When someone starts doing actual project work, the tendency is to take on the biggest, most complex project you can find and try to prove yourself right out of the gate. Most of the time that just leads to diffuse effort, missed details, and a passive-aggressive sense of flailing around before anything actually gets done. So, do a small project. Preferably something that runs two to three weeks in length and has only three to five components. The smaller the project, the better you can see if you’ve got the basics down in terms of definition, communication, and completion, because there’s less to lose track of.
Take on a single simple deliverable, like planning an off-site for your team, putting together a project update for your boss and her boss, or rolling out a new vendor. Write down exactly what done looks like in one sentence, and list the three to five tasks you need to do in order to meet that one sentence. Keep it on a sticky note. That tiny little note of definition will help you avoid scope creep as you go.
One thing you might notice early on is that you’re treating all of these tasks like they’re equally important and urgent, and you end up racing around like a madman. When you feel that happening, stop and ask yourself, which one thing actually moves this deliverable closer to completion right now, and not just keeps me busy? Focus on that one thing, and either defer or delegate everything else.
This simple rule alone has been known to cut the stress of any project in half the first week you start applying it religiously. Take fifteen minutes every morning to read the sticky note and check off the one most important thing you did the day before. Then pick the one most important thing you’re going to do today, and commit thirty minutes to working on it before you do anything else. At the end of the day, write one sentence about what you learned today about time, dependencies, or communication, based on that thirty minutes of work. Do this five days a week. After two weeks, it should feel much less artificial, and you should be able to see a real difference in the quality of your work. It’s easy to get hung up, even on a small project.
But when you do, it’s usually because you’re not sure what to hand off to whom, or you’re not sure what they expect from you. So stop and go back to the person you’re delivering to, and repeat back to them in your own words what you think the deliverable is, and ask them if that’s what they’re expecting. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find that you and they aren’t on exactly the same page, but the discrepancies are small enough that they’re easy to fix. And taking care of them right then keeps everything moving along. Plus, that’s another small success under your belt.