I can’t believe it’s been nine months since my last EBER project update.
For those of who aren’t in the loop on this, the EBER project is a massive three-year personal project that I conceived of in August 2017 and officially launched in September of that year. Click the category to the right if you want to see all the relevant posts.
EBER stand for Early to Bed, Early to Rise — because the triple goals of the project are health, wealth (prosperity really), and wisdom. I’d been doing a good job of keeping on top of the project — checking in with my plan regularly, course correcting as necessary, and talking about it here (accountability) — until this summer, when things kind of went sideways.
So, in the spirit of presenting project planning in the most accurate way possible, instead of ignoring what happened (or at least not talking about it in public), I’m going to dig in and work through the process I use to get a project back on track.
1. Reasons not excuses
The first thing is to acknowledge that, while excuses are never helpful, there may be reasons that a project got off track. Acknowledging those reasons helps keep things in perspective and avoid future issues.
In my case, things got very busy in June just at the start of the nasty astrological weather (that Austin and Gordon dubbed “the meat grinder”). Even after summer ended, things didn’t really let up until recently. My list includes:
- The kid getting quite sick during spring term (which involved dropping some coursework in his dual credit program)
- Kid having surgery in June
- The recovery from surgery, which was harder than we anticipated
- Husband having injury that slowed his work in the forge
- Tons of travel for work and work stress
- Travel for personal reasons (but also with stress)
Honestly, the first four items on that list are just priorities that will naturally derail other things in my life. I make no apology for that. The process of outlining those reasons helps me avoid guilt about getting my larger project off track. Because in the end, the household IS the project and anything that happens with it is important. That said, I see looking back that there were things I could have done to mitigate some of the other issues. First, I over-committed myself during an already busy time. I also let the stress of that get to me in ways that were unhealthy. So I missing needed perspective.
2. Count successes
No matter what’s gone awry in a project, there are usually some things that were good, or at least not terrible. This is the stuff you got done in spite of whatever chaos hit. There were several items that I’d planned to do that I actually did:
- I sorted out the migraine issue and have way fewer of those fuckers
- I found a new affordable gym and treated myself to personal training, which is GREAT
- We got everyone healed up from injury and surgery (health is an ongoing effort)
- We got the kid on his path to graduation, which should be in June of 2020 (still a year ahead of schedule) and he has a plan for what he wants to do next
I’d also like to point out how chaos can actually help drive your goals in interesting ways. Our household had been thinking through some complex planning challenges pretty much since the start of this project, and the various stresses of this autumn helped pinpoint some critical information that we were struggling to contextualize. I have a much better sense of where I want to be in the coming year (which, as you recall, is when this project ends).
3. Replan
So, you made a plan and then didn’t look at it? This is the cardinal sin of project management and also surprisingly easy to do. My last public project check in here on the blog was in March. My last planning was in May, just as thing started getting really crazy. And I swear I’m only just coming up for air right now. So yes, planning session is in order.
Normally, planning is a simple review of progress and goals, along with the standard agile sprint planning (if you’re curious about this, you can google Agile Method — or take my Planning is Magic course). But when you get off track, things are a bit more complicated.
First of all, it’s useful to check if you’ve missed any major deadlines or milestones (deadlines are external dates and milestones are internal ones). This can includes slipping the entire project out to end at a later date. I was initially picturing this project as ending in September of 2020, however some aspects of it may extend through the end of the year. Also, I didn’t miss any milestones… that I knew about.
The second thing you want to do is decide if you have any new goals that have come up. You do this every time you plan of course, but when you plan regularly, you usually don’t have many major course corrections. After skipping planning for a while, I did have some big changes and one of them create a change in the date of a milestone that I’m at risk of not making (it got moved up). Of course, that’s not exactly fair, setting a goal now that I may not meet, but life is sometimes like that.
Finally, you need to take a fresh look at your backlog of tasks to see what you need to catch up on, what you need to add, and what you can ax. The last is interesting. If you revisit a plan after a lapse and discover that most of your tasks are completely unnecessary at this point, you really need to consider how critical they were to begin with. Maybe they were then, but regardless, a break is a perfect time to get fresh eyes on everything about your project.
Conclusion
It’s possible that you come back to a project and suddenly realize that the whole thing is now pointless, different, or unnecessary. You may be a different person than you were when you started the project (this is especially true of very long projects). The truth is that the project is yours and you can kill it at any time if necessary.
The EBER project is still ongoing, with a renewed commitment to a) not over-commit to things that are off track b) adjust goals and milestones based on new data, and c) keep plan a verb rather than a noun.
