Projects best practices
Thinking on the process from PMI, I adapted it to:
- project TOR
- project meetings (here, one note per type of meeting, with recurrence notes within the body – one note for meeting with management, one note for meetings with sponsors, one note for …)
- project timeline (be it a Gantt chart, some Excalidraw picture, etc.)
- notes for main stakeholders
- notes for vendors
- notes for expenses and budget tracking
- etc.
Developing the above, and trying to adapt it to writing articles as a project:
- note defining the objective of the project (this includes the specification of your deliverables: an article published at XYZ magazine, with minimum of Z words/chars and maximum of Y words/chars, all charts formatted with the color guides received, etc.)
- note for stakeholders (me, sponsor, project manager, reviewer, editor, magazine / periodic where article will be published, possible audience to the article)
- note with risk analysis (am I able to write about that topic based on the technical knowledge I have about it? am I informing or disinforming people with that article? is it a viable thing to do in the time slot I assigned to that? do I have enough budget to buy books, talk to psycologists, interview people?)
- notes for interviews
- notes for books reads and highlights from each one (one note per book, besides some possible automated note from kindle / readwise / whatever)
- note with timeline showing expected delivery dates and real delivery dates (I should write n-chapters/sections in this period of time, how am I with regards to the expected progress?)
- meeting notes and notes for other items from the communication plan…
As it is true for every project, the project manager (you?) defines what is applicable, how detailed things must be, etc. Once the sponsor (also you?) approves it, go for it.
Agile projects have a smaller entry barrier and can have the above documented in a canvas instead of a more formal document. This is interesting to help estimating the effort and return of the time I'll invest on the task / project.
Personal tasks and small things – I don't call them projects but tasks unless they really fit into a project definition – are easier to handle… I write and link, as for any other note. Your process with two notes – one with contents and one with timeline – would be great to address these.
What is small? My personal rule is: something that takes less than 24 work-hours / man-hours (can be split in several days, can happen in a few hours - depend on how many people work on it; usually just me and some night hours after the kids go to bed).