In Part 6, I recommended treating any deliverable (whether it’s a simple email all the way to a full-fledged product) as a series of evolutionary artifacts, each one intended to test an assumption or make forward progress.
But there is a deeper reason for downscoping deliverables and then evolving them through a series of stages.
In Part 5, I introduced The Iron Triangle of Project Management and the idea that any given deliverable can be reduced or expanded in scope at any time.
How should you use this newfound ability? You should use it to:
Get started
Maintain momentum
Test assumptions
In Part 4, I introduced the idea of “intermediate packets.” Instead of delivering value in a big project that spans huge amounts of time, we want to deliver it in smaller chunks at more frequent intervals.
This follows a basic principle that has revolutionized many industries: small batch sizes.
In Part 3, I argued that having a personal knowledge base is the linchpin of success in a creative economy.
A knowledge base allows you to reuse past work, draw from past experiences, share your knowledge in concrete form, and eventually, build products and services out of that knowledge.
This requires strategically structuring your work in the first place, as a series of what I call intermediate packets.
In Part 2, I described the sublime and powerful experience of flow, which could be considered the “holy grail” of productivity.
I argued that there is theoretically no minimum amount of time necessary to get into flow, contrary to popular belief. But in reality, as always, it’s a bit more complicated. Let’s look at what this looks like in a typical working session of a couple hours.
In Part 1, I introduced Return-on-Attention (ROA) as a way to evaluate how we invest our most precious resource – our attention.
But there is a key difference between investing money and investing attention. Units of currency are always uniform and interchangeable. Units of attention, on the other hand, are not at all created equal.
Lauren Valdez joined me last week for an interview and case study, on how she developed her online course Win a Fulbright, which coaches people step by step through the process of successfully applying for the Fulbright fellowship, a prestigious government program that pays for a year of overseas research. Submit your email here if…
Series Navigation: Just-In-Time Project ManagementJust-In-Time PM #2: The Fundamentals of Flow >>Technology has transformed every aspect of business, from the tools we use to communicate and collaborate, to how products and services are built and delivered, to how we conceive of organizations and communities. But it hasn’t yet transformed the heart of how we manage…
Last month I partnered with Jeff Sauer of Jeffalytics on my first “joint venture” webinar. I’d wanted to try this format for a long time, as I’d heard it described as the “ultimate online marketing tactic.” I partnered with Jeff because I noticed that a huge proportion of my audience are freelancers, entrepreneurs, or have aspirations…
In 2006, inventor Ray Kurzweil released the book The Singularity Is Near (Amazon Affiliate Link), with a bold prediction that by the year 2049 we’d enter a “technological singularity.” Around that time, he argued, the pace of improvement in technology would become a runaway phenomenon that would transform all aspects of human civilization. The word “singularity”…
By James Stuber @uberstuber Alex the Plant Manager has returned home from a hectic day at the factory. Hoping to unwind, he decides to try a new game. Alex has loved trains since childhood, so he is delighted when he discovers Mini Metro. The clean, minimalist game promises to be a nice reprieve from his…
I’ve been writing on Medium for three and a half years. In that time, I’ve written somewhere north of 100,000 words, in more than 50 long-form essays, read by many tens of thousands of people. I’m a “Top Writer” in two of the most popular categories on the site — Productivity and Reading — and have more than 8,000…
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