GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

model to rear its ugly head in brainstorming, making people jump to premature evaluations and critiques of ideas. If you care even slightly about what a critic thinks, you'll censure your expressive process as you look for the 'right' thing to say. There's a very subtle distinction between keeping brainstorming on target with the topic and stifling the creative process. It's also important that brainstorming be put into the overall context of the planning process, because if you think you're doing it just for its own sake, it can seem trite and inappropriately off course. If you can understand it instead as something you're doing right now, for a certain period, before you move toward a resolution at the end, you'll feel more comfortable giving this part of the process its due.

A good way to find out what something might be is to uncover ail the things it's probably not.

This is not to suggest that you should shut off critical thinking, though—everything ought to be fair game at this stage. It's just wise to understand what kinds of thoughts you're having and to park them for use in the most appropriate way. The primary criterion must be expansion, not contraction.

Go for Quantity, Not Quality Going for quantity keeps your thinking expansive. Often you won't know what's a good idea until you have it. And sometimes you'll realize it's a good idea, or the germ of one, only later on. You know how shopping at a big store with lots of options lets you feel comfortable about your choice? The same holds true for project thinking. The greater the volume of thoughts you have to work with, the better the context you can create for developing options and trusting your choices.

Put Analysis and Organization in the Background Analysis and evaluation and organization of your thoughts should be given as free a rein as creative out-of-the-box thinking. But in the brain- storming phase, this critical activity should not be the driver.

Making a list can be a creative thing to do, a way to consider the people who should be on your team, the customer requirements for the software, or the components of the business plan. Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that make up the next stage.

Organizing

If you've done a thorough job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you'll notice that a natural organization is emerging. As my high school English teacher suggested, once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you'll automatically notice natural relation-ships and structure. This is what most people are referring to when they talk about 'project plans.'

Organizing usually happens when you identify components and subcomponents, sequences or events, and/or priorities. What are the things that must occur to create the final result? In what order must they occur? What is the most important element to ensure the success of the project?

This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from informal bullet points, scribbled liter-ally on the back of an envelope, to project-planning software like Microsoft Project. When a project calls for substantial objective control, you'll need some type of hierarchical outline with components and subcomponents, and/or a GANTT-type chart showing stages of the project laid out over time, with independent and dependent parts and milestones identified in relationship to the whole.

A 'project plan' identifies the smaller outcomes, which can then be naturally planned.

Creative thinking doesn't stop here; it just takes another form. Once you perceive a basic structure, your mind will start trying to 'fill in the blanks.' Identifying three key things that you need to handle on the project, for example, may cause you to think of a fourth and a fifth when you see them all lined up.

The Basics of Organizing

The key steps here are:

• Identify the significant pieces.

• Sort by (one or more):

  • components

  • sequences

  • priorities

• Detail to the required degree. 

I have never seen any two projects that needed to have exactly the same amount of structure and detail developed in order to get things off people's minds and moving successfully. But almost all projects can use some form of creative thinking from the left side of the brain, along the lines of 'What's the plan?'

Next Actions

The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving. The question to ask here is, 'What's the next action?'

As we noted in the previous chapter, this kind of grounded, reality-based thinking, combined with clarification of the desired outcome, forms the critical component of knowledge work. In my experience, creating a list of what your real projects are and consistently managing your next action for each one will constitute 90 percent of what is generally thought of as project planning. This 'runway level' approach will make you 'honest' about all kinds of things: Are you really serious about doing this? Who's responsible? Have you thought things through enough?

At some point, if the project is an actionable one, this next-action decision must be made[3]. Answering the question about what specifically you would do about something physically if you had nothing else to do will test the maturity of your thinking about the project. If you're not yet ready to answer that question, you have more to flesh out at some prior level in the natural planning sequence.

The Basics

• Decide on next actions for each of the current moving parts of the project.

• Decide on the next action in the planning process, if necessary.

Activating the 'Moving Parts' A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every next-action step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component's having to be completed first. If the project has multiple components, each of them should be assessed appropriately by asking, 'Is there something that anyone could be doing on this right now?' You could be coordinating speakers for the conference, for instance, at the same time that you're finding the appropriate site.

In some cases there will be only one aspect that can be activated, and everything else will depend on the results of that. So there may be only one next action, which will be the linchpin for all the rest.

More to Plan? What if there's still more planning to be done before you can feel comfortable with what's next? There's still an action step—it is just a process action. What's the next step in the continuation of planning? Drafting more ideas. E-mailing Ana Maria and Sean to get their input. Telling your assistant to set up a planning meeting with the product team.

The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

When the Next Action Is Someone Else's . . . If the next action is not yours, you must nevertheless clarify whose it is (this is a primary use of the 'Waiting For' action list). In a group-planning situation, it isn't necessary for everyone to know what the next step is on every part of the project. Often all that's required is to allocate responsibility for parts of the project to the appropriate persons and leave it up to them to identify next actions on their particular pieces.

This next-action conversation forces organizational clarity. Issues and details emerge that don't show up until someone holds everyone's 'feet to the fire' about the physical-level reality of resource allocation. It's a simple, practical discussion to foster, and one that can significantly stir the pot and identify weak links.

How Much Planning Do You Really Need to Do?

How much of this planning model do you really need to flesh out, and to what degree of detail? The simple answer is, as much as you need to get the project off your mind.

In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and the action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint. Most projects, given my definition of a project as an outcome requiring more than one action, need no more than a listing of their outcome and next action for you to get them off your mind. You