Transcription
Out of sight, out of mind doesn't just apply to the clothes in the back of your closet. It actually seriously impacts whether or not you get your projects done. In this video, I'm going to give you the high-level templates you need to track your projects on paper so that you complete them without relying on memory alone, and I'll show you ways to integrate them into your existing system right now.
Your brain was not designed to be a project tracker, okay? It was designed to have ideas, make connections, and solve problems, not to serve as a filing cabinet for your entire professional and personal life. And you don't want your memory to do that either. Memory is reconstructive. So each time you remember something, you pull it out of your memory. You are actually recreating the memory in its entirety. Memory is very easily degraded because of this. It tarnishes over time. It stretches and gets manipulated because of stress. These things degrade your memory significantly. So memory is really, really, really unreliable. And the idea that you're going to remember all the projects you have going on right now, like you're going to remember all that and store that all in your memory is flat ridiculous because if you do it, one, you're going to forget things. Your memory is not that big. It can't hold that much. And two, even if you do remember things, they are reconstructed ideas and plans that will vary significantly each time you remember them. So your memory is not a good storage place for these things. It's untenable. And yet we do it anyways all the time in our professional and personal lives. We're like, "Oh, I'll remember that later. Oh, okay. Yeah, I understand the basic one, two, three of this project. It's simple. I'll just do that when I sit down to my computer." But you won't. By the time you've gotten to your computer, you've already forgotten the three steps. You have to re-engineer those in your brain, reconstruct the three steps so that you can actually complete the project.
Um, so that's why most of us have some kind of place where we write our projects down. This is mine. This is my project tracker and I'm obsessed with her. It's not very complete and it does not always get updated, but it has a couple basic parts. First is the backlog. Some might call this an inbox. Uh, it's where everything gets written down. Then there is cold storage. So, anything in here is stuff that I have moved out of the backlog that I'm like, I'm not going to be working on right now. I'm just putting it on the ice until I can actually have some time to work on it. And then there's my projects list which has a list of all the projects I'm currently working on and the project templates themselves which have various components. Like I said, it's not very neat. It's not very complete, but it really does the job and it has a simple workflow. And the goal of any project planning system like this is to get all that info out of your head, out of your memory, and into one trusted place so that your memory can't warp it or forget it in that reconstructing act that it likes to do. I call this kind of practice making a single source of truth. So, one place your brain can point to and say, "It's in there. I don't have to hold it. I don't have to remember it." This is like a founding philosophy of all of my tools that I use for productivity. Project tracker. This is my one source of truth for projects. I'm re recently getting back into the Hobonichi cousin as a memory keeper. So, this is like the one source of truth for all my memories this year. This is my single planner. This is the only place that my plans are listed. You know, all that kind of stuff. So, broadly, we're trying to uh build a single source of truth for all of our projects when we do this because then the only thing we ever have to remember is where to look. And if we only have one, we only have to remember one thing. We don't have to be like, oh, is it in this book and this book and this book and this book and this book? It's just in the one space. And your memory has to do so little work to get started on any one of your projects. So having a single source of truth, a singular project manager is very important if you want to be able to remember what you're working on easily because then the only thing you have to remember is where to show up and where to look.
Of course, lots of people have multiple project managers because of reasons. I've talked to a lot of you who have side hustles and full-time jobs and private practices and kids who need their soccer practices tracked in a certain way and like all that stuff. home, life, personal, kids, family, dinners, whatever you do. Uh, all of those have their own associated projects. So, if you have a separate project tracker for like work and one for your personal life, for example, that's fine. Like, you can have as many project trackers as you need. Just know that the process I'm about to outline for you is going to be harder the more items you have because then you will, your brain will have to do a little bit more work. your memory will have to do a little bit more work trying to remember where you wrote something down. If it's like work and personal, that stuff is pretty easy to separate. So, just have clear delineations if you want to have two different sources of truth, so to speak, for certain project elements or life areas. Totally fine to split them up, but that is going to be kind of important just to know as things get more complex in your life and you have to add more complexity into your system, your system's going to become more complex and your memory is going to have to do a little bit more work.
So, but okay, say you are following my instructions exactly and you have this single source of truth. Even if you record your projects in something like this, you are still likely to forget what's coming up unless you have some kind of mechanism for getting a bird's eye view within the uh project system itself. And so, this is really what we're referring to when we talk about trackers. It's things like this, things like this, things like this. And I'll go over all of these in just a second. Um, but your project tracker is where you get that overall bird's eye view. Quick note, if you want hands-on help building this kind of system, building those sources of truth, I'm opening a limited number of spots for a program I've been developing. The link for the weight list is on the screen and in the description as well. It is designed to help you build the kind of durable holistic system that will withstand all your complex projects. So, if that is something you've been waiting for, please join the wait list to hear more. I'm very excited about it. Okay, let's build your tracking trucking. Okay, let's build your project tracking bird's eye view so you can always have a clear idea of where your projects are at a glance.
Before you can manage your projects, you need to be able to see all of them at once. You need to be able to tell what's active, what's inactive, what's on hold, what's just an idea. So, you want to create something called a project overview or I call it a project master list at the top of this page. But essentially, this is your at a glance report of how your projects are doing. This helps with keeping track of deadlines, making sure you're on track to meet those deadlines, noting at a glance what projects are for, where they live in your notebook, like with a page number, whether they're completed, incompleted, what notes you need to know for pursuing the rest of the project or notes for why a project was canceled. It basically needs a bunch of different information on it. And I'm going to take you through the anatomy of mine in particular, which is a little bit weird, but it's going to be unique to you. Whatever your projects actually hold. You're going to have a unique project overview page, and what information matters to me to see may not matter to you to see. So, take all this with a grain of salt. Um, just know that you need to build some sort of overview so that things remain top of mind. There's no out of sight, out of mind with a project master list. It means you can view everything at a glance. Everything is insight, so everything is in mind until you check it off.
Now, I will say when I have done project videos in the past, I have been somewhat negative towards project indexes and project master lists. I was foolish when I said those things. Okay, initially when I set up this project tracker, I did not have a project master list because what I was doing with a project master list was I was just listing out the projects that I had going and I was like, this is not useful. Like just the project list and a number. I'm never going to look at this page. I'm never going to check that. Instead, I'm just going to use my muscle memory and find the project where it is in my project pages. But I've turned the tide here because specifically this is so helpful to have at a glance to see how your whole life like everything that you are working on is functioning at a glance. So, so, so helpful. So, how mine developed is I'm keeping my projects in a notebook, right? So, this is very useful if you're keeping your projects in a notebook. If you're keeping your projects in um, a project software, it's very likely they have a built-in overview that you can use. And you'll find most of them have these traits as well, right? They have the name of the project. There is some sort of way to see what phase the project is in. So, for example, my phases are idea, planning, doing part one, doing part two, revisions, and done. This just works for the majority of my projects. Yours might be idea, plan, stakeholder review, first draft, prototype, whatever. For like a web page, this would be, you know, um, content design and wireframe and then builds and approvals, you know, like it just depends on what kind of work you do. But for most of my projects, for me, idea plan, doing part one, doing part two, revisions, and done encompasses pretty much everything. And those are all in columns here that I can just check off as the project moves through its phases. I can clearly see when a project is complete or when there's still more work to do. I also additionally will cross things off when I'm going through this workflow system. Uh, because that just helps me see at a glance what I'm looking at and what I'm not. Even though these projects were not completed, I didn't actually like I never actually need to look at this bar again because I know it was not completed. I already decided to cross it off. It's no longer relevant. I can skip to the ones that are still open. So, some way to tell where a project is throughout the phases it has to go through to get to completion and then some way to know if it is complete at a glance. Make this as easy as possible for yourself to know if it's complete at a glance.
Over here on the left, in addition to the page number and the name of the project, you'll see that I have a bunch of highlights. And actually, as I was experimenting with this, I did change how I did my highlight colors halfway through. So, the basic thing that you need to know is that this yellow color relates to RIT. So, relates to the YouTube channel, Rachel and Theory. This pink salmon color relates to anything in my personal life, any personal projects I have to do. And then this blue color relates to any writing projects that I'm working on. Actually, I need to add that to my key over here. Bonus tip, if you do decide to color code, make sure that you have a key where you need to color code. Sometimes I see people build these keys, like create these sort of like, oh, my color coding key lives in the front of my notebook for some reason. And I'm like, just put it on the page where you will be needing the key. I don't understand why it has to be so far away. So, this really helps me keep my key in mind. So, yeah. So, color coding helps me because I can see at a glance like what life area my projects are related to. And then I additionally have this complete and canceled delineation between green and red. I initially was doing life areas over here on the side and completion status here, but I switched to doing life area color here, highlighting the full name and um, completion status tracked in like this extra column over here. This is because when I come in here, this color connects more to how I have my projects listed out back here. So I have all my projects have a title and that title is also highlighted with the color the same color that is highlighted here. So it just helps navigation. Okay. So as I've said, you're going to need a way to see where the project is in its journey towards completion. See at a glance whether or not it is complete and any page numbers or other information where you can look up more information about the project so that your overview is connected to the rest of your project management system. And if you're like me and you like to split things up by work areas or contexts, you also have a way to delineate what projects are for work, personal, creativity, family, whatever you need to track.
So this is my main project tracking list, but project tracking actually has two different styles. You have general projects that can include anything from setting up Obsidian to running tests on at your job to writing creative projects. This is just my general project list that really works for me. But projects, some projects are also recurring and it would be like exhausting to write out the recurring projects here, especially when you know they have different and unique steps that you have to follow every single time. And that is where this little recurring project sheet comes in. Recurring projects repeat on a cycle like a monthly report or a weekly content batch. They are individual projects, but they are not one-off. They are usually part of some larger system or they happen multiple times and reoccurring projects are your friends because you can template them. The steps are basically the same every time. So you set it up once and you repeat. That's what I did with this page. So I have it taped to my project overview because I want to be able to work with this as an overview. I want to see everything I'm working on at a glance, including these things that by now are routinized. And that is creating a video and creating my newsletter. Oh yeah. You want to say hi to the camera? Hey, you just want to rub your face on all my stuff. Okay, I need you to leave. So, I'm using this little cutout to track my video projects, which all have the same steps in them until I complete them. And then also my newsletter projects, which again all have the same steps. The steps in the newsletter projects and video projects are different than the steps here because I do so many of them and they all have such specific requirements. And taping it in like this means I can see all of my one-off projects and all of my newsletter projects and all of my video projects just at a glance every single time I opened this page. You might notice this is like cut out and that's because I initially had it in the back of my journal, but it was just not getting updated when it was back there. So, a good tip for creating a good project overview is to make sure that it all lives in the same place. It's not buried in the back. You don't have two different project overviews that you're trying to look at. It's not buried in the back of a notebook. It's not in some different notebook. It's all part of the same system.
Okay. So, how does this project overview, this tracking mechanism connect with the other pieces of my project management system? To get something on this list, you will have to decide that it is worthy of your time. And there are tons of decision matrices that you can go through to figure out what is worth of your time and what you actually want to pursue. But once you figure out something is a project that you actually do want to get done, you can put it on your project master list and then make an individual spread for that project. So for example, this is a work project I was working on. We published a winter magazine. This had a timeline. It had task lists. It had information for where I could find more. This is the basic anatomy of a project plan. And when I am looking at my project master list, if I have plan checked off, it means that I have something set up for my projects back here. I have a page. I have a section. I have a task list. I have stuff that I can do to complete this. If I don't, it is just an idea, right? And so when I am actually working on a project, I'll come to this page. I'll say, "Oh, these three, four projects need my attention." I can then go to those pages and I can look at them more specifically and either they are still active or they are complete or they are cancelled. Those are the three statuses I have for my projects. Again, we are trying to make our projects as easy to see as possible. So, I'm scrolling through this scrolling. Wow, digital fatigue is so real, people. Okay, I'm flipping through these pages and I'm seeing immediately at a glance if this was complete, if it's canceled. I used to just cross everything off. I found that that wasn't enough. I need to be able to be flipping through this and just see at a glance like what is canceled, what is still active, what is complete. I of course also have that information here. I will color code on my project master list, but this just makes it so easy to skip a bunch here and go straight to the projects that are still open. And these project pages are again designed for me to see the most important information at a glance. So for example, this is a packaging test I was doing. I was like testing out some ideas with thumbnails for the channel. I had a deadline and that was once three out of three videos are tested, that's my deadline. And of course, I didn't meet this project requirements. I actually had a good reason why I didn't meet them and I wrote it in a note down here. So again, at a glance, even for my completed or canceled projects, I can come in, see that it was canceled, and immediately figure out why. I don't have to store any of that in my memory.
Another way I love to do this is with progress trackers. I think you guys know that I'm a big fan of progress trackers. I am not a big fan of habit trackers. I'm a big fan of progress trackers because a progress bar is a straight up and down bar. It gets filled the more work that you do. And so these are examples of things that I'm writing. They are fanfictions. We love a fanfiction on this channel. And I can see really quickly at a glance what in my first draft is complete. I split up my drafts into different phases depending on like the act structure I'm using or usually it depends on like the arc I want to build. So each individual fiction project has individual phases, individual phases. And then because I jump around a lot when I'm writing. Some of these phases have a little bit filled out. Some of them are completely filled out. So I'm coming in here and I'm looking at this and again at a glance I want to be able to just like feel in my body how complete these projects are. I'm looking at this and I'm like, "Okay, this is kind of scattered, but I have a good third of it already done." Now I can temper my expectations when I go into this project for how much I can realistically get done, how much I want to get done, and where the areas are that I really need to work on. Same thing with with this. I have about a third of it done. I've done a little bit over here, but these sections are largely empty. I know where I need to put my work.
So, to track your projects, you really want to make sure that your overview is really solid. It's always updated and it's always giving you the information you need at a mere glance. And then you also want to make sure your project pages are updated. They're solid. They're giving you the information you need at a glance, including whether or not it's complete, canceled, and what you need to do going forward or what you need to do about it. If there's a special note, make sure it's in a box. Make sure the deadlines are highlighted. You want to think about you in the future. Like, if you are coming back to this project tracker in whatever 5 years or something, will you know what happened? Will you be able to piece together your process? Think about her because she's out there and she will need to come back to this in 5 years. I don't know why, but she will.
One place where this kind of project tracking can actually get weirdly difficult is in tracking the projects that have to do with personal relationships. A lot of us have people we want to keep up with, like friendships and commitments we want to honor, but we don't actually have a specific vision of what that looks like. Today's sponsor is an app called Dex, and they are actually built just for this. The app pulls together your phone contacts, social media connections, Gmail, everything, and then it becomes this dashboard for keeping up with everybody. I've actually made connections with other content creators through this YouTube channel, and I'm always trying to keep up with them, but I'm terrible at that sort of thing if I don't have a system. So, Dex asks how often I'd like to check in with people I'm in touch with and it notifies me so I remember to reach out at the right time. If this sounds like it might be helpful, check out the link below. It's totally free to get started and it takes like 5 minutes maximum to set up. It's super helpful if you're always accidentally ghosting people like I am. Anyway, the point is you need to get specific about what you have planned and find a way for these detailed plans to talk to your project overview or your project master list.
Okay, let's talk about the next principle of this because your system only works if you have a ritual to maintain it, right? We just talked about how you need to make sure this talks to this and of course if you have a broader project management system, you need to make sure your backlog or inbox talks to your cold storage talks to your project master list. you need to make sure it all works together because I see a lot of people building out these project plans and project planner like notebooks and even building out a big project master list, but they don't put the routines in place to regularly update their project book. So, it ends up just this ends up not being filled out. These project pages get dusty and when you come back at a glance, you think that nothing is done and you just feel that sense of guilt. So, a routine or a ritual to maintain your project system is going to be so so helpful. Um, you might know these as a weekly reset, a daily check-in, a monthly plan. Usually, whatever you already have in place to update your other planners or your other notebooks, stacking this on top of that will usually work.
But, let's talk about the three real options that I think of when I think of project managing. And that is one, the daily 15-minute check-in. This is a mini clear out that ties directly into your daily planning session. You're not doing a deep dive. You're basically just like scanning for active projects here, here, here, and then anything you need to look deeper into, you go back to that page and you say, "Okay, I want to get some work on this done. I'll work on this part." And then you write that down in your planner as you do your daily planning ritual. Then the next day, you can say, "Okay, I was in here and I did this." Check off whatever you did. Come back to your project master list and make sure the appropriate columns are checked off there as well. A weekly review is the second type of routine I want to talk about. And it is basically a longer, more intentional session once a week where you go through every active project, update statuses, move things forward, archive what's done, the whole shebang. So in a weekly session, you are likely going to have more time to really think about all of your projects to really critically think like, okay, I'm not making a lot of movement on this one. What do I need to make movement? How do I gauge my momentum? Should I impose a deadline? Are there any tasks missing? Or should I just cancel it? So you're asking yourself those kinds of longer term questions. And then the third type of routine I recommend is basically just anything longer term. So this could be monthly. You're coming in here and really doing an assessment of are there any projects I want to add? How do these align with my life vision? You but you could also do something a little bit more granular but bigger than a weekly which is a bi-weekly sprint. This is borrowed from agile team workflows. At my last job we did standups and sprint planning on a two-week cycle and actually I'm still doing that now. I just implemented it for my personal work and my YouTube work and it's really really awesome. So it's translated really well to solo project management but essentially every two weeks you review what got done and you set intentions for the next two week sprint or two week um sort of like project window and I find two weeks is a little bit better than one week for me in terms of updating my projects cuz more gets done on a project over the course of two weeks than on one week. So whatever works for you just schedule it on your calendar. Make sure you protect it because if you don't show up to that calendar appointment, you are going to forget everything you're working on and then you're going to start going back to that dastardly technique we use called remembering and try to remember all the stuff you have to do for your projects instead of just referencing what you've already written down the way you've already exported your brain onto paper.
And then, like I said, as you review this, you pull things out and you put them into your daily or weekly or regular planner on whatever cadence works for you. This one's a really messy page, but you can kind of see that I have like main projects here over here on the side outlined with these like 1, two, three. That's usually how I outline my main projects. Um, and these all relate to something in this project master list or in a previous project master list I was using. So, you're keeping your projects visible at every level of planning. On the weekly basis, on the planner that you're in, you're seeing what you're working on now. On a weekly or a daily cadence, you're coming back into your project master list. You're just checking anything off, making sure everything got done that you needed to do. And then on a longer term timeline, like bi-weekly, monthly, however you like to set it up. You're coming in here again and checking if these are actually getting done, assessing where the roadblocks are, making sure everything aligns with your life vision and your goals, and you are doing all that without having to remember in detail every single thing about every single project. You've exported your mind, your memory for your projects onto paper and now you can use that like it was meant to be used as sort of this like second brain type of space where you can rely on it and you can trust it because it is the single source of truth for all your projects.
All right, if you made it this far in the video, I just want to flag my new program again. There is a link below, a QR code on screen. This is probably the last time I will mention it on YouTube, at least in a YouTube video, because I have limited spots. So, if you're interested in working together on a productivity system that will untangle your brain, please join the wait list to learn more. I'm super excited about it. Otherwise, if you want to make those routines really, really strong, I also have a video up here on the screen about how to make your very own command center, so you always know exactly what to do when you open your planner. I'll see you there.