Project Management in Day-to-Day Contexts

You’ve been working on managing an important project at work, and despite a few initial challenges, everything is going smoothly. Your supervisors have praised your ability to identify priorities and stick to a project schedule, and you are confident that this project will be a success.

Then you arrive home after your shift. The dishes still haven’t been washed. You should have done your laundry five days ago. There’s no food left in the fridge, you have three papers due tonight, and you were hoping to get a solid workout in before going to bed.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our “important work projects” that we forget about the everyday projects waiting for us at home.

The ultimate challenge of ordinary, everyday-life projects is the fact that there is never just one. In professional contexts, our projects are isolated and often limited in number, making it easier to focus on just one aspect of the project at a time. Normal life is not that simple; we’re constantly juggling different commitments and responsibilities.

Dishes, laundry, homework, exercise—they’re all projects in their own right, but they seem commonplace and dull next to the new products and services we’re enthusiastically developing at our jobs and internships.

The good news is that project management isn’t just a “workplace thing.” When we look at project management at its simplest, it’s easy to see how the principles we apply to projects in an internship or a job equally apply to other aspects of day-to-day life.

Even better, they have the ability to make us just as efficient and effective in regular contexts as we are in professional settings.

Key Principles to Project Management:

1. Identify the Project. A lot of items on our to-do list are projects in disguise, but there are a few tasks that make it onto the list that are just that—tasks. The challenge we face is weeding out the menial “to-do’s” (like replying to an email or watching a lecture) from the real projects (like writing a paper or fixing a broken cupboard). While a project is complex, has set deadlines, and brings about a unique end result, tasks and to-do’s are simply busy work. The trick to recognizing a real project is asking the following questions:
   
   • Does this task have multiple steps that need to be done before it can be completed?
   • Does this task have a unique product or end result (such as an original article or a functional kitchen)?

If the answer to both of these questions is yes, then chances are we have a project on our hands.

1. Communicate. Many projects impact the people around us. For example, household responsibilities have an immediate effect on the individuals we live with. It’s important to talk to these people and make sure our vision for the project is the same as theirs. On the other hand, some projects may only impact us—these could involve goals for self-improvement, such as building healthy eating habits or training for an athletic event. If this is the case, it’s important to enlist a close friend, roommate, spouse, or family member in the project’s success. We should let them know what our goals are and update them on our progress as we gradually complete our project.

1. Determine priorities. Any project—large or small—is built on determining which items on the project to-do list are absolutely necessary, and which tasks have little to no impact. We can do this by asking:
   
   • How urgent is this item on my to-do list?
   • How important is it?
   • How much of an impact will it have in a week? In a month? In a year?

If we arrange each item in order of highest impact to lowest impact, it’s a lot easier to see which steps should be completed first and which steps we can eliminate. When we know what our project priorities are, reaching the end goal of our project instantly becomes simpler and more easily attainable. This principle can also be applied to multiple projects at once; when we find ourselves struggling to juggle multiple projects, we need to take a step back, identify which projects are highest priority, and keep our focus on those.

1. Stay Organized. If priorities are clearly identified, we can start creating a project schedule. Some everyday projects can be finished within a matter of hours, like cleaning the apartment. Others, like training for a Spartan Race, take more time. In both cases, having a schedule to stick to keeps us on track to finish our project by our self-assigned deadline. Even if there isn’t enough time to complete all of our projects in a day, there may be enough time in a week, month, or year. Planning out time for each project days, weeks, and even months in advance can keep us organized and spare us the headache of a collection of unwanted, unfinished projects that we no longer have time for.

Remember, project management is so much more than just a “workplace thing.” Time management, communication, organization—application of these concepts significantly simplifies our day-to-day life, making us more efficient and dependable at home and in professional settings.

Better yet, the more we practice the principles of project management, the more effective we will become at living them—whether we’re tackling our next big project at work, that pile of dishes waiting in the sink, or our overflowing laundry basket.