Unrelated -- interesting pic from Flickr


I think I'm pretty terrible at management but observed something I found curious and useful so here it is:

We recently went through a monster workload at the Portal when we launched the Sanitation Portal (www.indiasanitationportal.org) and the Hindi Water Portal (hindi.indiawaterportal.org) in Delhi, during the same week.

As things got pretty hairy, I noticed that at different points different ways of looking at the problem became important and then vanished pretty quickly. Here are some of them. Most of these are in the nature of responses to a feeling of uneasiness that things were getting out of control:

-- earlier on it was just working on particular subitems with no particular order or structure
-- as the event came closer things became more panicky and a project management structure with task lists and time lines became necessary. Even this happened in different ways, during one week, I was just tracking things in an impressionistic way, keeping percentage completion targets and getting a sense of how much along the way I was.
-- at one point the relevant thing to do was to have a long conversation with the people involved with the project and impress on them that they would be held responsible for getting certain things done and so on.

Notes: at various points I wrote out detailed spreadsheets that tracked the relevant items for that phase, which were used only for a very short time and didn't feel relevant a few days later. An important part of the usefulness of the exercise seems to be in going through all the issues in the course of creating the tracking structure for that phase rather than having the same structure work throughout the entire course of the project. The process of seeing what the useful thing to do at a particular time came without a structure and arose internally in the mind on its own and creates a confidence of its own that its the right thing, since there is no thinking that created it.
There was a painful night before one of the launches when the feeling was of sheer terror. I guess that also counts as one of the phases, when you don't find a way of managing the situation.

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Couple of self-help links I came across:
http://litemind.com/overcoming-procrastination-self-talk/ A nice analysis of procrastination

A personal development website:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/

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I started a new blog for students of English :
http://englishfaculty.blogspot.com