Building Project Machines

The goal is to build a machine to create the result that you want. My suggestion only requires in-built apps (which must support lists and tags) so you don’t have to subscribe to anything. Much of what follows will be mechanically, if not semantically, familiar to anyone who has studied productivity and the concept of an ideas funnel. I am explaining a change in how you record and process your projects that will give you clarity and propulsion. If you make this small change in how you organise your projects you can make it inevitable that your project will succeed, because what I am describing is a mechanism. The goal is to build the correct mechanism for the result that you want.

I will use the GTD Five Core Principles framework to describe the stages. I am only affecting three of them here.

Capture — There are already quite enough tips and tricks floating around, and I don’t intend to add to the device and platform-specific systems out there. All you need is Apple Reminders and Siri (or copy of). Nominate an Inbox, add Tickler and Shopping lists, and remember that at this stage you are merely capturing. The next phase is where I intend to make my novel points.

One tip, always capture context; If you are capturing wisdom, take the opportunity to remind your future self why you thought it might be useful. ‘Call Jenny’ becomes ‘Ask Jenny if she has ever dealt with mixed-use planning, and if she has, consider trying her with the factory site’. It goes from being a reminder to being a task with a place in a system. There is also an intermediate stage, should there not be an immediate application for her work. If you were creating a Tickler item, for instance; ‘Expert in planning law — local’. You’d then have Jenny ready for the right situation.

I will clarify this idea at an appropriate later stage, so don’t go to the kitchen to make a tofu scramble just yet.

Clarify. You know what you want to achieve, I presume. Are you sure? As sure as you were sure about Atticus Finch?

You may assume that I would invite you to chunk-down here, as is normal practice in turning a complex project into manageable bites. We’ll do that soon, but there’s no point in chunking down if you don’t first chunk-up to get your concept and proposed execution crystal clear.

Encapsulate your goal in a sentence. The fewer qualifiers and clauses the better. Now ask yourself a question:

“What do I/we want from achieving this goal?”

If you have an answer, ask the question:

“What is it that is important about that?”

If you are dealing with personal goals you will be able to subtly reword that as “What is it that is important to me about that?”. If you’re suggesting it as a course of action for a company, ask as both an individual and the company. If there’s a difference between the two then I would suggest a period of introspection.

Now keep asking. Repeat the questions. Keep going until your motive is as pure as an Antarctic core sample, or me.

Your initial goal was to start an office in Hong Kong; from which you will have representation in a new, massive market. When you ask the second question, you find that having a truly global reach is what is important. So ask yourself what is important about a global reach. You might say branding, economies of scale, or prestige…

If it is part of the equation, it needs to be a part of the answer. You want New York, Paris, Peckham on the side of your van? Fine. That is good enough, it being your van, your money, and your effort.

Now make a business case for the prestige. Tricky, isn’t it? How much is it worth to you? What will it cost?

Is it worth more than taking-on a partner in that territory?

Is there any part of you that is trying to steer this towards air miles?

Do you need your name above the door of the Hong Kong office because of how good it will look in your obituary?

Another good test would be that you wish to buy something. You ask the first question, and discover that the only reason is that if you bought this something, another person would not be able to buy it. This happens a lot with land. If we buy the land next to our house, it will never be built on. I might deal with this by making sure that no-one would want to live next to me, but you might consider whether building on both plots and buying somewhere else might be the thing to do.

I once bought a derelict Aston Martin. Ask me about it one day.

The second question will provide a list of answers. It’s up to you to weight them appropriately. If you think you’ve built a castle in the air, then simply proceed on that basis. As long as you price it up honestly, it will be a clear goal. If you understand the true mechanics of your decision, you are free to build a system to make it a real castle.

Are you considering a new relationship? Do you think that it is in some way terrible to apply a thought process to this decision? No. You’re a monster if you didn’t clarify your thoughts and dated someone so your friends would envy you.

Just because you bankrupted your company by launching at CES doesn’t mean your investors mind that you enjoyed yourself in Vegas. It might come-up in a meeting, but at least you got to see Adele drive past.

Is there another way? Would being a senior figure in a global partnership be enough for you? It could be much easier than opening an office ten thousand kilometres from your support network. It could even work. Price-up both types of prestige.

You will come to the point where you have clarified what the goal actually is, having first realised that: You wanted an office in Hong Kong for the glow. You took-on that supplier because you have distantly fallen in love with the sales executive. You moved house because your father once made a defamatory comment about the residents of that part of the city. If you didn’t clarify your motives and things that don’t matter ate your lunch you only have yourself to blame.

Now you have pure goals, you need to ask another question.

How will I know when I have achieved my goals?

It’s a common enough question in business management, to which I have little to add beyond the common wisdom in goal setting: make sure you can achieve your goal, and make sure that you know that you have. If your goals are achievable and clearly stated, your project can only fail if you don’t do it. Equally importantly; if you fail at a task it could be that you’ve set the wrong goal so go back through and clarify again. You missed something the first time. GTD provides for this scenario in the Review phase.

Organise; If you know how to GTD, then you know how to break-down projects into smaller projects. You might even know how to break things down into tasks as well as projects. So do that. However…

Your aim is to create a system of clarifying and organising which will repeat until you have achieved your goal, not a list where you get to make a tick every time you call someone.

You need to create CRUCIBLES. I was introduced to the idea of crucibles by the author Dan Brown. He described in a masterclass how he put his characters into situations where their only escape was to thicken the plot. A character trapped in the crapper will jump out of the window into a refuse lorry below. A cutie will get into a death cab. A man left in a room with a tea cozy will put it on his head, thus proving himself trustworthy. These outcomes are inevitable, because the system is designed that way. If you design your system that way, your outcomes will be inevitable. Chekhov said, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” I am only telling you to put a gun on the wall metaphorically, but I am telling you to put a gun on the wall. More succinctly than Chekhov, but that is quite a low bar.

Crucibles are traps with only one way out. They must be completed. If you can’t complete it, the goal was wrong, so do another one and make this one realistic and achievable. Rinse and repeat until you own a speedboat.

There’s a big difference between the task ‘call Jenny about the planning permission’ and the following Project:

Get planning permission on the site to the north of the factory

Call Jenny to get a list of planning consultants

Create a shortlist of candidates that meet the criteria set-out HERE

Get NDAs (link to PDF) from the shortlist

Send the pitch to the shortlist with THESE instructions as to how to respond

State your tasks clearly, with context, and with only one outcome. Good writing means you have thought it through clearly. ‘Call Jenny about the planning permission can be ticked-off after a few seconds of simple work, and with no useful outcome. Your reminders may be longer than those of the person who is sitting next to you on the train, but ‘Call Jenny to get a list of suitable consultants’ can only be ticked-off once the list arrives, because if Jenny doesn’t want to play you can just run it again with a different name.

The goal is to stop yourself marking the task as done until it has fruited.

As an exercise, write a few items that are already on your to-do list in such terms. Note that it is a lot easier if you have taken my earlier advice about collecting context. The context is the supporting information that you need to complete the task. Use these verbs: call, email, and meet. They tell you how to get it done.

For those of you who think this is too much effort, or of little value in the age of AI, I have two things to say: This is how you train AI, and bugger off. The context you have gathered and only using verbs (call, talk to, find) when it is appropriate to suggest a route to a definitive conclusion mean that future automated systems will understand what you are working towards. And yes, I would be interested in developing an app of AI, limitless canvas, verbs and situations. I already have a suitable framework.

Reflect and Engage as you normally would. Reflection is how you know to re-aim your system if you’re not going it the right direction. You’ll know how to engage because you’ve narrowed it down and collected the data.

I hope you found something to chew on here. I’m going to be mainly writing member-side but I’m always happy to chat. I’m Matthew Bate everywhere.