Curb Your Appetite For Projects: The Foundations of Productivity

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at another fundamental rule: curb your appetite for projects.

Eyes Too Big For The Stomach

During holiday meals, if I took too much food and couldn’t finish it, my mother would look at me and ask if my eyes were too big for my stomach. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices of the holiday meal, and only seeing some of these foods once a year made me want to try everything. I started, but I couldn’t finish.

Projects can sometimes be the same way. We see all the things that we can do, and we start many things, flitting from one start to another, never finishing a project before we move on.

Knowing If You’ve Exceeded Your Appetite

When you take too much food, the evidence is before you. How about when you take on too many projects?

There are a few warning signs you can look for:

• You don’t know where to start. You have plenty of things to do, but you don’t know how to pick which one to do. There are just too many.
• You see reminders of unfinished things constantly. Looking around your house or office, you see things that you have started and not completed.
• Deadlines have slipped. Maybe more than one.
• Your feel overwhelmed with everything you have to do. There is simply too much on your plate and you know you will never get it all done.

Many people who have this issue also don’t have a realistic idea of how many things they have started. There might be a vague notion, but no written list of everything that have committed to or started.

The Beauty of Limits

Limiting how much you work on at any one time gives you a faster completion rate.

This is simple math: let’s say you have two projects, one needs 10 hours, and the other 6 hours. If you have one hour per day to work on these projects, how long will it take you to complete them?

If you work on both projects at the same time, it will take you 12 days to complete the 6 hour project, and then if you continue the same rate on the 10 hour project (because you have started something new), it would be a total of 20 days start to finish for both projects.8

If you work on the short project first, you can get it done in 6 days, and then an additional 10 days for the second, cutting your time by 4 days!

Limiting what you work on at any one time gives you a faster completion and throughput.

Curb Your Appetite for Projects

So how do you curb your appetite for projects? There are a few simple rules to follow:

• Know what is on your plate. Have a list of everything you have committed to and/or started. Keep it updated.
• Don’t use your list for dreams. Have a separate list for things you want to do some day. David Allen* calls this the “someday/maybe list”. Keep your project list clean with only things that you have committed to.
• Keep your load level. Don’t start something new without finishing or abandoning something else. Allowing even short things to creep on will bloat the list to unmanageability.
• Don’t say yes without checking the list. Practice phrases like, “I’ll have to let you know” or “I’ll check my schedule”. Get into the habit of not committing to anything without evaluating your current load.

All it takes is vigilance, a relevant list, and the ability to stop yourself from saying yes without checking.

Conclusion

Are your project eyes bigger than your stomach? Curb your appetite with a few steps, and start getting things done.

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As a question for my own curiosity, how many of you know how many projects you are working on at the moment, and what is that number? My own is 11, some of which due to their nature won’t be done until 2017.