6

BUILD YOUR PROJECT ROAD MAP

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

HENRY FORD

Now that you’ve made space for your project by using the Five Projects Rule and creating a weekly block schedule, it’s time to break your project down into the chunks that you’ll get done during those blocks. The project pyramid will be in play here too, but we’ll also be looking at the ingredients that make up your project.

The goal here is to build a project road map, which is a specific kind of project plan that chunks, links, and sequences the project over time. The road map helps us convert the vertical list of to-dos into a horizontal, time-based plan. With the vertical list, you have to do the sequencing work every time you look at it. Thinking about time is hard enough to start with, but when you add multiple chunks of multiple projects to the picture, you jump from arithmetic to calculus in terms of complexity and difficulty.

Your project road map will show you which chunks of your best-work project you can put on deck today or this week , rather than leaving your work stuck in Someday/Maybe Land. But speaking of difficulty, let’s start with how to make sure you’re not making the project harder than it needs to be from the start.

OPEN FLOW WITH YOUR PROJECT BY BUILDING FROM YOUR GATES

A few years ago I got an email from a reader — let’s call him Arnie — seeking advice on how to grow his (written) blog. In his email he mentioned that he wasn’t good at writing and didn’t enjoy it. A sentence or two later, he mentioned how much he loved talking and creating videos.

Being distant enough from his own stories, it was clear to me — and probably to you — that he was asking the wrong question and fundamentally pursuing his goals in the wrong way. He didn’t need to grow his written blog; he needed to start a podcast or video blog.

What was so striking to me from his email was that the answer was right in front of him, but he just couldn’t see it. While this may be an extreme anecdote, it’s far from an isolated incident of the common counterproductive pattern of choosing harder-than-necessary ways to accomplish goals. If you’re being honest with yourself, I bet you can come up with something you’ve done over the last couple of weeks that could have been done a lot easier if you had based it upon your advantages.

Rather than start your project on hard mode, why not take the upper hand by playing to your strengths? Playing to your strengths makes the project easier to do, and you’ll find flow more often when you’re using your strengths. The days of thriving creative giants are different precisely because they’re in flow while doing their best work.

Strengths come in different varieties, though, and the acronym GATES is a handy way to consider what you should base your projects on. GATES stands for:

​ Genius . What seems to be an expression of an inner creative force.

​ Affinities . What you’re drawn to do.

​ Talents . What seems to be your native skills or capabilities.

​ Expertise . What you’ve learned through experience and practice.

​ Strengths . What seems to come easy for you.

For our present discussion, it’s not important to dive into how we acquire and hone each element of our GATES, since positive feedback and continuous practice cultivates all of them. Once you have your GATES in play, you can start to build out how to overcome your tendency to make projects harder than they need to be. Stop for a moment and list some of your GATES; don’t stop until you have about fifteen. I’ll wait.

If you struggled to come up with fifteen, it’s probably because you followed the common pattern of only putting recognized professional skills on the list, but those are just a small subset of GATES. Consider the following as GATES:

​ Curating music, paintings, or art

​ Decorating

​ Organizing data in spreadsheets

​ Interacting with kids or pets

​ Knowing Greek mythology

​ Woodworking

​ Making cobblers

​ Coming up with catchy names

​ Performing improv

​ Orienteering

​ Throwing parties

​ Building workflows

​ Deep reading

I could go on, but you get the gist. Your list of GATES is unique to you, and while it’s true that not all of them are relevant for your project, asking “Which of my GATES can I leverage to complete this project?” is a great place to start.

Consider the graph below that has a column for GATES, methods, and goals. Methods is the only new category here, and I mean for it to be broad enough to cover actions, strategies, tactics, or techniques, since they all relate to how you’ll go about achieving a particular goal.

Most people find it easiest to work backward from the goal, but we’re not going to move right into listing methods, since doing so divorces the methods from your GATES. Rather, we start with GATES on the left side, then fill out the methods in between.

Let’s return to Arnie. Let’s assume his goals were to build an audience and increase his business revenue. That would go in the right-hand column. What Arnie did, though, was put “writing” in his method column. He mistook the method for the goal.

But consider what it would look like if he started with his GATES and then filled in the method. In the left-hand column, he would put “talking” and “creating videos.” It would then be clear that the pathway between his GATES and his goals would be podcasting and video blogging, and only doing as much writing as he absolutely had to do.

JONATHAN FIELDS​ YOUR GATES POINT TO A DEEPER SPARK

Your GATES may be more than just a sign of how to get a project done — they may be pointing to a deeper “purpose imprint” or identity. We’re all born with a certain imprint for work that makes us come alive. Work that lets us wake up in the morning and know, deep down, we’re doing what we’re here to do. Work that sets us ablaze with purpose and, fully expressed in a healthy way, becomes a mainline to meaning, purpose, expression, and flow.

I call this imprint or identity your Sparketype. It’s not about specific jobs, titles, industries, or fields. Yes, we often have fleeting glimpses of jobs, projects, teams, businesses, industries, causes, activities, adventures, endeavors, or moments that give us passing hits of “Yes, please, I’ll take some of that!” But we don’t know why we feel that way, we don’t understand what made it so powerful for us, and it never lasts for long.

Truth is, your Sparketype operates more on the level of “source code.” Think of it as the DNA-level driver for what makes you come alive. Discovering this unique imprint helps answer the question “What am I here to do?”

In my research I’ve identified ten Sparketypes: Maker, Maven, Scientist, Essentialist, Sage, Performer, Warrior, Advisor, Advocate, and Nurturer. How do you discover them? Interestingly, your GATES can serve as potential discovery signposts, since they often serve as pathways of expression for your Sparketype.

The more you integrate your GATES and Sparketype into the work you do in the world, the more your life and work will be deeply nourishing, on purpose, fully expressed, and in flow.

Jonathan Fields is the bestselling author of three books — his latest being How to Live a Good Life: Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom — the executive producer of the popular Good Life Project podcast, and the creator of the Sparketype assessment. Go to Sparketype.com if you want to take the free assessment and see what Sparketype your GATES are pointing to.

It’s true that Arnie may have eventually brute-forced his way to success, but damn if that wouldn’t be the hard way. Think about how much discipline and courage he’d have to muster to continue to improve his writing, as well as how much head trash he’d have to work through to get there. A fraction of that energy spent using what he was already good at would have gone much, much further.

You may have noticed that Arnie discounted his GATES. That’s also a common pattern. This is where your success pack comes in, as they can and will often reflect your GATES back to you. And if you seed it, they may also help you see how to weave your GATES into the methods to use to reach your goals.

While we’ve discussed the GATES framework in the context of a project, consistent use of your GATES across your life and work helps overcome head trash and having too few resources from the air sandwich. If you’re playing from your weaknesses, it’s much easier for shame and struggle stories to win out, and whatever resources you have don’t go nearly as far. It’s easier to identify your GATES when you apply them to a specific project.

BUILD A BUDGET FOR YOUR PROJECT

While a few projects can be completed with just your time, energy, and attention, most require some money to get done too. And even when money isn’t required to get a project done, it usually makes it easier or quicker to do.

Few of us have money lying around to fuel discretionary projects. Even when we do have saving and investment habits, that money is either tied up or working for us in different ways. I’ve lived through many periods where there wasn’t enough for the necessities, let alone the discretionary projects. I get it.

But there are always ways to reprioritize how to use what we have, and many of us are spending money to fill the empty spaces where meaning and fulfillment should be. We often buy cars, trips, meals, alcohol, entertainment, and status we don’t need as a way to avoid the boredom, frustration, and alienation we feel in our lives and work. It’s a cruel paradox:

the less we have, the more likely we are to compensate by spending money we don’t have enough of to acquire things we don’t need; but the more money we have, the more likely we are to continue to increase our expenses and still feel like we don’t have enough.

Given that intelligent, creative people are prone to end up with acute and chronic creative constipation when they’re not doing work that matters to them, it’s even more important that they divert their money to fuel that work. Remember, creative people will either be actively creating something or actively destroying something, and the object of their destruction is the easiest target — themselves.

Also consider that budgeting for your project creates a positive boundary for your work rather than a negative (restrictive) boundary for it. The difference between being able to spend a certain amount for your project and not being able to spend more than that amount is subtle, but it’s important. When we think about it positively, the goal isn’t to focus on saving as much money as possible but rather to find the best ways to use the space we’ve created to get the project done. I’ve been talking about budgets as a way to fuel the project for exactly that reason.

Making budgets is like making plans in that it’s an awareness-generating process, especially when you walk through the checklist of costs that just about any project may have. You may decide not to fund an item or be unable to, but considering it allows you to figure out how you’re going to work around that item or to spot opportunities to create, find, or reprioritize spending to fund that item. Knowing that childcare would help you move your project along makes it easier to skip the dessert at dinner or leave the cute shirt on the rack and instead apply that money to your project fund.

Before we run through the checklist, start by considering what you would spend to complete your project. To give it some grip and reality, it’s often simplest to consider your project budget as a fraction or multiple of your discretionary spending last month. For example, if you spent $500 last month between eating out and (discretionary) shopping, make your budget a fraction or multiple of that. The bigger the project, the more likely it needs to be a multiple, but it works out because you may be able to reallocate what you spend on those items per month to your project per month as you work the project through. If this is a project that you want your employer to fund, use a fraction or multiple of your monthly salary instead, since your case will probably need to be how much time it will save you (which decreases their expense in paying you) or how much the project will benefit the company (since that’s what they pay you to do). 1

We start with this step because it gives us a baseline to work from, otherwise we may overscrutinize every item on the checklist. From here, we’ll work through the checklist and then adjust our budget from there.

Here are the common items that may be a part of every project:

​ Professional support . Editors, copywriters, media engineers, administrative assistants, photographers, lawyers, or consultants are common kinds of professional support that can make a big difference in the quality of the end product or the process of completing it. Whether you’re paying someone to add competencies you don’t have, paying to not have as many surprises that can be avoided, or simply paying to have someone do something you could do but don’t need to do, you’re shaving off time to complete the project or to make the results better.

​ Tools and apps. You may be able to borrow someone else’s tools and/or use some open-source stuff, but you may be better off just buying or renting the tools and apps you need to get the job done. Better to spend fifty dollars and have what you need than to spend hours every month getting and returning borrowed tools and hacking freeware.

​ Caretakers and personal support. Childcare, elder care, and pet sitters can ensure your loved ones are safe, comfy, and not lonely while you’re working on your project, but you may also consider yard care, housecleaning, and grocery delivery as well. It’s also far cheaper to hire caretakers and personal support than it is professional support; twenty-five dollars may only get you an hour of professional support but buy a half day or more of caretaking and personal support. People often underestimate how much their interruptions and distractions are weighing on them until they experience not being interrupted and distracted.

​ Lodging, offices, and table rent (coffee and tea). I’m lumping these together because you may need different environments to get your work done, especially during the challenging parts of your work. There’s a reason people hole themselves in cabins, hotels, and B&Bs to get their projects done. But paying for coffee and tea is often paying for a conducive work environment just as much as paying for an office or hotel is. Starbucks is right that it’s not about the coffee; it’s about paying to work in a place that helps you get your work done.

​ Food. A lot of time and energy is spent in preparing and cleaning up meals, and you may find that it’s worth it to you to eat out or have your food delivered. Or maybe it’s that you love breakfast but hate making it, so between not making it and not eating or paying six dollars to start the day off well, the latter clearly makes more sense.

Once you’ve aggregated all the expenses mentioned, compare that to the baseline you started with. Professional support is what often breaks the budget, but you’ll need to weigh that cost against the real costs of not having the support. And you may need to consider whether you need to have another project in front of this one to create the funds to fuel this project.

Sharing your budget with partners and family members often sparks great conversations about who can help. For instance, your partner may rather cover caretaking for you than pay someone else, but they may also rather pay for caretaking so they can do their best-work projects too. Or your friend who’s an editor may exchange their expertise if you’ll dog-sit for a week while they’re on a trip.

Seeing what would fuel your project and how you’re going to get it ahead of time helps avoid getting stuck or hem-hawing about getting what you need when it’s clear you need it. But you have to start with acknowledging that you and your work are worth it. If nothing else, remember what it’s costing you not to do your best work.

DEADLINES GUIDE YOUR PROJECT; CAPACITY DRIVES YOUR PROJECT

Imagine that during a normal week, you set goals and deadlines that assume you’ll be able to get ten units of work done. But, during a normal week, you actually get four units of work done.

Imagine that during light weeks, you set goals and deadlines that you’ll be able to do six units of creative work. But, during those light weeks, you actually get four units of creative work done.

In this scenario, it’s easy to see that the goals and deadlines aren’t doing anything besides stressing you out. Set all the deadlines and goals you want, but it’s the four units of creative work that matters.

JACQETTE M. TIMMONS​ YOUR MONEY NEEDS YOU TO GIVE IT DIRECTION

If you have a reactive relationship with money, you probably tend to fund your projects reactively too. This correlation isn’t accidental.

Most of us have been conditioned to manage money by default, meaning you decide how to save, invest, and spend it based upon what you earn. An alternative way to manage your money is by design, meaning you first decide how much you want to save, invest, and spend and then ask, “How much do I need to earn to do these various things with my money?”

Shifting your mindset about money from “using what’s left over” (by default) to “determining what I need” (by design) will profoundly affect your approach to money. It will also help with creating budgets for your projects because you’ll develop the habit of factoring in the role of money at the outset (proactive) rather than as an afterthought (reactive).

For money to fulfill its job in your life, it needs you to give it direction — even when money is tight. Creating a budget for your projects is a form of telling money what it is you want it to do for you regarding your project.

And don’t let the desire to get the numbers “just right” stump you. As you make progress on your project, you’ll get feedback that will help you adjust your budget accordingly — money will always give you feedback about the quality of your choices and highlight for you when you’re being proactive . . . or not.

Jacquette M. Timmons works as a financial behaviorist and focuses on the human side of money. She’s the author of Financial Intimacy: How to Create a Healthy Relationship with Your Money and Your Mate and creator of The Comfort Circle dinner series.

Those four units of creative work are your true capacity. When it comes to moving your projects forward, it’s the only thing that really matters. Goals and deadlines are just tools you use to create commitments and expectations you can’t possibly meet.

Unfortunately you may have a pattern of using a backward-planning process that starts with the deadline and then walks backward to the milestones and targets you need to hit to make that deadline.

The backward-planning process is a great method for projects with hard deadlines and for helping you see major elements of the project, but it doesn’t work as well for our purposes for two major reasons:

​ It’s easy to build a plan that doesn’t fit reality because we often fail to consider the other projects we have going at the time with their own deadlines; so more often than not, the plan is doomed before you finish making it.

​ The projects that matter most very often don’t have hard deadlines to them. They’re usually not urgent, there’s little social pressure to do them, and their outcomes are generally more amorphous than others. To address the lack of hard deadlines, many people try to create aspirational deadlines for themselves, but far too often those aspirational deadlines are “good to do by” dates.

When we build from our capacity rather than the deadline, we get closer to carrying the amount of projects we can actually finish. Doing so means less planning and adjusting plans, fewer project collisions, and less frustration about the things we didn’t get to this week. And while it feels like we’re giving up something by focusing on fewer projects, the whole idea of the red line is that it’s what we’re actually able to do anyway.

The added benefit of basing your plans on your capacity is that it helps to shift your focus from results to process. If what’s driving those units of work is creating and firewalling your focus blocks, then you can rework your schedule such that you get more focus blocks. If the results happen from a shift in environment or tools, then you can explore that more. Or maybe it’s the kinds of projects or how you’re using your GATES at play.

But let’s not throw backward planning out with the bathwater. It can be incredibly useful as a tool to limit the scope of your project or to triage your projects.

The backward-planning process is useful for:

​ Constraining the size of the project because you only have so many focus blocks, and it probably alters how much you’re able to work on other projects.

​ Illuminating milestones and deadlines that you might otherwise miss while roadmapping.

​ Hitting project deadlines that are inherently anchored to dates, such as taxes, holidays, recurring deadlines.

So if backward planning works well for you, use it, but then adjust your deadlines based on what you can actually do, which may mean that you need to drop other projects to free up the focus blocks to get it done in the timeline available. Intentionally and proactively dropping projects so you can finish a project that matters is much better than not doing that and continuing to carry too many projects.

DON’T FORGET TO ACCOUNT FOR RELAY TIME

Another consideration to think about before you build out your road map is the relay time you’ll need for projects that involve other people. Relay time is the waiting time that happens every time a project changes hands. We sometimes forget to include relay time in our planning because it’s not active time.

Why relay time ? Projects can be like relay races where each person is running as fast as they can to hand off the baton to someone else. But the reality is that all it takes is one bad handoff or one person to sandbag the relay for the whole thing to slow down.

For example, let’s say you send your work to a coworker to review at the end of the day. Depending on what they have going on, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to take a look at it until midmorning the next day. But if they’re in meetings or working against a tight deadline, it could be days or weeks until they’re able to flip it back to you. If you have a sequential project — one that requires step A to be completed before you move on to step B — or the person’s perspective is required before you work on any other part of the project, the time is clicking but your project isn’t going anywhere.

I mentioned above that two conditions create additional relay time: (1) bad handoffs, and (2) someone slowing down the race (typically because they’re overloaded and are unintentionally bottlenecking the race).

Bad handoffs occur for three reasons:

​ You’re unclear about what you need.

​ You’re communicating in channels or ways where the baton isn’t being received.

​ You’re not indicating that it is a relay task and who’s running next.

For instance, take the far-too-common process of sending an email to multiple collaborators with “Thoughts?” or “What do you think?” as a request. In this case, all three reasons are at play. “Thoughts?” is too broad a question, as it’s not clear what the tension points are most of the time, so collaborators have to work especially hard to respond. The usual result is that your request goes into the “stuff to think about” bucket that’s already overfull. If it’s via email, it’s not in a channel that’s conducive for actual conversation, so it’s a bad handoff there. And since it’s sent to multiple collaborators, it’s not clear that it’s a relay task and who’s running next. (If I could, I would ban “Thoughts?” and “What do you think?” from all team communication, as there are always better questions to ask to move the ball forward and foster collaboration.)

Addressing bad handoffs often helps with someone slowing down the relay since it lowers the amount of work that the next person has to do. But there are also collaborators who slow down the relay because of their schedule, capacity, and preferences. In each case, you need to consider when and how to hand off the baton to each person. For example, if you’re working with a collaborator in an earlier time zone than you, and you need something from them today, you’ll need to send the work to them earlier or wait until the next day. If your boss is prone to ask twenty questions or the same kinds of questions every time you run something by them, then not answering those questions before you hand them the baton is going to slow down the relay. They will ask those questions — you may as well preempt them so they can address what you need.

Rather than addressing all the strategies for mitigating relay time in this book, my main goal here is to put relay time into the mix for consideration as you build your road map. The “Upgrade Your Clumps ” section provides a quick way to address relay time, but if you know your projects are being unreasonably delayed due to relay time, then you may want to focus more on smoother, more strategic handoffs with your collaborators.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR PROJECT ROAD MAP

With the ingredients of your project discussed thus far, we can start to build a project road map. Before we start building the road map for your project, these four rules will serve you well:

​ If you’re going to be (hand)writing, write in pencil or something erasable .

​ Make multiple passes .

​ Have enough space to have a messy area and a clean area . Space could mean multiple sheets of paper or different portions of a whiteboard; in a digital context, it could be different sections of a document, with one area being the “scratch” area.

​ Embrace your top-down or bottom-up planning styles. Some people are skilled at chunking projects from bigger chunks to smaller ones, but they get overwhelmed with all the smaller chunks. Others find that building from smaller chunks makes more sense to them, but they have trouble with how big the top-level projects feel once they’ve put them together. No one style is better than the other; the Five Projects Rule, weekly block schedule, and the roadmapping process you’ll be working through address these challenges.

You are encouraged to make the mistakes of making chunk sizes too big, forgetting some chunks, not seeing how they link together, and putting them in the wrong sequence. Think of this exercise more like putting building blocks together with pages missing from the instructions and some pieces you can’t see because they’re hidden behind others. If you’re planning effectively, you’ll be reworking your plan multiple times. (I know, it’s a paradox.)

It’s time to start playing with the conceptual toys we’ve been unpacking in this chapter.

1 ​ START YOUR CHUNK LIST

Your chunk list is, unsurprisingly, a list of all the top-of-mind chunks of the project. During this phase, don’t worry about the size of the chunks. It’s not necessary to think about the fifteen-minute tasks of the project, but if they come to you, don’t fight them. Use the universal action words .

The goal of this step isn’t to get all the chunks of the project in the first go, but just to start with what’s right in front of you.

You may find it easier to mindmap your project rather than just listing action items. Whichever technique you use, use one of your messy spaces for this part of the project. And leave room, as you’ll be adding chunks in another pass.

2 ​ SORT AND LINK YOUR CHUNKS

If your project starts with a big objective word such as develop , it contains chunks that would begin with words such as research, plan, design , and create , and would probably be linked to other similar-sized project chunks that begin with words such as publish or kick off.

Knowing these patterns, you can sort and link your chunks into the right arrangements. People who are strong at spatial thinking often find it helpful to split out the chunks into a hierarchy from quarter-sized down to week-sized, since it makes the next step easier, but that also causes some people to spin out. If you’re of the latter variety, don’t worry about creating a hierarchy — you have other GATES you can use to help out here.

3 ​ SEQUENCE YOUR CHUNKS

To start sequencing your chunks, you still don’t need to do anything besides look at how the verbs in front of the chunks relate to each other. If the verb is publish , you can’t do that without creating and editing something, but you usually can’t create something without planning and researching it. Whether it’s Research Plan Create Edit Publish, or Plan Research Create Edit Publish, as far a verb sequence goes, it’s usually pretty clear. It can always be Research Plan Research Create Edit Publish, with the understanding that the first round of research is survey research and the second round is deep research. Survey research helps you figure out if the project is worthy and create the plan; deep research helps you do the work.

Once sequencing begins, it’s pretty normal for people to realize they missed some chunks, so you may need to add some chunks to get a proper sequence. That’s great; it’s exactly why you’re doing this now.

It’s often helpful to do some slight renaming of the chunks, as I did above and in the last chapter, to give more specificity and meaning (remember the SMART acronym). So perhaps you need to switch research to conduct initial research or survey once you start sequencing chunks, to separate it from the other researching you’ll do after you’ve committed to the project. At this stage, it can be helpful to keep the original verb so you remember its chunk size — for example, “Research (Survey)” — as it’s far too easy to lose that context and forget how it’s linked or contained in other chunks.

Because sequencing focuses on arranging chunks in the order that they need to be done, it’s natural to start thinking about when those chunks need to happen. Sequencing isn’t scheduling, though, and we’re not quite to the scheduling stage. If it bugs you to not write down when something needs to happen, you can always write the deadline — for example, “Research (Survey) by March 31st” or “Develop TPS Report (March 31st).”

4 ​ CLUMP YOUR CHUNKS

Clumping is the opposite of chunking in that it’s the process of organizing smaller chunks by the larger chunks that contain them. To continue with our building blocks metaphor, clumping is putting pieces together into larger, linked units, like two separately built wheels and axles coming together to form the chassis of a building-block truck.

The project pyramid gives us a default way to clump our chunks, and the sequenced chunks from above clump into a bigger, coherent chunk. So the sequence above — Research Plan Create Edit — clumps together to a bigger Publish project. If we estimate that each of the chunks in the lower-level sequence will take a day, we see that the Publish project is a week-sized project; if we estimate each lower-level chunk will take a week, that particular Publish project is a month-sized project.

Clumping helps us build our road map by allowing us to switch to a higher-level time perspective so we can better shape that perspective. Most projects that matter will span over months and quarters, and we need to be able to shape our time at those levels, but we don’t need to see the lower-level chunks at those higher levels. If we clump our project into, say, four month-sized chunks and we plan on doing one of those month-sized chunks each for the next four months, then when we’re doing our monthly goal setting and planning for next month, we don’t need to think about the parts of the project that follow next month. We can think about them when we’ve finished next month’s projects and the next leg of the project is upon us.

5 ​ UPGRADE YOUR CLUMPS

After you’ve created your larger clumps, it’s time to check if you need to upgrade some of these clumps into the next larger size in the time perspective. By check I mean you almost always will need to do some upgrading based on the triggers below.

There are five triggers that suggest you should upgrade the clump in question to the next higher chunk size:

​ You have no idea how long it will take to do the clump.

​ You’re not competent at the work involved to complete the clump.

​ The clump depends on someone else completing a chunk of work of that chunk’s size — that is, if you’re looking at a clump of week-sized chunks and someone else needs to do one of those chunks, then you need to upgrade the clump.

​ The clump contains more than five chunks.

​ One of the chunks in the clump will take more of that chunk size of time to complete. For example, if the clump contains month-sized projects, it would normally be a quarter-sized clump, but if one of those month-level chunks will actually take multiple months to complete, upgrade it to a year-sized clump.

If all five conditions are present, you don’t need to upgrade something five times so that it can’t get done. It’s often better to add an additional unit of time to the project, though. For instance, if you end up with a month-sized clump after upgrading once, and you see that another trigger is in play, add another month to the project’s timeline. If another is in play, add another month, which is essentially an upgrade to the next higher chunk size anyway.

These planning factors account for the displacement, stalls, wait times, project cascades, competing priorities, thrashing, unforeseeable life challenges, and overestimation that will happen with projects that matter. While they don’t explain why projects can take so long to finish, they at least give some guide rails that help us create more realistic road maps.

To continue with our example clump — Research Plan Create Edit — that we’ve already decided would be a month-sized project, if the Create chunk seems as if it will take three weeks to do, upgrading it to a quarter-sized project would be prudent. Remember, it’s not that a quarter-sized project will take the full quarter but that it will require prioritization at that time perspective and below. Seeing that it needs to sit at that level ensures that you don’t stack too many quarter-sized projects that you won’t be able to finish.

As you get better at practicing the five keys and getting projects done, you may decide that you don’t need to upgrade projects per the suggestions above, or you might decide to alter the way you upgrade them. For instance, you may decide that it’s better to double the time you think something will take rather than shift it to the next higher time perspective. But if you’re chronically overcommitted and not finishing what you start, try using the guidelines to see if it helps. Yes, you’ll commit to fewer projects, but you’ll also finish more of what matters and carry fewer stalled and dead projects too.

6 ​ OVERLAY YOUR CHUNKS ON A TIMELINE

The last step of upgrading is to check that the sequence of the chunks still appears coherent and logical. Like above, you may need to do some slight renaming of the chunks to do so, but at this stage of the process, there’s less of a concern about forgetting chunk size since you’ll be renaming, linking, and sequencing at a fixed time perspective.

The roadmapping method builds the timeline from how long we guesstimate the chunks of the project will take to get done. Upgrading and resequencing mean that we can simply lay the project out.

To start overlaying your chunks on a timeline, you have to start with a time perspective that corresponds to the perspective of your project. It sounds obvious, but laying out a month-sized project on a year-sized timeline isn’t helpful because you wouldn’t be able to see the week-sized chunks and daily blocks that you’d need for that level of detail and context. At the year-sized timeline, the lowest you would generally want to go is two sizes under it, so you might be able to meaningfully put month-sized projects on that timeline.

This rule holds for all time perspectives; for example, if you’re looking at a month-sized timeline — a.k.a. a calendar — getting into the nitty-gritty of what’s happening in the hours and minutes of your days wouldn’t be meaningful. At most, you would want to put fixed events and appointments on the day, which is what you’re probably already doing.

As a general guideline, use a timeline that’s one size larger than your largest chunk so you can see how that chunk relates to other projects. The exception here is year-sized projects, unless you’re comfortable looking at a three-year perspective. Three-year timelines are outside of most people’s mental headlights and planning confidence and thus can cause more anxiety than clarity. People usually have an intuitive sense of the next year-sized project that their current year-sized project rolls into or sets up.

The inverse is also useful: if you want to build a timeline that charts your focus blocks, you should use no larger than a monthly timeline. The additional advantage of using this rule is that it will help prevent the overoptimistic thinking that you can lay out exactly how you’ll use your focus blocks five weeks from now. If you want to have a sense of where your focus blocks will get you five weeks from now, you must think up two time perspectives, to the monthly level. (I told you it was easy to slip between time perspectives.)

Let’s assume that the Create chunk of the quarterly Publish project we’ve been coaxing got upgraded to a month-sized project because of the size of the work being created. When we did our clumping, let’s say we added a Staging chunk because we anticipated needing to do a few things to make the edited work ready for show. Our road map might thus look like the figure below.

You can see why you wouldn’t want to include the focus-block level — the road map would be so busy that it would cease to be useful. Additionally, we don’t need to go to that level at this stage since, when we’re close to doing the next chunk of the project, we can pick the timeline horizon that’s appropriate for the work.

Roadmapping this way makes it easier to adjust the larger chunks — or the whole thing — if you need to. For instance, let’s say that in the project above, something happens at the end of January that displaces your ability to do the Create leg of the project. Rather than changing the dates of a lot of tasks or blocks, you can simply move the Create leg of the project (and the parts of the project that follow) into whatever month makes sense. Do yourself a favor and add a Review chunk to the front of the Create leg, so you realistically plan for a crawl rather than a gallop as you get back into the project.

When you build road maps this way, you can transpose other projects to the same timeline to see how things are stacking up, since you’ve fixed the timeline horizon and time perspective. That said, having a handful of projects roadmapped this way is a bit much (unless you like playing Tetris), but that’s the beauty of the project pyramid: you don’t have to know in advance what all the moving pieces are. You just need to know how many projects of that size might be stacking up on you, and when it’s time to get working on those projects, you can “activate” the chunks that are relevant in that time perspective or do some roadmapping on the fly to see how you’re going to get the work done in that period.

7 ​ SCHEDULE YOUR CHUNKS

We often mistake putting something on a timeline as scheduling, but they’re not the same thing. Committing to do something “next week” — that is, putting it on a timeline — is weak sauce; committing to do it Wednesday morning at 10:00 or, even better, during Wednesday’s focus block, pushes it one step closer to done.

How you schedule is obviously going to depend on what tools you use, but it also depends on what size project you’re talking about. Scheduling a month-sized project means that you first check your schedule and other commitments to ensure that you have enough room for it that month, then you schedule its week-sized chunks and blocks to get it done. If you’re using a digital or standard calendar, it may be harder to figure out where to show that you’ve committed to a month-sized project. Blocks are easier to schedule, though, since most digital and many print calendars are built around the idea of setting appointments, so you can convert their appointment features for blocks.

Many people get tripped up, though, because they try to schedule chunks too far in advance and then get frustrated when reality doesn’t look like their plans. Again, we return to the project pyramid. If you’re doing your monthly planning, you should only be scheduling and prioritizing at that perspective, which means looking at the quarter for context and scheduling week-sized chunks. If you’re doing your weekly planning, it’s the same thing: look at the month for context, schedule blocks for the week.

Keep in mind that the further out you schedule creative projects, the more likely it is that you’ll need to adjust that schedule. On the flip side, the less advance planning you do, the less likely you are to complete the project in the first place. It’s a balancing act, but remember that the point of a plan isn’t to straitjacket you but rather to help you drive your project to done.

If you’ve been reading along without doing the steps I’ve listed above, I encourage you to grab some paper and actually apply the steps to a focus block or two. If it made sense when you read it, that’s great; you can immediately apply it to your best-work project. If it didn’t make sense, that’s also great; you can pick it up by applying it. To keep with the math analogy with which I started the chapter, doing this is much like doing multiplication tables; with repetition, you’ll see the patterns, but you may not see the patterns without the repetition.

Once you’re done, celebrate! The work you’ve done is part of your best work and it’s probably been challenging. But you’ve made it clear what your next steps are with your project, which means you’re one step closer to being proud of the best work you’ve released into the world.

CHAPTER 6 TAKEAWAYS

​ A project road map is a project plan that places chunks of a project on a timeline.

​ Build projects from your GATES — genius, affinities, talents, expertise, and strengths — from the beginning to make it easier to get the project done.

​ Creating a budget for your project helps avoid snags and stall-outs, and even when a project doesn’t require money, funding a project can make it better.

​ Use deadlines to guide your project, but remember that it’s your capacity that drives your project no matter what the deadline is.

​ When you’re working with collaborators — and almost all best work projects have collaborators — make sure to build relay time into your road map.

​ As you work through building your road map, write in pencil and embrace the mistakes you’re going to make.

1 .​ How to make a budget for a company-funded project is considerably more complex than for a personally funded project. A common problem in business budgets is that they’re centered only on expense factors rather than revenue factors, even though businesses can create revenue a lot easier than individuals can. As a shortcut, ask whoever makes your company budgets to explain how budgets are made and follow their guidance.