As your business grows, developing a project list becomes imperative. It creates a timeline and schedule for you to complete tasks, as well as making sure that you don’t miss important steps along the way. Realistically, working through projects is how we grow our business; the rest is just building blocks, and the inroads we take to get there.
If you are anything like me you think you are very good at multitasking, even if you really aren’t. For years, I have been proud of my ability to juggle a million things and get them done. However, I realized I was actually terrible at it! My work was much faultier and less precise, and I was much less efficient in finishing tasks. Now I tend to work directly from project lists, and my work is more precise and exact.
Additionally, I have learned when working with employees, giving them project lists is HIGHLY effective. Like me, our employees have become significantly more effective since working off of more defined project lists. They produce better (and faster!) results.
The most effective method we have found for building a project list is:
- Define Your Objective – Your Project Goal
- Develop a series of steps to accomplish the project
- Create a timeline for the internal and sub-steps
- Make sure that that the internal and sub-steps follow a logical path to completion
This allows our team to focus on smaller, more accomplishable tasks rather than a large overarching issue, which can seem daunting and can take someone’s motivation away from them. For example, look at our course creation, which was a massive undertaking and a HUGE project.
- Create Course on Wholesale (Primary Objective)
- Set-up Facebook Group
- Set-up Payment Portal
- Build Website & Mapping
- Create Videos
- Create Slides
- Create PDF Follow Up
- Create Scripts
- Develop Course Map
- Develop Course Topics
Each of these Internal Steps had to be accomplished to achieve the primary objective. Too often we put the cart before the horse and don’t realize what actually goes into accomplishing a major task. After we have the project map, we create mini-projects to develop our timeline. For example:
Develop Course Topics
Goal: Develop a fully encompassing set of course topics, which if properly constructed, will be able to walk someone through how our business operates on a daily basis and how we utilize wholesale.
- Get feedback started with the basic processes – breaking it down step-by-step
- Talk to our employees to find out what their major pain points were when they started, what they had the most trouble with.
- Develop preliminary map of topics (themes): Product Analysis, Sourcing, Scaling
- Sculpt out each theme and develop a video set
- Present video set to the team and look for holes (missing items)
- Present video set to outside consultants (missing items)
After we reach that point, we move on to the next set-up topic.
As you can see, developing a project list and working through the project list can provide great insight, clarity, and lead to higher quality work. We try to build in as many feedback steps as possible to our project list to make sure we get as many viewpoints as possible, as well as to make sure we don’t miss stuff.
Are you a good multitasking person? Have you used Project Lists in your own business?
