Just finished reading a book by Jenny Wood (Wild Courage) that suggests a technique for clarifying thought and producing a project plan quickly and efficiently called “pencil sharpening”. Her idea is that as you get an assignment or start on a project, you sit down in the first 24 hours and write out a one-page or so “plan of attack”. How will you start the work?, what are your metrics?, who will be important stakeholders?, how long will it take to do this work?, etc. As I was reading through her description of this technique she uses to get work off the ground, I was reminded of a sort of similar technique called Chair Flying.
Chair flying is something that some pilots do to prepare for flights. It involves visualization of the flight, essentially. You consider what you need to have when you take off, what kind of atmospheric conditions you might encounter, traffic at your end point airport, and so on. My version of chair flying is one of my first stops when I embark on a new project and it just involves me turning to my trusty pen and legal pad, writing the name of the project across the top and then visualizing what needs to happen to get to “success” at the end of the project. What kinds of info/materials/resources do I need? What sort of roadblocks might I encounter? What are my deliverables as I create the project and when might those be reasonably expected? I basically work through, in my head, what the project will entail and list out everything that pops into my head while I do that. I prefer to do this on paper, but there is no reason this couldn’t be done with Google Docs and a keyboard instead.
The same flexibility seems to be in place for pencil sharpening. Jenny says that she does it on a Google doc, but it can be done on paper if you’d like. I think that, despite the fact that I prefer to chair fly on paper, my first attempts at pencil sharpening will be on a Google Doc because I imagine that my doc that I come up with will be the heart of my project plan and it might as well be born digital because it will need to become digital at some point anyway.
Those two techniques, put together (have a chair flying section in your pencil sharpening document, even if you don’t actually refer to it as chair flying) would make for a really strong project plan right out of the gate – and the fact that the pencil sharpening doc is recommended to be produced in the first 24 hours after receiving the work/project helps to combat procrastination and that panicked feeling you get when you realize a big project is due in two days and you have hardly even started on it…