I did some tweets about project management and I got a request to say more words about it.
It’s interesting for me to consider my own life, and my own projects. For the most part I don’t think I would recommend myself as a project manager. I’m not great at “it”, at least not in the conventional sense. I haven’t been great at creating value in a predictable, methodical way. That’s what people expect of project managers, right?
And yet. Here I am, about 74% done with a massive project to write a million words. Is it the greatest project ever conceived? No. Is it being done well? Also no. But it’s being done! I hope to be done with it this year, and realistically it’ll probably spill over to the next, and then it’ll be done. I’d have written a million words for the sake of it. Which is something I personally find gratifying, even if it seems silly and pointless to anybody else. (Have you seen some of the strange art projects people have spent decades doing? But anyway, that isn’t something that I have to justify to anybody other than myself. If you want to do it, it’s worth doing. Projects can be deeply personal, private things.)
I also have a bunch of Twitter threads that I update periodically, and every so often I get someone telling me something like, “wow, you’re so organized, how do you do it”. Which is always so funny for me to hear, because… have you seen my life? (I guess the average person I run into hasn’t, which is itself an interesting thing to sit with and consider.)
My state of organization is a strange one. I definitely can’t describe myself as “organized” in a conventional sense. I miss appointments and stuff all the time. I am forgetful and sloppy about a lot of things. But there are some things that I have a certain hyperfocus about. (Yeah, I probably have ADHD).
At this point I looked up “from:visakanv project management” to see what I’ve tweeted about this so far, and it’s interesting – I don’t just talk about it in the abstract, but I’ve brought it up specifically regarding things like managing your own emotional health, taking care of others, and about how video games have gotten really good at getting players to perform many, many tasks over a long period of time in pursuit of specific goals. And also about the ongoing dismantling of fears. (All of these are linked in the previously mentioned thread.)
I think my personal take on project management is – the popular conception of it – as something to be studied in school, to be practiced in corporate business type contexts – is a very narrow one. The reality of it can be much stranger, much weirder, much more intimate, exciting, fascinating. (Quick bit about why it’s boring? probably something to do with the business context. There’s not much personal investment and buy-in when we’re talking about say, being a more efficient middle-manager at some large firm.)
I think video games hold the key to understanding how to think about project management. (I also found myself thinking about a specific Netflix TV show I watched – Rust to Riches – about a car workshop that buys and upgrades and sells cars.) I think project management is something that’s maybe secondary to ~narrative~ management. We embark on projects because we want something.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
So… the beginning of any project has to begin with the desire. The goal. What do you want? Why do you want it? Why is it compelling? What’s the vision? What’s the story? What are we after? What is the treasure we seek? If the journey is more important than the destination, what is the journey really about? What is the journey we want to undertake? Why?
If you’re sufficiently fixated on a particular journey or destination, then I think you’ll more or less figure out the project management chops along the way. It’s not guaranteed – some people hold on to escapist fantasies all their lives and never do anything about it. (Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle comes to mind). But I don’t know if it’s possible to get good at project management in a wholesome, personal, serious way without having that sense of vision. Maybe it is, I don’t know. I don’t really care, even. Because it’s not something that I want to do for myself, getting good at it for the sake of it. Your mileage may vary. The point of becoming a better project manager is to get better at achieving your goals. Achieving your childhood dreams, as Randy Pausch put it.
So… what IS project management? You have a goal, or some set of goals. You want to achieve them. You can’t achieve the goal by performing a single task, otherwise you’d already have done it. You have to perform a series of tasks over an extended period of time. You have to keep these tasks in mind. You have to keep the goal in mind (and this is something that I haven’t always been great at – looking back on my life I see that I’ve often neglected my own goals, because everyday life sort of gets in the way). You have to make a little bit of progress in a sustainable way. You have to coordinate with your past and future selves. For a lot of worthy projects, you’ll also have to coordinate with other people. I’ve written before about the importance of “commenting your code”, and there are many many vomits by now about the importance of doing regular reviews – to revisit what you want, what you’re working on, what you’re working towards.
A realization I had when trying to make sense of the difference between video games and reality is that reality is far messier, far more complicated. Video games limit the range of responses you have, the range of things you can do. Reality is pretty much infinitely distracting, you can always be swept up in something completely different at any moment. I don’t think being distracted is intrinsically a bad thing, but I think it’s good to have some sort of stable configuration that you can return to. A “home base” or a “mental workshop”, if you will. This itself is something that’s subject to change, something you might modify, alter or even discard completely after a certain point (consider Wittgenstein’s ladder) – but without some sort of personal focus, you’ll probably be left drifting in the tides.
I don’t think I’ve said everything I want to say about project management here. The point is… I think it’s useful to think in terms of projects. When I started Statement, my partner and I thought of it as a little project, rather than some sort of massive undertaking, some sort of Serious Business. And it being a side-project of sorts allowed us to play fast-and-dirty with it, and I don’t think it could’ve succeeded otherwise. What are the projects in your life? If you’re like me, chances are that you might have some projects you aren’t even consciously aware of – certain talking points that you return to, for example. Turning those things into semi-explicit projects can pay off in surprising and interesting ways.
And I guess ultimately this vomit is sort of conceptualizing a meta-project, the project of getting better at managing projects. But to be clear, I don’t expect anybody to want to do this for its own sake. In my case, I want to do this because I yearn for the vast and endless sea.