Handy Polymath

Storyboarding as Project Management

I’m untrained in the bureaucratic voodoo of Project Management, the business practice of herding cats through red tape. But I know these are the folks who have a spooky handle on both petty details and grand workflows. I’ve got goals up the ying-yang and am in danger of losing my balance of yin and yang as a consequence. I don’t have to corral a staff, but I need a handle on petty details and grand workflows. In lieu of traditional Project Management, I’ve been using PM tools to craft a narrative.

Except There Is No Second Draft–Ha!

The Happy Ending (keeping in mind that beginnings and endings are always arbitrary points in time, only meaningful because of what they bookend), the Happy Ending of this narrative is a parting shot of me, in the fall of 2010, with everything in hand for a great application to my favored PT program. However, like a novel, I cannot keep all of this straight in my head for any length of time. Frankly, at any given point in time the vast majority of it is fore- and backlog I can (should! must!) forget while completing the task at hand.

Yet too much focus and deadlines can (and will!) go whizzing by without even leaving a manly bullet graze on my temple to make me look heroic.

You know those dreams where you have to take a test and you forgot you even had the class? In my version, I have to go back to elementary school in order to get credit for my high school diploma, in order to get credit for my bachelors. I’m wedged in a tiny desk with fifth-graders trying to do ten chapters of social science homework before the bell rings. I’m getting a flop sweat just typing this.

This creates the need for a solution: How can I move through this period of time and this mountain of work so that I have prompt delivery of the necessary ingredients–and tasks–to begin tackling each piece as I need to?

Another Tool for the Utility Belt

In the past, this would be a job for Office Supplies! and her trusty ambidextrous sidekick Hours N. Hours. Alas, they’ve been downsized and replaced with a virtual assistant in the form of “what free software can I load on a USB and stick in my pocket?”. Not a good superhero name. Which is why I named the USB “Bat Cave”. That way I get to be the superhero. That is, if Bruce Wayne is a wage slave in the white collar ghetto, married to a devious combination of Alfred Pennyworth and Lucius Fox.

Back to the Bat Cave. For someone who grew up with a Smith Corona and graph paper, open source software is almost like having a keycard to the sublevel labs of Wayne Enterprises.

I’m using a copy of Open Project, a free open-source project management program that’s been friendly so far–after I figured out how to set up the calendar to calculate constant time, instead of 8 hour days, 40 hour weeks, and 20 day months. If nothing else, I like the ability to link tasks sequentially and see them marching across the screen in a Gantt chart like a choreography of relay racers.

Deadlines are Useless if You Don’t Know When to Go Live

I will never be able to properly estimate time, which leads to the following given: I will never be punctual. The choices are to be either tardy or wildly early–wildly early being the result of accounting for every possibility that could make me late, and having only one or two of them happen. This plan for a happy application ending is an exercise in choosing wildly early, and so it’s not focused on a single deadline for anything. Instead, each item or deliverable has an organic ripening described in a series of dates:

when’s the earliest I can start this?
when’s the latest I can start this?
when should I have the bulk of this done?
when’s the earliest this can be done?
when’s the latest I can finish this?
when is this actually due?

At any given point I can clearly see what I need to get done, what I can work on if I have extra time and mental capacity, and what I can put out of mind until the time comes. I also have dynamic timelines that give scope, can motivate me if I’m lethargic–or can be ignored if I’m anxious without shooting myself in the foot.

Even if it doesn’t output a pretty graph, it’s helped me organize my thinking ‘on paper’ so I can indulge my natural ability to focus without risking a Rip Van Winkle incident of, “Holy crap, I forgot to take physics!”