Now it’s time to look at the JIT Project Manager’s toolkit. How do we put these ideas into practice in our day to day work? Through Workflow Strategies, a set of practical techniques for executing modern projects. Here is the full list, according to whether they work better for small or large-scale projects, and what
In Part 19, I argued that continuously finding new sources of motivation was the most important challenge for knowledge workers, and that the best way to get started was to generate momentum through a series of small wins. Although Progressive Summarization can bootstrap you to a minimum level of motivation, at some point you do
In Part 18, I introduced the idea that our states of mind come and go in “motivational waves,” and that we should try to surf them instead of forcing them to conform to our will. Now let’s go deeper into what these motivational states entail, and how we can use them to our advantage. A
In Part 17, I argued that unique states of mind are the most powerful resource available to knowledge workers. But these states are difficult to reproduce on demand, and come and go unpredictably. Our challenge becomes clear: how do we capture the value from a series of valuable, yet fleeting mental states? Let’s take the
In Part 16, we refined our understanding of Return on Attention by taking into account our biggest constraint as knowledge workers – not just our attention but our deeply focused attention in particular. But human attention is not a simple commodity like oil or gold. It can’t be stored in barrels or vaults or measured
In Part 15, I advocated for multithreading, or weaving together multiple projects to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and synergies. To take advantage of the benefits of multithreading, it’s critical that you begin to think of yourself not as a lone project manager, but as a project portfolio manager (PPM). Traditionally found only in large