Lately my juggling skills have been lacking. Too many projects at work, at home, for my community; nothing is getting done and I keep tripping over the damn balls and I’m running out of post-it notes.
Part of this is purely because – try as I might to add more – there are only 24 hours in a day and I require sleep for some of those hours. The other reason though is due to the lack of some sort of project management plan. I figured if I could find the magic system, it would solve all of my problems so I recently spent several hours searching for that magic project management system. After hours of banging my head on the virtual wall, I decided that there isn’t a magic system.
Oh sure, there are lots of them out there. They range from the painfully simplistic to the needlessly complicated. I’m not even going to bother sharing the ones that I looked at because not one of them is worth a moment of anyone’s time or effort.
The majority of my projects are communications-related so I said out loud to no one in particular: Maybe what I need is an editorial/content calendar. Back to Google in search of the magic system for managing communication activities from start-to-finish. Various systems had bits and pieces of what I was looking for but none really solved my problem. So on to the next phase of solving my problem: Create my own system. The system needs to:
- Allow me to track communication/marketing initiatives, projects, events and tasks
- Measure those said initiatives, projects, events and tasks
- Report out to anyone who cares on said initiatives, projects, events and tasks
- Actually complete the said initiatives, projects, events and tasks.
Tell us! Tell us! How did you do it?
I started with the tools that I already use to try and manage my mess of a life:
- Microsoft Outlook 2013: Laugh if you will but because I spend the majority of my days in front of a desktop/laptop, Outlook is still the best application for email, to-dos, calendar, etc.
- Google Calendar: Occasionally I actually leave my office and desk behind and still need access to my to-dos, calendar, etc.
- gSyncit: Let’s me sync Outlook and Google Calendar/Tasks so that I can leave my office and still have access to everything on my phone or tablet.
I created a new calendar in Outlook and Google and now sync them together. Change made in one place automatically goes to other place and VOILA! I’m always up-to-date.
Behind each entry in the calendar are the planning and implementation details for that specific piece of content or message. I’m still playing with the final setup of this system but ultimately each entry will include the following bits of minutiae:
- Content/activity title
- People involved/responsible
- Working notes and final deliverables
- Distribution vehicle
- Date and time of distribution
- ROI data (i.e. number of retweets, shares, questions, engagement, etc.)
I suspect the system will change a little more but after a couple of days of using this, it’s working for me. I no longer have events overlapping each other. I can easily see what’s coming and focus on what I need to work on today. So far so good. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Related Reading