We’ve completed the baby step exercise in the Overcoming overwhelm or The power of baby steps. This post provides additional information on how to schedule those baby steps. When working on a time-sensitive project, whether self-imposed or externally imposed, we must start from the desired completion date and work backward. However, before we start scheduling, we need to consider the time required for each step, task, and sub-task, the priority of each, and any dependencies between them.
When time is limited, we must first identify the approximate time required to complete each step, task, and sub-task. This information is essential to know the time needed to finish the project. If all the steps, tasks, and sub-tasks require more time than we have, we’ll need to find ways to shorten each time, extend the project deadline, or overlap work on steps, tasks, or sub-tasks that have no dependencies.
All projects include must-have items and nice-to-have items. Must-have items are required for the project to be successful, whereas nice-to-have items are not essential to the project’s completion. Therefore, we always want to schedule steps, tasks, and sub-tasks related to must-have items before those of nice-to-have items. When time allows, nice-to-have items can be added to the schedule later or overlapped with other steps, tasks, or sub-tasks.
Identifying dependencies is essential when scheduling to ensure forward progress doesn’t stop and cause us to miss our completion date. Steps, tasks, and sub-tasks may all have dependencies, so we must review our list carefully, identify which depend on one another, and then schedule accordingly.
Action steps:
- Review your list of steps, tasks, and sub-tasks and estimate the amount of time needed to complete each, taking into account the resources available to complete them.
- Identify any must-have steps, tasks, and sub-tasks.
- Identify an nice-to-have steps, tasks, and sub-tasks.
- Identify dependencies between any steps, tasks, and sub-tasks.
- Review the estimated time to complete all steps, tasks, and sub-tasks.
- When the estimated time to complete all steps, tasks, and sub-tasks falls within the project window, start scheduling the steps, tasks, and sub-tasks backward from the completion date, ensuring any dependencies are scheduled in the appropriate order.
- When the estimated time to complete all steps, tasks, and sub-tasks exceeds the project window, start scheduling the must-have steps, tasks, and sub-tasks backward from the completion date, ensuring any dependencies are scheduled in the appropriate order. Hold the nice-to-have steps, tasks, and sub-tasks for scheduling if time allows or additional resources are added.