned earlier, it requires a lot of commitment and dedication, which is difficult to find when we already have a full-time and stressful job.
• Waterfall is what we turned to (without knowing the term) when we are very ambitious about something, But usually, just planning the whole thing makes us dizzy and the size of the whole thing usually makes us believe that we will never have the time and the determination to go to the end. And we stop. (a bit like the Eric Moussambani effect, go check it out!)

What is left? Lean and Agile. Usually those new concepts for people not used to applying the principles in their work places. But when you think of those principles:

Step by step…

Small tasks…

Get started when you know enough…

Obtain some outcomes quickly…

Start with the most important thing first…

Continuously improving…

Changing your mind but still going forward…

It sounds like it may be of interest to whoever wants to make his/her dreams come true, doesn’t it? Maybe the failure in our personal projects is not only a problem of motivation, but just a lack of basic project management skills, whereby anybody could get started with what they want to achieve most in their respective lives? I personally think so…

The best productivity tool on the market is affordable for all

This article is a follow-up on a more thorough analysis about the ultimate self-organisation system.

As you already know, the ultimate self-organisation system doesn’t exist, and any quest to search for it is doomed by definition.

However… however… however…

If the ultimate tool had ever existed, I know what existing tool would actually be the closest. A tool that gives you absolutely freedom on everything you do. It can do:

• to-do list
• Kanban
• Calendar
• Plans
• Drawing
• Creative design
• Instant messaging
• Slides
• Time-killer
• Journal
• Notepad
• Scrapbook
• Calculations
• Tables
• Reminder
• Taskboard
• Storyboard
• Moodboard
• Vision board
• SKATEBOARD (no I’m kidding, not that one)

Indeed, I found only one tool able to do that… Here it is:

S-I-M-P-L-I-C-I-T-Y it is – a NOTEBOOK with a PEN!

I keep this little notebook with me all the time. It is next to me on my night table at night, then goes to work with me. In the office, it is on my desk, and it goes back with me home. All day, except during some meetings (as you know now that I am bringing my laptop into meetings again…!), this little thing is very rarely more than a meter away from me.

Why?

Because it captures all my ideas. Every time I have an idea, I fix it on this little notebook, before even knowing whether this idea is good or bad. When an idea comes, there is no point in assessing whether it is a good or a bad one, because the idea is not mature enough yet to be properly valued. All I care about when I have an idea is to make sure that I don’t lose it, that it just does not vanish from my mind and potentially never comes back.

Ideas can come at any time, and I realise it even more since I have had this notebook. When I am about to fall asleep, during lunch time, when I brush my teeth, it can be any time. And the forms of the ideas can also vary. For example, when this is about this blog, sometimes the ideas are just ideas of posts. Or concepts I should develop. Or a killer phrase that I just want to sneak in somewhere. Or a joke! Sometimes the ideas are like visualisations: I can picture how to arrange things on my white board in order to make my self-organisation system even better. Sometimes I already write half of a post!

But every time, every single time, at any time of the day or night, at any place, I can fix the idea on my notebook, in order to reflect the idea I have in the most pure and genuine way. Pens don’t betray ideas, even if your handwriting is sh*** (and mine is definitely sh***, just ask my teammates), all the rest does. Anything digital kills ideas as they want to shape them into their own framework: powerpoint, outlook, paint etc. those apps make ideas lame. But a pen sublimates them, as if your fingers were just giving birth to those ideas… Well, I should certainly stop there.

I still hadn’t a best-friend-type notebook like that a month ago. But I had lots of ideas and was just moaning to my wife how there were lots of thoughts in my mind but no energy for action. My wife told me to buy a notebook and just write in there all of those ideas. And it has been a life changer, really.

Of notepad and actions log

Yesterday, I decided that I would change the way I was managing my workload at work. I was using wunderlist until now, an app designed to manage to-do lists a bit in the GTD mode. Wunderlist was not ideal because I was a bit overwhelmed by the endless amount of items I had to deal with. So I had decided to split those into multiple lists, but as a result I was constantly switching across multiple lists, which was not making things any better.

Also, I thouht there was a lot of wasted space on the screen (I work on a big screenwhen I am on site) as one entry takes almost its full length. Well, it was a bit heartbreaking to switch to another app as I liked Wunderlist’s interface, but I had to move to something more visual, something more kanban-like (more details to come soon), which allows to move stuff around in order to reflect progress, and not only to just tick the box as tasks were a simple pass or fail test.

I decided to go for Trello, a tool that I had already used over the past year wit my employer. Not the most glamourous interface, but it is flexible and does the job alright. Massive advantag as well, it is cloud based, therefore I can access and update from anywhere, with any device, providing that there is an Internet connection. As you most likely read my post around time management, you know that I have pretty much three hours of transport every day, therefore the latter is a critical advantage for me.

So I moved all my actions to Trello, and I realised one of them was « Follow-up on actions from planning session – see notepad ». Then I realised :

• When I have a meeting, I take a notepad
• I write the actions on the notepad
• After the meeting I key those actions on my (official) action log to actually record and prioritise the actions

HOW INEFFICIENT !!!

Then I asked myself : Why (the hell) don’t I write them straight away into my actions log at the time the action is mentioned ? That would save me time, plus I wouldn’t have to fight with my horrendous handwriting in order to understand what I wrote 24 hours earlier. And, even better, it will mean that my actions log will become the primary and golden source of the work I have to do, ready to just be prioritised and actioned.

As very often, we fail at using self-organisation tools because we don’t make them central and necessary enough in our environment, I believe I made an easy obvious, but still positive step in the right direction.

However, the mystery remains on one point : why wasn’t I doing that earlier ? I now know what was the blocker : I don’t like going to meetings with my laptop as this is a source of distraction. Usually, we need a good plan and a robust approach in order to remove such bad blocking thoughts. But surprisingly, overcoming it has been very easy for me : I realised that instead of going to meetings with my laptop, I was actually going with… my phone. In terms of distractions, this is even worse… hum…

That’s how I re-instated the use my laptop into my meetings. In terms of cultural revolution, pretty effective isn’t it ? Believe me, there are no such things as unbeatable bad habits when you are a management consultant. Well…

What work taught me about the value of time (2/2)

This article is the second part of a longer one about time management. You can find the first part here

 

Lesson Two: the pennies are accurate, but the billions are wrong

What most people have wrong about time is that they are trying to gain two or three minutes here and there instead on focusing on the structural time-consuming areas of their lives. I am always amazed how people convince themselves how productive they are because they have a little trick to manage their emails efficiently, tidy their cupboards like this or like that, the right app to manage their to-do list, use several colours on their calendars etc. But they often don’t realise that they are wasting ten times as much time in other areas.

The office is full of highly time consuming and unproductive tasks. They even occupy sometimes more than 80% of our work. In three words: Powerpoint, e-mails and meetings.

Colouring powerpoint decks? Yes

Millions of pending e-mails? Yes

Meetings all day long? Yes

Value of the time spent on  all of that? … (silence that means « none » or « very little »)

We say in French that in the accounting field, “the pennies are accurate, but the billions are wrong”. It is exactly the same thing about time. We focus on the few minutes lost here and there and try to be more productive, but we don’t want to admit that most of our work activities taking most of our time are actually of low value. The remedy to such situation is to completely re-consider the way we approach work by re-focusing on the important stuff and leave til later or even undone the least important tasks. Calling back the important client, attending only the important meeting with the important stakeholders (=the ones making decisions) etc.

At home, this is no different. Taking the time to perform the important tasks is the beginning of freedom, as this is beginning of making progress on the projects that matter. Whatever the place, work or home, making time for the important things is maybe the most critical success (work) or happiness (home) factor, as it consists of giving ourselves the control over what is in our hands.

On the other side, gaining time, which consists of conquering time through little organisational tricks, can only be a tactical fix. It is useful to gain a few minutes here and there, but it is not suitable to mitigate issues with structural time allocation such as focusing on the least important stuff. In short, gaining time is only a relevant effort when the fundamentals are right. If I was going back home at 10pm every night, would I want to bother buying a new brush to make the washing-up in 5′ instead of 10′ ? Certainly not. However, I may want to re-consider my working hours.

This is a reality that I realised only very recently in my own life : if my personal life matters to me, and it does, then I need to make more time for it.

I always try to leave work at a decent time, irrespective of my “workload”. Firstly because I decided that I should not be the slave of work, but work should adapt to my life. Secondly, because I realised it was actually true – we can take control of our work! I never achieved more output than since the day I stopped working beyond 6pm almost every day. Why? Because when I tell myself “I’m here til 6pm, so we need to get that project going within this timeframe”, I genuinely work from the perspective of leaving at 6pm, and what matters most gets done on time. This is a positive pressure to perform. Under the assumption that I would instead tell myself “It’s all going to be fine, I will spend all the time it needs to make this project successful anyway”, it would be completely different, as I could afford doing useless powerpoint decks, nice slides,  nice reports and using other consultants rubbish tools that just waste a hell of time. In the end, II would have to work twice as much and fast at the end of the project for a very uncertain result.

The conflict betwen professional and personal lives does not exist. A balance between both is best enabler for us to perform in both at our best. In most case, work will tend to grow on the personal time, therefore consciously taking time for ourselves becomes the answer.

 

Lesson 3 : « I don’t have the time » actually means « I am not taking the time »

The liberal credo says: “you’re the only judge of how well you spend your time”. So basically, if you want to spend all your time working, you can, that’s your choice. On your phone? Your choice. On League of Legends? Your choice. Sleeping? Your choice. Drinking? Your choice (but be careful).

All of that is absolutely your choice, only your choice. Therefore, in that context, and especially as we want to be a very much empowered person, it is inappropriate to constantly put forward the eternal and most commonly excuse of all when it comes to pushing back on stuff we are offered: “Sorry but I don’t have time”.

Again, let’s imagine such situation in the office. My manager is telling me: “Can you plan out your work for the next month, make sure it’s aligned to the project plan, and give it to me by COP tomorrow?”.

Me:  « Sorry but I don’t have time at the moment »

Then what happens ? The manager will either say « Why ? What are you working on ? » and then determine whether I should prioritise the task he just gave me over the one I am working on. [Little separate note for all the bankers reading my blog : this post assumes that we are referring to a normal job, with relatively standard working hours. It does not assume that days are normally extensible to 17 or 18 hours of work per day]. What matters is the priority of what we do. We got quite a fixed amount of time to spend on producing output during the day, the question is : what should be done first and foremost ? So that what is left out at the end of the day is the stuff which does not matter as much (eg. the colleague – you know the one you don’t really like – who asked for some help).

In the private space, things are no different, except that it is impolite to ask somebody why he or she believes that the other stuff left they have to do is more important than what you are offering them now. But the conclusion remains the same, ie. The other person thinks that he or she is the « stuff left out at the end that doesn’t really matter ». And the reality is that it is true. « I don’t have time » doesn’t mean « I already have something planned », it means « there are other more important things than yours that I have to do ». Usually, this more important thing to do is work, and it is commonly accepted that work to do is non arguable.

However, it completely contradicts the liberal credo, that is supposed to make me a very free person : « you’re the only judge of how you allocate your time ». Which means that when I cross the line of what are reasonable working hours, I am the only one responsible for what happens to me. Therefore, if I don’t have time, it means either option of the following :

1. I am not that much of a free person as I think, and it seems that I am unable to take the time for others or myself because I am too dependent of my work.
2. I am just not interested in what the other person is suggesting and I don’t want to take the time for that

The purpose of this blog is not re-visit the way I manage the relationships with my relatives, so I won’t make any judgemental comment about the option two. But option 1 is interesting because in this case I actually believe that I don’t have time because of adverse circumstances. The more I say that I don’t have the time, the more I actually believe it, and the more I think that the whole world is against me and that I have to carry all its heavy sufferings on my shoulders.

This is why acknowledging that instead of « not having the time » I just « am not taking the time » is the real first act of resistance I can do in my life, as it will mean that I am in control of my time, and therefore or my existence. Achieving the latter without the former is a Mission Impossible.

 

Conclusion

The funny thing is that the overarching lesson that work just taught me to about time is the following : to be less dependent on… work !

What work taught me about the value of time (1/2)

I feel like I am in a scientific mood today, and I think that it is a shame if I don’t make you take advantage of such a great opportunity. More specifically, I am in a mathematical mood, which I reckon does not happen very often.

However, it comes handy as I would like to work out with you the mathematics of time. Hold on there is nothing too fancy here, or too philosophical – just basics math, the math that we are constantly experiencing but denying at the same time: the math of a standard day of work.

And as an example for my case, I will use what I know best and better than anybody: my own standard working day.

This is how a standard day of mine actually looks like:

6:00am: the alarm rings

6:15am: get-up and get super-fast ready

6:45am: departure for work

8:15am: arrival at work (looooong journey!)

8:20: start work

12:00pm: lunch

12:45pm: afternoon work

5:00pm: internal work

5:45pm: departure home

7:15pm: arrival home (loooong journey)

11:30pm: sleep

Now, from another angle, this is how the same data looks like:

13:15 hours spent outside of home

3 hours spent in the transport

8 hours of pure work

6:30 hours of sleep (that’s not enough I know, especially as this is past midnight as I am writing now)

10:45 hours spent at home, including 4:15 hours available (outside of sleep and preparation time).

In those 4:15 hours, it’s fair to assume that 1h30 is spent on dinner prep and eating, as well as on other various unavoidable tasks.

Which leaves us overall with about a bit less  than 3h to spend at home and joy all the delights hat life offers us.

Well, no need to be a mathematician to come to the obvious following conclusion: 3h available in a day, that does not sound much, and it is not much compared to the 15-16 hours during which we are awake on a standard day. Even worse, those 3h sound even less when we acknowledge that we need to use them to do also all he boring and annoying stuff such as the chores, the cleaning, the paperwork etc.

That was the first part of the reasoning, nonetheless the conclusion is the same as the irrational one we draw on a daily and five times a day : it looks like we are not going to have enough time to do it all. Irrationality would also push us to add « and I be obliged to sacrifice my hobbies ».

However, none of that is true. To discover why, see below three lessons I learned from work about time, and that are perfectly relevant at home as well.

Lesson one : If I were on my death bed…

Let’s try and reverse the perspective : Imagine that five days a week you manage to take full advantage of your 3h available. That’s 15 hours. Plus let’s assume that we have another 6h in total for the week-end (which is easily achievable in the case of a week-end at home). That’s 21 hours.

Sounds like we can do quite a lot in 21 hours right ? If you have the pleasure to live with your other half as I do, and if this person has roughly the same rhythm as you, you guys have in your household around 42 hours available to move forward the various stuff in your life. And it doesn’t count most of the week-end time !

Multiply that by four, and this is about 168 hours available in the month in order to do the stuff.

Now look at me in the eyes an try to tell me you still have no time. Well if you do, you’d either be a liar or an incompetent. That is of course a lot time to do stuff. Not to do everything we dream of, but certainly a decent chunk of it. When I think of how I would behave in a professional context if that time could be used to produce some output, I wouldn’t hesitate a second in order to use in the most productive way. 1h left ? I can certainly make tangible progress. 30’ ? Reply to my emails. 15’ ? Organise my day for tomorrow. 5’ ? Quickly debrief with a colleague.

At work, if I decide to procrastinate at any point, the consequences are quite significant :

1. I feel bad because my firm charges a lot of money everyday to the client for my time, and I find that unfair that they don’t get the value for their money
2. I put myself behind the project plan and, even worse I become a liability for my team and the whole project
3. I stay later in the office in order to catch-up and sacrifice some personal life time, and I put additional pressure (=stress) on myself

It’s a lose-lose situation, and I have absolutely no interest to go down that route. Why would it be different at home ? It shouldn’t be. The consequences are less visible and material but only impact myself and my household. No project manager to ask me about progress. No teammates awaiting my input etc. Just my dreams remaining at the state of dreams. It’s not less important.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the question of the use of time. Too often, in our personal life, we miss a critical point : we never really question ourselves about the real value of time. Keeping ourselves busy and constantly pushing our « plans » til later are the two primary symptoms of some subconsciously driven blindness about the lack of meaning of our existence. It is avoiding the question : what do I want to do with the time I have now ?

That question is sneaky because it pressurises any subject threefold : « What do I want » calls on self-questioning, about what is the meaning of our lives. « with the time I have » makes us cope with the non-lasting dimension of life. Time passes and we don’t have an infinity of it. Finally, « now » imposes an immediate decision, that can’t or shouldn’t be delayed.

Personally, I recently realised that all the time-killers in my life were some kind of « drugs » preventing me from asking myself this central question (I write it again for you) : What do I want to do with the time I have now ? I just proved to myself that I actually had some decent amount of time available (3 h a day bla bla bla), but these blockers were persuading me that I had none. There were mainly two of them :

• Working hours
• Procrastination

The former consisted of making myself believe that I was fulfilling myself as a person by being successful at work, therefore I was extending my working hours in order to convince myself that I was indeed successful and important in my job. My personal time was cannibalised by my own ego and my thirst for social and self-recognition.

The latter was about filling current time with non-productive or non particularly enjoyable activity in order to persuade myself that « now » was actually not the right time to take control of my life. From a personal perspective, procrastination could be embodied by my phone, because it was making me procrastinate without even me realising that I was procrastinating, therefore without me feeling too guilty about that.

The sure thing is that in both case, more or less subconsciously, I was trying to avoid the question of the best use of my time, because it was bringing me back to the question of the meaning of my life. And instead of acknowledging that my life was not going where I had imagined it would go, it was much much easier to just dive deeper into work or stay a bit longer on facebook or twitter (on my phone…).

That’s how at least 2 out of my 3 hours per day were vanishing in useless activities, a bit in the same way as the way I was spending most of my teenager’s time on MSN messenger speaking to my friends. So many hours spent on that sh***, and today I don’t even remember an interesting thing from it, in terms of how it actually made my existence more exciting. It just didn’t. Today, I value my time too much to afford debilitating myself (too much) with those things. And those three hours a day I have available, I am dedicated to make the best of it. What does it mean ? I think it is quite universal : spending time with the people I love, and doing things I genuinely enjoy to do.

And the best test I found to check whether I was on the right track was: If I were to be on my death bed right now, would I actually die in peace ? The moment I realised that my answer would be no was the exact same moment I decided to stop just filling my time with stuff, but to consciously use this time to do meaningful things.

The second part of the article will be published onver the next couple of days

Is this blog about « washing the dishes more often » ?

The other day, I presented my project to a good friend : I am starting a blog, and this is about experiencing in a fun way practices and methods from the office at home. I really believe that we can apply some of those concepts in our households, especially when it comes to project management, and that it is going to help a lot etc.

His reply : « so basically you’re going to tell us to do the washing-up more often »

Well… actually sort of!

The washing up in itself is of very little interest to me. What interests me though, is understanding why we are so sharp on doing everything in the leanest way and with a lot of rigour when we are in the office, including the most boring and annoying tasks, but we are equally as slacking when it comes to managing our own personal projects, despite them being one of the only things in the world we have a complete control on.

One can deal with the most detailed accounting rules but is unable to put a dish in the right place within the cupboard.

One can sell the most sophisticated financial products on the market to the most demanding clients but is not capable of cooking some pasta.

Therefore, why would I add more blabla to the endless literature already existing about getting one’s own professional life in control whereas this is the area when things are going for the better ?

From that perspective, if I prefer to get people do the washing up more often and prevent the dishes from piling up in the sink, as it would mean that I have succeeded in my endeavour to have a real impact on their lives.

Dishes in the sink perfectly embody a tragic dimension of our existence, where the busy white collars we are give up on taking care on the most simple and obvious things of our lives, like washing up the dirty dishes, because our subconscious mind is deeply embedded with the idea that there will be a better time to do it… later. And in the same way as we constantly postpone the washing-up until it becomes overwhelming, we postpone the most enjoyable moments of our existence whereas it only belongs to us to make a difference now, for ourselves and our relatives.

Yes, the washing-up tells a lot about someone, don’t underestimate it !

And next time I will be asked the same question, I will reply « Absolutely ! If I don’t do it, nobody will, and I will feel guilty about it ». And the other person, confused, will go back to his job and leave at 10pm, then go back home at a time, at which his partner is already in bed, and he will pass by the kitchen and give a glance through the door. The dishes will be piling up in the sink, which will make him think again of our conversation. After a couple of seconds  thinking, he will go to bed, trying to make sense of what I was saying earlier.

The path for true success

When it comes to managing our personal lives or projects, it is always interesting to put our initiatives into perspective and never lose sight of the reasons why we started them in the first place.
In all the literature on the topic of personal life management, irrespective of it coming from books or from the Internet, all authors seem to be to some extent OCD with one single word :

Success.

« What do successful people do in the morning ? », « 10 things that successful people never do », « The financial habits of successful people », « 5 things to reply in the office to have a successful career »

Success… Blablabla… Success… Blablabla…

Now let me tell you what I think about success and successful people : I absolutely don’t give a sh*** about them. On the contrary, I believe that considering life achievements from the sole perspective of success is already a failure in itself, and does not deserve any respect or consideration.

I don’t believe that millionnaires and billionnaires living a completely depraved life, slave for their money and their insane (and often unsustainable) living standards should be considered as role models whatsoever within our societies. The opposite should actually prevail – their way to be and to do things should be avoided at any cost as the obsession of success is nothing but deeply pathological. Also, in most cases, those that we usually consider as being « successful » owe their fortune more to favourable circumstances, such as inheritance, a network, a degree etc. than to their hard work and intelligence only.

It’s time now turn towards the people who are the truly successful people in the society, those that we actually value most on this blog : people who find happiness in just living the way they want to live, doing what they enjoy to do, with the people they love. Those are the people I have an infinite respect for, as I believe this is exactly how I would define a fulfilling existence.

One could argue that in both cases, people are trying to achieve the top of what they do, try to be the best, and that it is in the end no different. But I fully disagree with such argument because there is a fundamental difference between both categories of people : The former look for the success of themselves, whereas for the latter the success of their project is more important that their own, because the project itself is what makes them happy. Sane ambition can only be built on the feeling of self-fulfilment, not the other way around.

My life has taken a turning point a few weeks ago when I started this blog. The reason for that is that I am genuinely interested in the various ways of working, how to make the best of my time and try to achieve more while keeping things simple. And contributing to this blog is a project that I really enjoy. And those are sufficiently solid foundations to build the blog’s success on. 

My own success doesn’t matter, I am very happy in pyjamas and slippers.

Fighting the “Eric Moussambani” effect thanks to Project Management

Being very excited about something is undoubtedly a positive thing, however it can sometimes play tricks on you. There is one negative effect of being over-excited that I am myself very easily subject to.

This effect is what the pyjamas & slippers consultant in me calls the Eric Moussambani Effect. Have you heard of Eric Moussambani? No? Then have a look (the interesting bit starts after 30s)

I am a bit mean, it’s true… but the illustration is pretty clear, isn’t it?

Why are we all concerned by the Eric Moussambani effect, and particularly myself? Not only because I am absolutely terrible in a swimming pool. We are all concerned because this is exactly what happens to us every single time that we are overly excited about any personal project: we burn all of our energy on the first steps, instead of saving our resources in order to move forward steadily on the long run, which a key factor of success on those occasions. This usually leads to the vanishing of our enthusiasm, but with some form of denial at the same time, because our personal projects then remain at the state of “dream” forever.

Now, I need to tell you how extremely recently I have been hit by the Eric Moussambani effect: it was in relation to this actual blog, a few weeks ago. The week started, and I was getting very excited about publishing my first post, the Introduction. Back home, once all the boring stuff was done, it was then 9:30pm. Before starting to draft the article, I had to upload the home page header picture. I tried a few, played with the picture size, had a few iterations, etc. The picture published, it was now 10pm. But I was still very excited about the article, and there was no way I would go to bed before having a first stab at it. At midnight, only a few paragraphs were written, i.e. not even 50% of the post – less than what I had expected, but still a good start.

On Tuesday – the day started and my throat was a bit sore. Very likely, my immune system got weakened by the sleep deprivation. However in my mind, things were already non-negotiable: tonight again, I would not go to bed unless this first post was published (this is the blogger version of what in your teenage sounds like: “I am not going to bed unless I am beating Brazil with France in expert mode at FIFA). Half past midnight, the post finally got ready. Ready to be proof-read so that I could correct any mistake? Nah, no need to do that this time, it was already quite late. I published it straight away. I then went to bed, but barely more than five hours until the alarm would ring, and only 8 hours before my first client meeting on the next day. It doesn’t sound like enough sleep, does it?

On Wednesday morning, my wife read the article on her way to work. She spotted five to ten mistakes. I corrected them straight away, but they should have never made it to the published articles…

When you pay attention to the details of that story, you can actually start to identify the first symptoms of the Eric Moussambani effect: It was only the beginning of the project, but after two days I already started to be a bit sloppy, I compromised on quality to some extent, and I put myself in very bad conditions for the next days because of sleep deprivation. The only truth at this stage was the following: If I were to continue on that path, there was no way that the blog would make it beyond twenty articles or so. And my subsequent personal project beyond the blog would never materialise in anything tangible. It will remain a dream, you know the one we actually deny having given it all up…

A measured, controlled, and moderate approach to one’s personal projects is a critical success factor for this project. Any truly exciting project in life is a long adventure, and the last thing we want is for it to drown (!) because we can’t hold the distance after taking a too intense start.

Now let me get dressed, put my tie on and get into my consultant’s shoes.

Does the Eric Moussambani effect exist in the business world? To some extent, but for sure in a much much smaller scale than in the personal space. Why that? In two words: Project Management. We could also add “boring“, but some (odd) people find their boring work so exciting that over-excitement can still be relevant sometimes.

In the business world, whenever there is a strong appetite for a project, employees are not just going to start working on it the day after the decision was made to launch it. Whenever a project is decided, here are the questions that are asked: What scope? What timelines? What resources? In summary those are the basics of project management. The business environment acknowledges that a new project stretches the existing resources in place, therefore the battle is usually fierce between the various stakeholders around timelines, budget, project team size, expected outcomes etc.

Carrying out a project is not only about will and determination. Those components being necessary, they are nonetheless insufficient. We need to be clever about how we move our project forward, find ways around blockers, mitigate and manage risks and issues, use our charms to handle the difficulties, build the key relationships for success. That’s is what project is all about, irrespective of it being in the professional or personal area. In business, we’ve got between 8 and 10 hours a day available, and we need to make the best of it in order to achieve the ultimate objective: deliver the expected outcomes to the right quality, in time, and in budget.

Project management may certainly be the main area where business can bring most to our personal lives: So many methods available, so much literature written, so many videos on the topic ready to be watched, and so many success and failure stories to learn from… And the first of this lesson is certainly about the first step usually performed when a project has been kicked off: planning. It almost always starts with planning, in order to give the necessary framework to the execution of the different but interdependent tasks of the project. In the same fashion, any personal project should always start with some sort of planning. No need for a fancy or complex plan, but just a simple, actionable plan, which gives us enough to start with, as well as the comfort of reminding us every day that what exact effort is required, no less, and above all… no more!

PS: A massive big up to Eric Moussambani for his performance and his courage of being the first athlete to represent his country for the olympics on a swimming competition. He deserves a clap from us all!

Make things… fun !

When things we do are not fun in essence, it is very much down to us to make sure that people enjoy their time with us.

We succeed in making boring things fun when people say : « ooh that thing was actually shit, but I still had good time ! ». Let’s think of our old days at school. How many many math teachers did we have until our A level or even later ? A math class is a math class, and we can’t have too high expectations about enjoying ourselves while calculating exponential functions.

But the experiences of the math class with each of those teachers were completely different experiences, the most successful ones being when the teacher managed to make his/her class enjoyable, maybe even interesting.

It is in our power to make things fun, and I had completely forgotten that critical point when I tried to get my wife on board with my initiative of transforming the way we manage our personal life together. My mistake was to assume that my wife would share the same excitement as me when it comes to use the new ways of doing things I have come across.

I took 20’ of her time and showed her my masterpiece (more to come on the details at a later stage) : white board, post it notes, columns etc. But I didn’t focus on making it an enjoyable experience, I didn’t make it fun, so it wasn’t great, Despite all my efforts, we were still speaking of when and how we do the washing-up, our shopping or we go the bank. Definitely not fun.

But the missed opportunity is somewhere else : no drinks, no snack, no comfy chairs, and a real mess on the living room’s table as we were speaking and organising our life – that is why I really failed in our first session aiming to manage the boring stuff in our lives but also the most exciting projects.

It was worse than the most terrible math class. But at least the lesson is now learnt.