Productivity by Degrees
How to Avoid Going Off Course
Welcome to “All the Tasks Fit to Print,” my weekly newsletter on all issues productivity related for authors and other solopreneurs!
My father was a pilot…I don't mean he became a pilot or learned how to fly, which are also true, but that he was in his heart and soul born a pilot. I think most great* pilots are "born that way" with a love of flight that can only be experienced, not explained.
More to the point, my father had a lot of aphorisms that were flight related. One of my favorite (if unhelpful) ones is "You can only take off when the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane." At least he braced me for the bureaucracy of my adult life, I guess?
More helpful but also a bit more obscure was his occasional reference to the "1 in 60 Rule".
If you follow "productivity twitter" (or productivity gurus on any socmed platform) you've probably run across this before. If not, allow me to explain:
A one degree error in heading will cause a plane to miss its target by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown.
This has to do with spheres and maths and angles, but that's not important here. What is important is that a slight error in your current path can lead to massive problems in the future.
Project managers know this well; if a material needed for production isn't sourced in the time frame and cost allowance originally planned, it can throw off manufacturing (and thus delivery of the final product) by not just hours or days, but weeks or even months. Sometimes the way a problem like that spirals out of control feels exponential, even if it technically isn't.
But sometimes it's much sneakier than that, which is what the "1 in 60 Rule" is in reference to.
One degree of shift in a flight plan, way up in the sky, is so very very little and back before navigation computers existed, so very very easy to do. My father retired out of the U.S. Air Force doing crash investigations, and while flying off course was not always the problem, he claimed that 90% of the time, pilot error was the cause of the crash. Usually those errors were so small as to go unnoticed by extremely experienced pilots, co-pilots, and navigators.
Project Management and Flight Plans
It could be argued that a flight plan, the plan that a pilot registers with flight control at an airport before taking off, is a form of project management. It has to be clearly thought out ahead of time along with variables such as time, weather, fuel, and costs.
Similarly, for both, often times errors in flight plans and project schedules are not expected or even noticed. You are flying along in your business, one degree off course, and suddenly your calendar is backed up and all your plans are buried in problems.
This is one reason I caution against prioritizing your life by your calendar. Instead, your schedule needs to be in alignment with your goals.
While being "one degree" off on your project planning might not be as catastrophic for your business as it is for a pilot, it is true in both cases that the earlier you discover the problem, the earlier you can fix it and lessen the impact (or even eliminate it).
Course Correction
I've seen a lot of advice about how to course correct when a project or program is off schedule. Most of it is common sense: backtrack, analyze, prioritize, re-align.
However, taking time out of your day/week to sit down and figure out if you are one degree off course is a heck of a time sink, isn't it? A necessary one if you know something is wrong, I'll grant you that. But what if you could just…not be off course? What if you never had to backtrack and analyze etcetera etcetera?
How can you stay on target?
Pilots and project managers do not get off course the vast majority of the time, and when they do, it's because they were not doing their job. What do I mean? I mean it's not just a pilot's responsibility to keep the plane in the air, it's the pilot's job to follow the flight plan. It's not a project manager's job to just make sure everyone is busy, but to follow the project plan.
If you are busier filling up your daily task list or calendar with "important things" than you are checking to make sure those things are vital steps toward your goals, then you've got it backwards and you absolutely will end up drifting several degrees off course.
How do you stay on course?
By constantly referencing your position (pilots) or constantly referencing the project plan. If, every day, part of your schedule is to look at your project/program plans and create your task list based on them, then you will always be on the right track, just like a pilot checking their flight plan against their actual navigation.
It's no good to plan out what you are going to do, plug in some due dates or time blocks, and then sail on your merry way. If you cannot easily see the overall picture (aka flight path, project plan) of what you are doing, now is the time to put that together as a resource to use every day. This is a one-and-done chore, but will pay numerous dividends in time, sanity, and even money!
Let's start:
Create a road map, also known as a flight path or project plan. Let it be as winding and complex as you need it to be for every step/mile marker to be included. It can be an outline or a list or (worst case scenario!) a flowchart. It can even be a row of sticky-notes across your desk.
Condense it down into one page/screen. If there are sub-projects that are complex, that's okay, you don't need to spell them out. (A flight plan does not usually include instructions on how to fly the plane, after all!) You are looking for brevity at this stage!
Print it out or make it your phone's wallpaper or WHATEVER you need to do to make it easily referenced. Put all those sticky-notes on a large poster board or cork-board and hang it on your office wall, if you have to.
Make checking it every day a part of your routine.
You'll discover that looking at your project plan regularly makes you automatically course correct. The "1 in 60 Rule" will never apply to you. You will see problems coming at you from miles away (sometimes literally, if you deal with shipping products!).
It really is that simple!
(The Fourth Step in Project Management is "Monitoring" which is what you are doing: controlling the advancement of your goals purposefully and carefully.)
* And yes, my father was a great pilot, verifiably. In WWII he flew reconnaissance prior to the invasion of Europe, and was nicknamed the Omaha Kid for his fly-by photos of Omaha Beach, which you can see in any NatGeo issue about the it. Only the top pilots were chosen for reconnaissance, as it required tremendous skill, talent, and nerve. Poppa had all of that in excess!