Project Management Tools, Models & Principles You Need to Know

It might seem like there is an everlasting number of projects.

So many tasks to do.

It never ends!

You find yourself spending half your work time just trying to work out .

How do you tackle them in the most efficient way?

Here are some of the most essential tools, models & principles you need to know.

Your Self

It starts with yourself – improving in these areas, so you can think clearly.

• Focus
• Diet
• Food
• Environment
• Removing social media
• Reading
• Sleeping

It’s amazing how doing these things over time changes how you think.

Basics

1. You have time to think about it – you don’t need to run around like a headless chicken.
2. You don’t need to do them all. You can’t do them all. Don’t try to be a perfectionist. Just get started.
3. Get out a pen and paper! Writing down helps to think through things.
4. Identify the goal! What’s the purpose of the project, where is the destination. This is important to have in mind.
5. Define the scope, define the steps to get there
6. Break it down –
7. Identify the path way to get there.
8. Put all the tasks down – do a mind dump. Just write down all the tasks.
9. Learning – make sure you are dedicating some time to learning and sharpening the saw. Improving how you can do it. I should be learning when it can help me directly or I have a direct issue.

Strategy

1. FOCUS – do one task at a time. Multi-tasking is inefficent. Turn off all notifications and put your phone away.
2. Understand Dependencies – some tasks need to wait for others
3. Focus on Opportunities not Problems. (and other counterintuitive principles of business)
4. Chunking – Break big work into smaller tasks that can be completed easily
5. Task Batching – doing more similar work together is more efficient eg, calling 10 people one after another, compared to doing many different tasks because of switching cost.
6. Tasks Expand to Fill the Time
7. Set exceedingly high expectations and inspiring vision.
8. Bottlenecks – in many processes, there is a bottleneck
9. Leverage – usually, not all tasks are not equal. We can create leverage by using money, code, content, or people.
10. The Domino – what’s the one thing that
11. Eliminate Automate Delegate – a guide is here.
12. 3 Things List – like Sam Altman – make a list of 3 most important things you will do today, and just do those
13. The simpler, and fewer steps something takes the faster it is
14. Plan tomorrow today – read Psychocybernetics

Frameworks

1. The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.
2. Theory of Constraints
3. Critical Path Method (CPM) – write out all the tasks, the dependencies, and the time it takes, and the path to get there in a diagram. There’s a good guide here.
4. Eisenhower matrix – some stuff that is urgent is not important, and prevents us from doing the important stuff.
5. GANTT Charts 
6. Lean Startup
7. RICE score for prioritisation – to evaluate what to work on first.
8. Timeboxing
9. Energy Audit
10. Time Audit
11. Waterfall methodology
12. Extreme Programming (XP)
13. Prince2
14. Six Sigma
15. Removing Value Friction
16. Agile & Scrum
17. Buy Back Your Time

Problem Solving

• Define the problem  – writing a problem down makes it go half way towards solving it.
• Frame problem as a puzzle
• Attack a problem from multiple angles

Hiring & Managing People

This is a whole different area that I won’t go into too much:

• Importance of selecting the best talent
• Write down processes so you can give them to your team.
• Defining and being clear about expectations
• Setting a great example
• Sharing the vision
• Helping them to reach their goals
• Remote work principles operating system

Concepts

• “Done is Better than Perfect” Vs “The Best Gives Disproportionate Rewards” and working out which type of task is which.
• You can do much more than you realise –
• Some tasks seem hard but can be done quite fast
• Traps – just like an animal trap, where an animal is tempted by something attractive, and it puts them in a worse position. It’s hard to escape traps when you are caught inside, you need to work hard to learn about traps, to work hard get free from the trap, often you need to escape the trap with the help of someone who is from outside the trap – a mentor.
• Technical Debt – Technical debt happens when you take shortcuts in writing your code so that you achieve your goal faster, but at the cost of uglier, harder to maintain code. It’s called technical debt because it’s like taking out a loan
• Circuses – sometimes when you fail at something it makes it harder for you which makes you stronger, which helps you succeed. Be thankful for that. A guide here.
• Distractions – distractions are often the fruit of a trap. Don’t be tempted by shiny object syndrome.