I am a believer in the power of project management.
As a professional project manager for twenty years, I have witnessed project success drive business results. I have also proven that project management can change lives and help achieve personal transformation. Now I am sharing some practical tips and techniques that you can use to help achieve your own personal goals, live your best life and become a PM Believer.
Anything Not Everything: An Important Life Hack
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything!
This is one of my favorite sayings in life because it includes two critical reminders.
- We all have the power to accomplish anything that we want to achieve.
- We can’t do everything at the same time.
This second reminder is an essential rule of life. Each of us has limited time, energy and capacity for how much we can accomplish at one time. Surprisingly, this means we can achieve more if we only focus on one thing at a time. We need to limit our work in progress because we can’t do everything.
To enable this focus, project managers need to become experts in prioritization.
Project managers determine priorities through every step of our daily process. Every issue logged needs a priority ranking. Every risk needs its probability and impact evaluated to determine the overall exposure. The critical path through the project plan (the longest path through the project where, if one task slips, the end of the project extends) needs to be calculated.
Prioritization becomes part of a project manager’s DNA. This helps them ensure that the work being done by the team is the most critical work. Because we don’t have time to focus on the lesser valuable work.
The value of prioritization doesn’t end with your workday. Prioritization is a key life hack to achieve your personal goals too!
But, you don’t have to take my word for it; you can test it for yourself. Skip the prioritization and try to accomplish all of your goals at the same time. You will find that it is a quick path to failure with your life goals.
Do you believe me? Ok, now let me help.
Here are three quick steps to help you unlock the magic of prioritization.
What?
What goal is most important to you right now? Start by going through all of your goals and “someday” dreams and choose the one goal that is most important to you to accomplish right now. That doesn’t mean the others aren’t important, just that you are choosing one goal to start working on today.
How?
Next, make a list of everything you might need to do to achieve this goal. Get it all down on paper to free up space in your mind.
When?
Finally, review the list of steps you just made and rank the items by priority, or “force rank” the list. Start with number one for the most critical step right now, then move on to two and continue until each step has its own rank.
Now, Go to Work!
Once you have your force-ranked list of steps needed to achieve your goal, simply start with number one and move on from there.
Repeat this process as you check each item off of your list. As you progress toward your goal, you will identify new steps that are needed. You will also realize that some things on your original list were not required.
Most importantly, as you progress towards your goal, your understanding of the priorities of your steps will become more clear. So, be ready to adjust as you progress.
Are you ready to be a PM Believer?
We can accomplish anything but not everything. We have limited capacity for what we can achieve at one time. So how do we make the best use of our days? We can rely on a key life hack that is part of the project manager’s DNA.
Need some help getting your priorities in order? Let’s talk!
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