Coming to Grips with Long-Term Projects
Posted May 27th, 2013
Big, long-term projects. They can loom over you like a mountain, ominous and intimidating. What produces all the anxiety, however, is not the actual work itself, but rather the fear that we will not measure up to it.
Sometimes these big projects lead to procrastination…until the deadline becomes critical. Often, according to business analyst Peter Bregman, we discover that we don’t even know what we need in order to get started. And then, when we do start, we find that we don’t know everything we need to know or even have the skills necessary to finish it. In addition, more urgent things keep popping up, so we lay the long-term project aside.
The standard advice to getting a big project done is to break it up into smaller parts, concentrate on the next step to move ahead, and set incremental deadlines along the way. It’s good advice, Bregman says, but it’s not enough.
It’s not enough because it doesn’t address the real culprit behind our procrastination – our fear of failure. We are afraid that we will fail, that we will spend all of our time on it, neglecting other things, and in the end it won’t be very good anyway.
So how do we handle this fear – the elephant in the room?
Don’t pretend it’s not there, Bregman says; we should acknowledge that we’re afraid. Don’t try to downplay it, because that is just another form of denial – denying the reality of the situation. It’s a natural feeling. Moreover, by trying to ignore it, we stoke that fear even more, because it’s always there in the background gnawing at us.
But by admitting our fears, we also are admitting that we may not be able to meet our expectations. By doing this, we are acknowledging that our efforts aren’t going to be perfect. This actually helps us get started, because it is that desire for perfection – or something close to it – that often prevents us from moving ahead.
Also, by accepting our fears, we also accept that we don’t have everything we need to get the project done. This, in turn, spurns us to seek out the information, skills or other support we need.
Speaking of support, if you need help staffing your San Francisco-area company with great IT and other professionals, call upon the recruiters at Bayside Solutions to help. We look forward to hearing how we may be of service.
