How do most new project leads start? Most wait for a big project opportunity to prove themselves, which means they go months without actually doing much project leading. The best way to start is with one micro-delivery every day. What can you produce in sixty to ninety minutes? Write one page of notes about a recent meeting? Send a precisely worded status update to a key collaborator? Identify the next three things that need to happen to deliver a task? It doesn’t matter, just pick one thing that you can produce in a short amount of time and make sure it is small enough that you can deliver it. Perfection is not the goal here, finishing is. Being able to close a loop is the goal.
It is also important not to treat these small tasks as your master plan. They are an experiment. Do them and as you finish each one, write one sentence about how it went. What went smoothly? What was harder than expected? What will you change tomorrow? After about a week, you will see some patterns. Some things take longer than you expect. Some tasks have dependencies that you didn’t see coming. It’s ok. If you write down one sentence about each task, you will see patterns, and it will help you learn from each task, without having to keep track of them in a complicated way.
One of the most common habits new project leads struggle with is over editing. They write something, then rewrite it, then rewrite it again, and it’s still not good enough to share with anyone else. Don’t do that. Set a timer and spend 15 minutes editing your work, then send it or hand it off. Most people don’t care about every word being perfect, they care about clarity, and getting something in time to review. You will get feedback that will help you make the document much better than editing for another hour would. So just send it and be done. This will help you get faster and more comfortable sharing work with others.
Structure the day so the micro-delivery happens first thing during a protected block. Sit down, open the task, spend the time you allocated on it, write the one sentence about the task, and move on. The consistency of doing it every day is more important than how long you do it. So if it is a busy day, don’t be afraid to just do 30 minutes. After about 10 days, you will find that you don’t even think about it, it’s just part of what you do. And as you finish each of these small tasks, you will have something to show for it. Motivation can only carry you so far, it’s important to see progress.
When you struggle to do this, when you feel too busy or too overwhelmed, look back at the last thing you delivered. Look back at the last micro-delivery. How many little tasks did that take? When you can see all of the little things you did to get to a micro-delivery, it will give you the energy to keep going. Progress, even when it feels like baby steps, will keep you moving forward, especially if you can see the baby steps. Keep your daily task small enough that if you miss a day or two, you can catch back up. And after a while, you will see that all of these small tasks will start to make your judgment better on the bigger tasks, the ones with more moving parts that require a lot more work.