November 9, 2011

what do i want? what am i doing? and why?

Sunset at Varkala by Koshy Koshy

As the weather turns cold and the leaves fall from the trees, we start to reflect on the previous year and set our sights on the coming one. To reflect and review is a natural, cyclical impulse.

We do ourselves a favor when we stop to assess what we set out to do and why we are doing it and to discern whether or not it still makes sense.

If you haven’t already, take some time to look back on goals, lists and plans you made for 2011 and take a moment to ask:

Your goals: What were the reasons, desires or drivers behind the goals I set? Are they still relevant? How have they changed?

Your scope: Did the projects I set for myself accomplish my goals? Were/are there other things I should/could be doing to accomplish them? Where did I get side tracked? Conversely, did I miss opportunities because I stuck too rigidly to the task at hand?

Estimations and plans: Were the time frames I gave myself realistic? Did I give myself enough time? Not enough? Was I able to have some semblance of balance between work, life, family and everything else? Did I slack too much?

Going through these questions isn’t just an exercise to go through at the end of the year, but a few times throughout it. A good rule of thumb is to review your goals at least twice a year. If you have set up your projects and scope and are planning monthly and weekly you will have a sort of built in defacto review.

Taking a moment every few months to take a step back and ask the above questions while you’re planning will keep you from going too far down a path which may have made sense when you set your goals, but no longer does.

This is harder than it looks.

Life is not static; opportunities arise and must be seized – charts, plans and to-do lists be damned! On the other hand, we don’t want to jump at each bright, shiny object that crosses our path.

I am wrestling with this right now. I look at the past year and can say that I have accomplished much. A lot of these things, however, had nothing to do directly with my business. I did this knowingly and for reasons that were sound, but I fought with myself the entire time.

For example, my Hello Etsy! talk, these posts, and my Steal This Process Project and Time Management Kit were waaaay out of scope. In fact, the whole thing was an effort to get the word out about e.m.papers, ha! But it gathered momentum and took on a life of its own and has been a deeply gratifying project.

Having said that, in the coming year I want to do a better job of really focusing on a few key goals and making sure I prune back unrelated extraneous activities, no matter how enticing new opportunities may seem. But I also don’t want to lose sight of the fact that sometimes the surest path to a goal is not always a straight line.

This involves discipline and a lot of soul searching to answer the questions: What do I want? Why? Will what I’m doing help me get where I want to go? Reviewing helps us figure this out.

‘What do I want?’ and ‘Why’ are the alpha and omega between reviewing and defining goals. Reviewing sounds easy, but it’s not. Make sure not to skip or gloss over this important step.

P.S. As the link above points out, The Steal This Process Kit is now available and ready for download. It’s a 60+ page guide book plus a slew of templates (in both Excel or PDF formats) that walk through and help you implement the concepts I’ve been sharing here and in my workshop, which you can now view here. The kit is 20% off until Friday, November 11; use the code: earlybirdspecial. Thanks so much to all of you who have already signed up to the mailing list!

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June 15, 2011

What you do know: Metrics

Dixville Notch Rubber Factory
The final topic I want to cover in estimation is metrics. I’ve been trying all week to think of a way to weave the theme into a relate-able little anecdote or some kind of clever analogy, but I can’t. Metrics just ain’t sexy. They are extremely helpful though.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking about how we can’t control the future and we don’t know what we don’t know.

I will now make an abrupt about face and say that there are some things we do know.

You know it takes x amount of time to cut out ten patterns, or three hours to string beads onto your best selling necklace. You know how long it takes because you’ve done it a skajillion times.

The known amount of time that it takes to do these (usually production) tasks is a metric. Estimating and planning your time with metrics helps to avoid the Parkinson’s Law effect. This is why it is very helpful to track how much time you spend on what, as much as possible.

You may find that it only takes you 15 minutes a day to maintain your Facebook page, or it may take two hours, but once you know, you can plan accordingly. You may find that you can’t fit some activities into such neat, granular packages (although I highly recommend ‘time-boxing’ activity on social media!) If not, that’s fine, too; just create metrics for those activities for which it makes sense.

If you know it takes you thirty minutes to do something, and you’ve scheduled that amount of time to do it, you will appreciate the reality of that time, and get in gear to do it.

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June 8, 2011

Parkinson’s Law & My Lost Semester of Painting

Slacker Button from The Angry Robot

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

So states Parkinson’s Law. In other words, if you give yourself an hour to do something that takes fifteen minutes, you’ll take an hour to do it.

When I was in art school, I decided to take a semester off so I could have time to ‘be really creative’ and spend a lot of time painting. A school pal of mine warned, “Watch out, it can be really bad to have too much time, you won’t have any pressure to get stuff done.” “Hooey!” I thought, and then proceeded to spend an entire semester finishing crossword puzzles in my favorite Haight Street coffeehouse and catching up on Start Trek: The Next Generation re-runs. During the course of the entire semester I produced exactly one semi-finished painting.

I’ve since learned, that like many people, I need pressure to produce.

It has to be the right amount, though. Too much time pressure and I feel myself rushing through my work just to get it done; too little and it either doesn’t get done or I just can’t focus.

It’s important to consider this when estimating, which is why it’s good to try and set up metrics (which I’ll talk about  next week.) Knowing that the time you’ve allotted yourself is realistic can really help you focus and work mindfully.

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May 25, 2011

You Can’t Control the Future – or, Your Estimates Suck

Measuring Tape Clutch

Measuring Tape Clutch from FA2u

Estimating feels good.

It makes us feel like we can control things, that we can whip both ourselves and time into shape. But I’ve found that life has a way of resisting being scheduled (dammit!)

Don’t get me wrong, I stand by the importance of estimating. If we don’t try to get a handle on the amount of time it takes to do something, we run the risk of getting totally off track. But we also have to paradoxically accept that we don’t know what we don’t know.

We don’t know what kind of family emergencies will arise to throw our schedules to the wayside, we don’t know that we may run into all sorts of technical problems setting up our new blog that we didn’t anticipate, and as disciplined as we may be one week, we may end up screwing around on Facebook for hours the next.

In their book Rework, 37 signals’ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson support the ‘breaking work into smaller chunks’ approach of estimating in a chapter bluntly titled ‘Your Estimates Suck.’ They point out that:

humans are just plain bad at estimating, which is why the Denver Airport opened 16 months late with a cost overrun of $2 billion dollars and Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ finished five years late.

So don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re estimates are off. It’s a bit of a paradox but that’s part of the process; we plan, God laughs.

Alas, we can’t control the future.

What we can do is break work down into more easily predictable (and over time, measurable) chunks and revisit our estimates on a regular (weekly, monthly) basis. The shorter the time span of the estimate (one week, versus four months) the more likely the estimate is going to reflect reality.

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April 20, 2011

How Long? – Estimating Your Work

Modern Numbers Clock from Uncommon

In an earlier post I mentioned that ‘what’, ‘how long’ and ‘when’ describe the building blocks of project planning. We’ve just tackled scope (the ‘what’) so now it’s time to take a look at ‘How Long’ – or, in more technical terms, estimating.

Figuring out how to estimate your work is important for a couple of reasons.

You can’t accurately plan or schedule if you don’t know how long it’s going to take, and it also helps you figure out if you have scoped out too much (or too little) work.

So how do you estimate your work? For a small or indie-biz it’s pretty straightforward. Some of the projects or tasks you’ve set out for yourself you’ve probably done before; you intuitively know that it takes you, say, 4 hours to produce a new pattern and cut out pieces for 10 items.

For activities that are new or unfamiliar, it’s best to think through the individual steps of an activity, assign an amount of time to each step (start with a conservative estimate, meaning you allow yourself lots of time) and then track how long it actually takes you to get it done, making adjustments as you go.

For example, let’s say you’ve decided to increase your social media activity; you’d like to have more of a presence on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. These are ongoing ‘maintenance’ activities, so one way to estimate them would be to break them down into initial set-up and daily chunks:

Set up Facebook Page: 4 hours
Set up Twitter Account: 2 hours
Look up and join relevant Flickr Groups: 3 hours
Daily Twitter reading/responding/tweeting: 20 mins
Daily Flickr uploading/surfing/gallery making/ group sharing: 30 mins
Daily Facebook admin: 45 mins

In this example you would plan for a day or two of getting your accounts set up and then spend about an hour and a half a day on social media activities.

Breaking everything down and measuring it in this granular way is not always necessary; with time and practice you may not need to do it at all.

It can, however, be very helpful when you’re grappling with the enormity of new projects and activities you want to commit to, and not sure if and when you’ll have the time to get it done.

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