Handling Many Projects

In my post yesterday I went into some of the issues associated with the scale of information I have to manage.

One dimension of this is having a large number of projects active at a point in time. I don’t pretend I know how to manage projects optimally. (Though I guarantee I know a lot more about managing projects than I did when I was a new assistant professor.) What’s important when you’re dealing with dozens of active projects?

• The ease with which you can create a new project. What’s less obvious here is that you need to create projects that will get reviewed regularly.
• The ease with which you can get stuff into projects. Have an email with reference files? It needs to be added to the project. How smoothly can you do that? Have a new task for the projects? How convenient is it to add it to the project, give it a deadline, set up a reminder that appears on your master calendar, and then record all subtasks required for completion and notes with ideas for how to proceed?
• How do you capture notes and ideas related to the project? How do you capture milestones and use them to monitor progress toward completion?
• How easy is it to review your projects to confirm that you’re making the necessary progress, or to identify that you’re not, and then plan a strategy to change that?
• Can you easily review all of your projects to decide which you should be working on that week and which can wait?

The different components of a project include:

• Description
• Task management
• Notes
• Milestones to monitor progress
• Files, links, and other reference material

I’ve tried a large number of tools that claim they’re designed for project management. I have hit some rough patches along the way due to the limitations of the software. Heck, I’ve been to the breaking point, due to being overwhelmed by my projects.

All available software falls short in important ways.

Task managers like Todoist are worse than useless for this kind of thing. A lengthy todo list with no way to know what to work on is a recipe for stress that will make me shut down.

Notes apps like Evernote are likewise useless because they don’t have a good way to query across projects. Notes apps and databases are completely different animals.

The biggest limitation I have found is that these apps are generally designed for a small number of small projects. They are not meant to scale to the volume I operate at. This is no doubt a hard problem to solve. Everyone has their own needs. There’s no substitute for writing your own - but that takes a ton of time.

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