1. You’re not thinking through the step-by-step details in your project plan

Make a Project plan that isn’t a just a quick to-do list

If your project plan is like more like a hasty to-do list, then you’re leaving out vital steps that will cost you time, energy, and even money in the long run.

You may have seen me tell this story before, but it’s the perfect example (and I see it happen all the time.)

How business owners typically set a project end date (a familiar story)

A business owner came to me for help planning her launch and when I asked her timeframe, she threw out a launch date that was a few weeks away. After we created the roadmap together, we saw she’d need at least 8 weeks to complete her project plan.

So why did she think her project could be done in 3 weeks when it really needed 8? Because she hadn’t really thought through the details. She had an idea of what needed to be done, but hadn’t considered every step of the process.

What would have happened if we hadn’t made a detailed project plan for her launch?

Could she have launched in 3 weeks? Maybe! But she would have added to her stress as she was forced to make some hard decisions:

• Outsource the work to get it done on time? Is there room in the budget for that? How would that impact the launch ROI? Who should she hire? Is there time to research and interview contractors?
• Cut back on the launch plans in order to focus her time on the bare minimum required?
• Change her goal date to add another 3 weeks (surely doubling her time is enough, right?) And then doing that again when she realizes the launch still isn’t ready after 6 weeks?

I hear about project stress like this all the time. And all of it can have been avoided by making sure your project plan is sufficiently detailed from the beginning.

2. Your project plan timelines aren’t realistic

If you don’t leave enough time in your project plan for required tasks, then trying to follow it is a stressful exercise in futility (and a lack of sleep).

When you launch your program or project, the first thing to do is to plan it out. I’ll go into the detailed step-by-step of project planning another time, but you’re creating a roadmap of what needs to be done and when. After you see what the tasks are, you estimate how long it will take for each task and set deadlines accordingly.

Estimating time for a project can be difficult—and that’s okay

This can be really difficult if you are planning something new—there’s always uncertainty about how long tasks will take (and that’s okay). If you’re not sure what your time estimate should be, think about a worst-case scenario so that you have the time necessary in the event of delays or problems.

Think through a worst case scenario (include buffer time)

In other words, leave some buffer time when you’re unsure in case something comes up that was not planned for. Don’t put yourself under more pressure than what’s best for your well-being. A plan with a spacious timeline will always feel better than a rushed plan.

3. Your plan (or goals) are too focused on perfection

Think of this plan as “version 1.1” (or 1.2… or 3.1)

Say it with me: your first doesn’t need to be your best. If you feel like everything needs to be perfect from the get-go, you’ll develop an all-or-nothing mindset that’s sure to bring on a sense of dread and defeat. Consider this plan to be an iteration of your ultimate vision. 

No one is watching every (virtual) thing you do

Help manage your inner critic by reminding yourself that no one is paying the same level of attention to your stuff as you are (as a perfectionist Enneagram 1, believe me: I am saying this to myself most of all.)

Get started: done is better than perfect

It’s not about making your goal fit some idea of what “the best” looks like to you, but actually getting it out there so that you can start collecting feedback and know what needs to be done next. Each time you repeat a launch, you can adjust, improve, and add a new idea or feature that excites you.

4. You are giving all your project goals equal importance

What parts of your project plan are critical? And which ones can you let go?

Setting priorities is essential to being able to adjust your plan as needed with minimal stress. If you know what your priorities are, then it’s easier to let go of the stuff that’s not supporting your most valued goals. It’s okay to let some tasks—and some goals!—be less important than others.

What is important to you?

Think about what’s truly important to you for this project—not what’s important to that famous business coach or what Big Man McCEO says your “key performance indicators” should be. You might decide that some of your priorities are numbers-based (hitting a financial target, for instance—especially if it’s based on your actual budget goals and not just a vanity number… but I digress).

Your priorities aren’t just about your business goals

But it’s just as vital to consider how you want to feel or ways that you want to grow through your launching/project cycle process. Maybe you want to maintain better boundaries around your work time or get more comfortable being in front of the camera.

Choose and rank these priorities early in your project planning process. Then, if you begin to feel overwhelmed or need to pivot, you’ll already have the decision-making criteria you need to move forward—with minimal hand-wringing.

If you have struggled in the past with any (or all!) of these, there is help! Project planning and consulting can give you the support you need all the way through your project, from digging into the details in planning to helping you stay prioritized and focused during implementation. Let me hear about your upcoming project by sending me an email at kate[at]theefficientcreative[dot]com.

Don’t Forget: Research

It’s a classic example of the type of forgotten task that can add days (or weeks!) to any plan. Your to-do list says something like “Decide on a new platform for client scheduling.”

Great! That’s a clear, actionable task, right? And “deciding” or “choosing” or “selecting” is something that you do all the time—you can decide something in the blink of an eye! Unless it’s where to have dinner on date night, for some reason that decision takes forever.

What most business owners forget to plan for are the things that need to happen in order to make that important decision.

• What functionalities are non-negotiables (or nice-to-haves) when it comes to choosing a platform/software/equipment/team member/coach/program/etc.?
• What other criteria do you need to consider for each option (e.g. budget, design, end-user experience, customization options)?
• Which criterion is the most important? (Pro tip: knowing this in advance can help keep you from getting stuck in analysis paralysis)
• Do you need to take advantage of any free trials before making a decision (add time for each into your plan!)

“Research options for a new platform” is just as important an action item in your plan as “choosing” is, so add it to your plan, along with a reasonable amount of time for conducting the research.

Don’t Forget: Technical or Logistical Details

The specific tasks you might include here are going to vary based on what you’re launching, and you may not always know what’s needed in advance. Especially if you’re working with a new platform or software. It’s a classic case of “you don’t know what you don’t know,” but that doesn’t mean that you can’t plan for it.

For example, your task list might say “Set up new course platform” and you might expect to spend a couple of days to complete it. But once you start to dig in, you realize each of your modules needs its own slide deck (something you hadn’t planned for) and the platform needs to be connected with your scheduler, but FIRST you were going to merge your schedulers because they haven’t been syncing to your calendar correctly, but before you do that, you’ve got to (etc, etc…)

So what felt like a simple enough task at the beginning has suddenly become a big task with a lot of prerequisites. When this happens and a deadline is looming, you’ll quickly figure out that you’ve got two options:

• Work nonstop to try to finish everything
• Slash your priorities down to the bare minimum

If your launch (or offer) includes aspects that are new to you or your team, expect the unexpected and give yourself some extra time to work out those pieces.

Don’t Forget: Editing Your Content

No matter what kind of content you’re creating to go with your offer (from sales pages to video reels to the emails you’re sending to welcome new clients), it’s pretty common to think of content creation as:

Step 1: Create

Step 2: Publish

And while I may be a little bit of a stickler for proofreading (thanks to that B.A. in English!), it will almost always be worth your time to add Step 1.5 in there: edit your content.

This isn’t about being a perfectionist or mining your content for every possible error. I’m a firm believer that “done is better than perfect.” But there’s a middle ground between firing off your message as soon as it leaves your fingers and waiting until every star is perfectly aligned.

If you’re the kind of person who edits as you go, that’s great, but there’s nothing like getting a fresh pair of eyes on your content before it goes live. Next time you’re planning the content pieces of your launch, consider adding in a little extra time for one of these options:

1. Sleep on it. Let your new content “rest” overnight and come back to it the next day with a fresh perspective. 99 times out of 100, you will notice a few quick improvements that will help your content be that much stronger.
2. Take a walk. Even 20 minutes away from the computer to walk the dog can give you the distance you need to double-check your content before moving it down the assembly line.
3. Hand it off. Enlist a detailed assistant, trusted colleague, or freelance editor. Having another brain try to interpret your content can be invaluable to making sure your message is understood. Keep in mind that your launch plan will need to account for all of the time between when you send them the content and when you can expect to receive it back (make sure you ask them for this info in advance.)

Don’t Forget: Testing

I’ve worked with enough solopreneurs over the years to know most of us don’t really want to put in the time & effort for a full beta launch (complete with market research, surveys, and product iterations). Most of the time, we just want to get the thing out into the world so we can stop investing our time and energy and start seeing a return.

So before your eyes glaze over, let me just say that those things (market research, beta launches) are amazing if you have the time & resources for them, but otherwise this is The Bare Minimum Version So You Can Continue with Your Life.

Please, for the love of Future You, run a test of your process/client workflow/anything that’s supposed to run or happen automatically in the background. Make sure it works the way you intend before you open it to the public. Otherwise, you’re going to get an email from Confused or Angry Purchaser about something that doesn’t work and you’ll have to put out that fire (and maybe even pause your launch while you figure it out).

Don’t Forget: Planning for Potential Obstacles

When you start to wrap up the planning portion of your launch, I know you are ready to stop planning and get moving, but this may be the most important one—don’t overlook it!

Once you’ve mapped out a plan for your launch, take a bird’s eye view of the to-dos in your plan and ask yourself, “Where do I expect to hit a snag?”

Chances are good that you already have an inkling of some places where you might struggle or feel a little stuck. What are those potential obstacles? And how could you plan in advance to get around them?

Write these down—both the potential obstacles and your mitigation ideas—they’re just as important to your successful plan as the tasks themselves.

How about you? Have you ever had adjust your launch plan due to some forgotten tasks? This is one reason why project planners exist—we excel in helping you dig into the details so you can minimize forgotten to-dos.

Curious what forgotten details you might be leaving out of your project plan? Contact me about professional project planning and project management so you can be confident in all the details.

By making a plan you are effectively giving yourself…

• Clarity. 💎 You’ll encounter fewer obstacles as you work your pre-planned system, which will also effectively elevate other areas of your work, too. A plan will help you get to know your client better, strengthen your messaging, and aid in more powerful marketing.

• Relaxation. ☀️ Or more specifically: the gift of time management. Once you identify what needs to happen and when, you will consequently be identifying time slots that call for work and time slots that allow for rest. With this peace of mind, you’ll avoid that wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-panic that happens when you realize you’ve forgotten something important, because it will already be accommodated for in the plan.

• Customization. 📝 By crafting your own, one-of-a-kind plan, you are innately giving yourself permission to do it the way you want to in a style that works best for your business brain and heart. Following someone else’s template or simply winging it doesn’t cater to the unique, special things that make you such an awesome business owner!

• Momentum. 🏃‍♀️ With a clear goal in sight and thoughtfully-designed milestones laid out along the way, you will have confidence with each step you take forward. This will also make it easier to check items off as you go. Once you hit “launch,” you’ll be able to look back and say “Wow, I did all of that?” 

Without a plan you are leaving yourself vulnerable to…

• Confusion.😖 How many times have you been in the shower thinking about the work day ahead and feel crystal clear on how you’re going to tackle it all, and then by the time you get to your work desk, all you can remember is “check inbox” and “make coffee”? My guess is: a lot. That’s how the human brain works. By leaving all of your launch steps in your head without organizing them on paper (computer, or other) you’re risking getting lost in the mental shuffle!

• Overworking.🤯 Sure, the main point of a plan is to make sure you achieve what you’ve set out to achieve, but an added benefit is a plan allows you to work effectively and efficiently. Without one, you risk missing key steps that then have to be dealt with last minute, overworking certain elements that really should be left alone, and ultimately chewing into precious weekend, holiday, or family hours that should be set aside for R&R.

• Decision-making paralysis. 😵 Without a game plan, you might find yourself overthinking or overanalyzing ALL OF THE THINGS that need to be done, making it virtually impossible to start any single task. Feeling like everything must happen at once can effectively shut a project down. Putting 10 percent into a hundred things only moves the needle forward so much, which might make you say, “Ugh, this isn’t worth it!” and scrap the project all-together.

• Wasting resources 🤑 like time and money on items that feel really important in the moment but you could have avoided had you given yourself the opportunity to see them coming down the pipeline. 

Now, you might be sitting there reading this thinking, “This is all well and good, but I don’t even know where to start! I know what I want to happen, but I’m having a really hard time identifying my very first step, let alone how many steps there will be in total!” 

Yup, I get that. Here is what I recommend: As soon as you are done reading this article and ready to start your really impressive, super responsible plan-making process, take a big piece of paper (or big empty Word Document) and give yourself time to have an almighty, cathartic, *brain dump.* 

A brain dump is when you take every single thought in your head as it relates to your project and write it down as it comes. Don’t judge it. Try not to analyze it. Just write it. 

Once you have everything bouncing around in your brain in one piece, you will have effectively made mental space to begin the task at hand and have a frame of reference for the scope of this project. With everything in front of you and a clear mind to back you up, you can fully begin to get organized. 

That, and you can call me. 

I’d love to help you plan your next big project and Craft a Custom Launch to your specific needs. As part of our 3-hour planning intensive, we can walk through your own glorious brain dump together. With all of the pieces floating beautifully in front of us, I’ll help your create a project plan that makes your business-building brain feel like it went to the spa. And that’s just one small piece of all the goodness you’ll get out of it!