Many life skills exist in the world. But to truly live well, you need to master just a few. Standard survival skills, financial management and project management. While the first two are self explanatory – the third one is new for me. And that’s the one I want to explore this week.
Everything that you do at work is a project in itself, including coming to work – if you work in a metro city. So project management which includes, setting objectives, deadlines, trackers and allocation of resources, planning for contingencies and communicating progress and updates becomes crucial.
Over the course of many years of working, I have realised that what separates most effective leaders from the rest is how they manage their tasks. Essentially they manage their many projects quite well through a mix of delegation, ruthless prioritisation and timely stock taking. They swear by their gantt charts but never fail to do a quick check on the field. They are mindful of the politics involved while working with various stakeholders and are sensitive to nuances of hierarchy and culture.
Strong project management skills are essential to achieve complex outcomes, with competing priorities. In a world where all projects are due as of yesterday, a sense of urgency becomes a way of life and it is easy to lose sight of what is important. Most productivity gurus stress on tools but what matters more are the skills of managing a project.
Now don’t get me wrong. I know there are project managers designated for tasks. But while they specialise in managing various projects, applying the project managers philosophy to life and work is very helpful.
Most goals that we pursue don’t come with a standard step by step checklist to achieve them. It is important to plan well for our context and then execute those ideas and then review them until we achieve our goals. Losing or gaining weight is not just about eating or working out, it is how we manage our life overall and that requires a lot of careful planning, execution and review.
But while we do this, we shouldn’t be consumed by dashboards and metrics for things that we enjoy. Overdoing productivity dashboards can create much more fatigue than the tasks themselves. So one must watch out for overusing one’s project management skills.