Stop doing ‘projects’🏁 and start passing ‘milestones’🚀

We found that working on what was called a ‘project’ made us obsessed with crossing the finish line to completion. Once we had however, we’d find the race wasn’t over.

We’re a content development agency that prides itself on being your editorial team, one that takes your goals to heart. We don’t just create posts, drop them on an audience, and walk away. We want to learn from every post we make for you. We want to see every post we make for you as part of something bigger. We want every post to signal a development in your story.

Say, for example, we are making a post for a tangerine company: “🍊”. Of course researching tangerines and putting words on paper are a very important part of this process. However, even more important, is making sure it’s distributed widely on social media, analysing its impact and learning from it. This all happens after publication.

Project

noun |ˈprɒdʒɛkt|

an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim: a research project | a project to build a new power station.
— OED

This is where the word becomes a problem. A ‘project’ is per definition something that stands on its own. It is something that lives in isolation to serve a specific goal. It is not part of a larger context.

We found that because we used the word “project” for posts we were making, we spent far too much time making them ‘just right’, whilst completely ignoring them after we’d published them.

There are many aspects to making a successful post, and making sure we use the right words can help covering them all.

If we want the 🍊 company to get the most value out of our contribution, we can’t see publication as the end of the process. Publishing the post is just one moment in the middle. Seeing this post as a ‘project’ would lead us to believe that we’d finished after publication and could just move on. The distribution, analysis and learning would likely never happen.

We’ve tried a range of words to replace ‘project’, from “expedition”, which seemed to describe something even more isolated, to “feature”, which conflicts with a word from publishing.

For now, partly inspired by software development and GitHub, we’ve settled on:

Milestone

noun |ˈmʌɪlstəʊn|

a significant stage or event in the development of something: the speech is being hailed as a milestone in race relations.
— OED

The ‘milestone’ is a particular point that we want to pass in the entire process, not a specific thing we want to finish. The word “milestone” helps us think about the bigger picture, what we’re trying to achieve with our content. It forces us to be mindful that our work doesn’t end when we publish.

We want our relationships with clients to be sustainable and durable ones. We need to take their goals and missions to heart and understand what our role is in them. Every post we make is part of that bigger goal and should add significant value, even after our ‘project’ is ‘finished’.

Using the word “milestone” can help us realise that the 🍊 post is not something that needs to be hurled into the world while we forget about them and pursue new ‘projects’. We now realise passing the milestone is just a step in our journey. Not a finish line to cross, but just one lap in a race. A race where the aim isn’t to be the fastest, but to get the furthest.