I often write about the soft skills associated with Leadership. This post is going to be a little more tactical. So, if you only remember one thing about this post I want you to remember:

“Stop doing dumb things.”

Dumb things in my days as a Project Manager

Have you ever created a project schedule for a creative process? I spent nearly 15 years trying to perfect this skill.

I don’t want to brag, but over the years of learning to work with the data and tools I was a master at building detailed schedules (seriously, I am not bragging about this). My schedules would contain hundreds of detailed tasks.

I would gather the input needed, structure the schedule, then carefully balanced everyone’s time. My intention was to ensure we fully utilized everyone’s time.

Lots of people claimed you couldn’t do what I was doing with the tools. However, by continually learning how the tools worked I was able to overcome many of the limitations people were complaining about.

Despite learning to use the tools so masterfully, I was ignoring an important fact that was right in front of me the whole time. The schedule’s accuracy is not proportional to my skills. In fact, in a creative process, the level of accuracy is always low.