Overcoming Project Freeze: How to Start When You Feel Stuck
Your Time, Your Way
NASA's approach: list obstacles, take first steps
Carl uses NASA's Mercury program to show starting small by identifying obstacles and removing them first.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
That was President John Kennedy in 1961, speaking at the Joint Session of Congress. It is possibly the best example of a project statement ever made.
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Script | 397
Hello, and welcome to episode 397 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Starting projects. It can be tough. Where do you start? Where will you find the time? And what do you need to do?
These are just some of the questions you will find yourself asking.
Yet the biggest obstacle to completing a project on time is overthinking and over-planning. Thinking about and planning a project are not the same as working on one. Working on a project is doing something that moves it forward.
Decorating your bedroom will require paint and brushes. The only pre-project decision you need to make is what colour.
The first two steps, therefore, are:
- Decide what colour to paint the bedroom
- Buy paint and brushes
I would add a third decision: when. When will you do it?
Once you’ve done those three things, you’re ready to go—no more planning, no more thinking. Just get on and start.
Yet, that’s not how most projects go, is it? There’s thinking, planning, then creating tasks in your task manager, and if it’s a work project, a meeting, then perhaps another meeting.
Often, by the time a project is conceived, 80% of the time required to complete it gets spent on thinking, planning, and meetings.
And that brings us nicely to this week’s question—a question about finding ways to reduce the thinking and planning time.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, “Hi Carl, how do you work on complex projects?” I find I spend a lot of time planning a project, end up with a long list of things to do, and when it comes to starting, I freeze. It’s as if I don’t know where to start. Do you have any tips on handling this type of problem?
Hi Phil, thank you for your question.
“Project freeze” is a common problem for many people. I suspect this stems from the belief that every aspect of a project needs to be planned before starting. Yet, for many projects, this would be impossible.
Imagine you were part of NASA in May 1961, and you’d just heard President Kennedy’s speech at the joint session of Congress about why the US should put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth before the end of the decade.
At that time, NASA was struggling to get even the smallest of rockets into space—the idea of sending astronauts to the moon and back was a pipe dream.
Yet a group of incredible people at NASA in 1961 took on the challenge. Instead of planning every single step they thought would be needed to complete the project, they looked at what they already knew, the obstacles they would need to overcome, and the first steps.
That gave birth to the Mercury space mission. The Mercury programme was not to put a man on the moon; its objectives were to orbit a crewed spacecraft around Earth, study the human ability to function in space, and ensure the safe recovery of both the astronaut and the spacecraft.
Before they could reach the moon, they needed to understand how humans cope in space. So the project’s objective was to send a man into Earth’s orbit.
The key was to get started, and they did this by listing out the obstacles they needed to overcome first. They then worked out how to remove those obstacles.
Now, I know our projects are unlikely to be as big as sending someone to the moon and back, but we can adopt the same approach that NASA used to work on our projects.
Even small projects can adopt this approach. Let’s say you were asked to do a presentation on the likely effects of AI on your company’s business over the next five years. Where would you start?
For something like this, there would be several phases.
The first would be to research and gather information. For this, the task would likely be to find out who to ask or what to read.
Okay, when will you do this?
Here’s the key point. It’s no good just deciding what needs to be done first. You need to make it intentional, and to do that, you will need to set aside time to do it.
Perhaps you decide to give yourself an afternoon to research this.
Research is a challenge in itself. We can go down rabbit holes that bring no meaningful insights into what we are trying to do. Yet, we can also underestimate how much time is required for research. So the first step is to do an initial session of research to help you develop some boundaries.
You might be lucky and find that the first research session gives you everything you need to start the presentation. However, if not, and you discover you need to do more research, then when will you do that?
One thing you can do with creating a presentation is to set up your PowerPoint or Keynote file. Create the document, do the first slide and perhaps set the theme colours.
Having a document started makes it much easier to get into creating the presentation.
The danger of listing out all the things you think you need to do to complete the project is that 80% of what you think needs to be done doesn’t, and you will find that 80% of what ends up being done were things you never thought of in the first place.
All you really need is a starting point.
I recently did a video on how to write a book. The number one reason people who want to write but never do write a book is that they overthink and plan it.
Thinking and planning do not produce a book.
The best way to write a book is to get the first draft written as fast as you can. All that is required is a few ideas about what you want to write about. From there, you start writing the first draft.
The first draft will be the worst state your book will ever be in. It’s meant to be messy, unstructured and occasionally unreadable.
But, once you have a first draft, you have around 80,000 words you can manipulate, craft and organise into a best seller. Without that first draft, you have nothing but a few ideas.
How do you write a first draft? Set aside time each day to write. An hour or two every day for eight weeks will give you your first draft.
As you write, new ideas will form, and you can make a note of those along the way. That will make your editing easier.
The common denominator with any project is to get started. Everything has a starting point. Wherever that is, start there.
It’s as you are working on the project that your next steps reveal themselves.
When I first began creating online courses, I had no idea what I was doing. But what I did have was fifteen years of teaching experience, and I knew how to create a lesson plan.
I also knew what I wanted to create an online course on. So I could create a lesson plan and a topic. That was where I started.
Once I had a lesson plan, I realised I needed a storyboard of sorts to help me break the course down into lessons. That evolved into the outline I have written for every course I have created since.
Now, after eight years of creating courses, I have a process I follow. All I need is a topic and time to plan, outline, record, edit and post. (Five steps)
On big projects, many tasks are completed before the project ends. Yet, if you were to try to predict what needs to be done at the start, you will find you are wasting a lot of time.
NASA had no idea whether a human being could survive in space. What they did know was that they needed to develop a reliable rocket to get them into space. So, they began with that. Without the rocket, it didn’t matter whether a human could survive in space or not. There would have been no way of getting them there.
In 1962, NASA didn’t know that they would need software to keep the spacecraft on the right trajectory. There was no way they could have planned for that at that point. It was only when they began working on the Gemini programme that they realised software would be needed.
Without paint and brushes, it wouldn’t matter what colour you wanted to paint your bedroom.
In many ways, when you’re working on a large, complex project, you’re solving problems as you go along. Yet, there’s always going to be a starting point.
Another thing about bigger projects is setting a deadline.
Because we are not sure how long a large project will take to complete, it can be tempting to set an unrealistic deadline. Three months to complete a project that realistically would take twelve.
This is why setting up the project’s stages will help you.
What’s the first stage? Give yourself a realistic time frame to complete that first stage. The information you gather during that first stage will guide you with the deadlines for the next stage.
I would also take another leaf from NASA’s book. President Kennedy said, “before the decade is out”. Given that he made this speech in 1961, NASA had around 9 years to complete the project. Yet it was not absolute.
Theoretically, the deadline was 31 December 1969, but the actual deadline was a grey area until NASA got closer to achieving the goal.
Deadlines are good as they bring energy to the project. Yet, unrealistic deadlines bring nothing but stress to a project.
I know an online course will take me about 6 weeks to complete. I know the process, and I’ve learned from experience that the whole process takes six weeks.
If I were to stop doing all my other work, close my calendar to appointments and work solidly for fourteen hours a day for two weeks, I might be able to complete the course in two weeks, but all I would have is a lot of stress. Not pleasant.
Six weeks gives me time to bring the course to life, check things, and make sure everything fits together.
And the final part of developing any project is to be clear about your outcomes.
I refer you back to the opening quotation from President Kennedy:
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
A perfect project outcome statement. It’s clear about the objective, and there is a timeline. There was nothing else for NASA to know.
President Kennedy didn’t have the skills or knowledge to do this himself; that was for the scientists and engineers to work out.
Something they did with magnificent effort on the 20th July 1969.
Thank you, Phil, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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