Completing The Project

By Yosef Solomon on Apr 27, 2010

The art of procrastination is one of the most common reasons projects aren’t completed. The interesting thing about procrastination is that it takes so many different forms. It can be reveled as a television commercial, Facebook message, tweet, doorbell, text message or even the weather. The fact that we are easily influenced by our surroundings makes “completing the project” difficult.

Priorities is another major factor when trying to complete specific projects. Most of us are either in school or working. Each presents projects on a daily if not weekly basis that we are constantly thinking about. The funny thing is that most of the projects dictated by work and school get done, but those that we produce on the side are often forgotten about. Why is this the case? Do we not care about these passion projects as much as the others?

If we actually analyze why most projects for work and school are completed in a specific time span, we’ll see a pattern of different variables. The three most important elements to completing projects are as follows:

Organization- Being able to efficiently organize the tasks needed to fulfill the project. Successful organization techniques include: breaking the project into small simple functions that succinctly progress. An effective blueprint allow

Application- Executing the project by applying the necessary functions laid out during the organization process. Timeboxing is an effective technique when executing various tasks. It lets us know

Completion- The last and most important element in this process is completing it. Author Seth Godin calls this shipping. Exit strategy is key here and being able to successfully complete a project depends on the fact that we finish. Godin emphasizes the importance in establishing a shipping date for each and every project. This will put even more pressure on us to finish what we started and have a final product.

So how do we avoid procrastination? It varies from person to person, but I’ve found that the more I focus on strategy and content, the less I procrastinate. We can almost equate this to public speaking and avoiding nervousness. In college I took a public speaking course and the professor would always emphasize the importance of knowing your content. He would say that the more we focus on content, the less time we’d have to worry about being nervous.