One Simple Thing From a Project Management Course That Changed My Life
Do you know what success would look like? Often I felt frustrated and incompetent only to realize that I never thought about my goals. How could I ever know how to achieve them? Am I on the right track? What if I have achieved the goals already?
Sometimes ideas can have a big impact on your life. For me, one of those times happened when I was watching a Coursera course about project management.
A simple question
This course started with a question: “What is a project?”
Such a logical question from a project management course. What is the difference between projects and not-projects? If something is not a project what is it?
Project v.s. process
A project has a clear goal and limited time, cost, and resources. Its goal is to deliver a particular result or a product.
A lot of what we do in life are projects. Some are small others not so much. Getting a driver’s license, graduating high school, getting into university, and getting a job. Setting up a Medium account, and publishing your first article.
So what are non-projects? Those are processes. Something that you do regularly to produce a recurring result.
Processes are: manufacturing cars, maintaining an Instagram account, doing daily yoga, or any daily habit.
Processes and projects have different goals and objectives. And different definitions of success.
Projects are time-bound and processes are open-ended. Projects have one (big) goal, and processes focus on doing and achieving the same thing over and over.
Implementation in life
Every time you want to do something — ask yourself this: is what I want a process or a project?
Want to lose weight? That’s a project. You want to have a particular goal in mind. You want to have a timeline and the opportunity to check your progress.
Want to create a habit? That’s a process. Your goal here is to keep doing it. Showing up is enough. Skipping a day is also okay (not preferable, but normal). Checking your progress can be helpful, but it can be in a more relaxed manner. There is no deadline.
You can approach your goals as a combination of projects and processes. Start with a 30-day challenge (project) and use the momentum to transition it into a habit (process).
Knowing the goal of each task makes a lot of difference
For everything you are doing take a pause and think about these:
- Is what you need to achieve this goal a process or a project?
- Get clear not only on what you want to achieve but on how to achieve it. Set a specific goal. And by specific I mean the one for which it is easy to see whether is it achieved or not. Is it showing up every day and practicing a skill, or is there something particular you want at the end of it?
- Actually think about the timeframe for achieving the goal.
- What are the resources you might need: time, money, energy, etc.
Learning to separate projects from processes was a lightbulb moment for me. It explained an incredible amount of frustration I have been having. For a long time, I felt stuck in everything I did. The Project management course showed me that I needed clarity in what I wanted from each activity.
Sometimes the most important thing is taking a break and thinking about the details of what you want.
Thank you for your time!
