I took a project management class last week. It was not terrible, and given my noted aversion to the entire discipline of project management AND my hatred of online training, this is high praise. But of course, also given the said aversion and hatred, it would be reasonable to ask me why I took this class in the first place? Well it had to do with training dollars that needed to be spent and the rapidly approaching end of the fiscal year and before I knew what happened I was signed up to learn all about project management. Sometimes you just happen to be walking through the station, and you end up on the train.
Project management trainers (this was a live synchronous class, offered via Zoom) love to tell everyone who will listen that project management has broad applications beyond the realms of software development or construction, and I’m sure they’re quite right. I would simply suggest that if they want to really make that case, then write training class scenarios that draw on examples from any other industry. But she was a very good trainer and what the class lacked in direct relevance to my job, it made up for in energy.
Lack of relevance aside, I did learn some ideas that are generally useful and relevant, though we spent far too much time on the critical path, a thing that I will never track, measure, or even think about, ever again, God willing. I couldn't pick a critical path out of a lineup. I wouldn't recognize a critical path if it lived next door. The critical path and I move in different circles. Nothing personal, it's just that the critical path and its friends have nothing to do with my life.
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Maybe I need to project manage this blog because these half-finished drafts continue to proliferate, and yet I just keep writing new stuff.
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Do you know what else has nothing to do with my life? Data. Data and metrics. Just as not everything is a project that can or should be managed, not every endeavor lends itself to measurement. Almost anything can be evaluated, but not everything can be quantified. At least that's how I see it, but most of American management theory has not yet caught up with my visionary thinking on the subject, which is why I spend so much time thinking about metrics when I would really rather not.
Give me any data visualization other than the simplest pie chart, and it will make no more sense to me than an ancient Greek scroll or whatever those ancient Greeks wrote stuff down on. I can barely read a map, so don’t get me started on histograms. Ask me about almost any number, whether it’s a completion percentage estimate, or a reasonable length of time to finish a project, or (and this is a big one) how much something is going to cost, and I’ll look for all the world as though I’m crunching the numbers and analyzing the data. And then I’ll take a guess. And it’ll be a wild guess, pulled out of absolutely nowhere.
I’m just keeping it real. I’m terrible at quantitative reasoning, but I excel at keeping it real.
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I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately (define "lately" as "every day of my life.") I come home and feel like I have a million things to do; a million tasks. Most of these are self-assigned tasks, but if you prick them, do they not bleed? Well, you know what I mean. I mean just because it’s a self-assigned task doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be done. I’m a demanding supervisor of myself, but I’m fair.
So every time I feel overwhelmed (which is all the time, but I mean every time I feel really overwhelmed, like beyond reason), I think that I should give something up and the only thing that I can think of to give up is my writing habit. Daily writing is a self-assigned task like all the others; a self-imposed burden. But it’s my favorite self-assigned task and so why do I have to give it up? Why not give up laundry-folding or bill-paying or meal-planning?
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I was driving to work one day last week singing along with Bruce Springsteen’s “Trapped” on the radio. “Trapped” is about a bad relationship but it’s also about living in a prison of one’s own making and it made me feel both validated and accused; validated because I know how those prison walls feel and accused because I feel that it’s my fault that I’m behind those walls. It is my fault, really. I worry about things that are beyond my or anyone else’s control. I force myself to complete tasks that maybe don’t need to be completed right away or maybe ever. My to-do list is the absolute boss of me, and interruptions to my routine throw me into a tailspin of dithering indecision and panic. I’d like to be free. I’d like to break out of this trap, but I don’t know how. I’ve been inside too long. I’m institutionalized.
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Oh my gosh. I DID need that project management training. For God’s sake. I need to project manage my life.
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