ISSUE #16

Welcome to the + 2 newsletter from The PPM Academy

Each month, I’ll send you two quick and simple approaches to improve your Productivity and Project Management that you can try, test, and adapt to work and everyday life.

Project plans are fundamental to running a project, but what do you do if your clients aren’t reviewing them? In this month’s Project Management Tip, I’ll share an approach to creating more client-friendly project plans, which I call visual plans. 1 minute, 40 seconds reading time.

Are email notifications regularly distracting you, the badge count increasing, and spending far too long in your inbox? In this month’s Productivity Tip, I’ll take you through an approach to batch up time to manage and review emails so you can get more time back to focus on what matters. 1 minute, 50 seconds reading time.

Before you read the tips, I have some exciting news 🚀

Soon, I’ll be launching my new training called the High-Performance Programme. It’s a mixture of live and on-demand video training across 5-weeks teaching How to Become a High-Performing Project Manager by maximising your project management skills, productivity and mindset.

Sound interesting?

​Read more about it here.​

Project Management Tip: Visual Plans

Most projects have a project plan created, a valuable and needed output showing the project’s direction and detailed steps to achieve it.

The one problem with project plans is that they are not very user-friendly.

They consist of line after line of tasks, sometimes in a tool the recipients haven’t used before or squeezed into a one-page PDF with tiny details.

The result is that many plans are not examined in detail, as they should be, so problems that could have been caught are missed.

When creating any approach or process for your project, you must consider how well it works for the recipients.

It may look great and be entirely understandable by you, the Project Manager, but if it doesn’t provide the same value for your team or client, everyone misses out.

Visual plans are a great way to create a more user-friendly project plan for those less inclined to review a detailed Gantt chart.

They present the information that matters to the recipients and visualise the key client-owned tasks and responsibilities.

Visual plans and a more detailed project plan work hand in hand; they they supplement each other.

The benefit of creating a visual plan is that it reduces the likelihood of a plan not being reviewed correctly by your clients or being misunderstood.

So you have more alignment and increase your clients’ accountability.

To create one:

1. You always start with a detailed project plan and maintain it alongside the visual plan.
2. Extract the critical activities like meetings, reviews, and approvals from the detailed plan and add them to the visual plan.
3. Add in recurring meetings, e.g. daily stand-ups and weekly reviews.
4. Add in the critical team and client availability, e.g. holidays.

You’ll create something like this.

Creating and maintaining a visual plan is more work than just having a detailed one.

Still, it reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings about what you need to have completed and by when, problems with your clients, and assumptions, so you’ll spend far less time fixing issues further down the line.

Productivity Tip: 3-21-0 Method to manage your time spent on emails.

Do you have those days where you feel like you’re fighting your inbox?

Not only how many emails you have to deal with, but it keeps pulling you back in to check it.

According to this McKinsey analysis, the average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails. This adds up to about 676 hours per year—that’s just 28 days!

I’ve shared another approach to help reduce your emails in the +2 newsletter, but this method is about increasing your focus, whether when working on emails or giving yourself more focus when you’re not.

The method is called The 3-21-0 Method.

It was created by Kevin Kruse (author of ‘Great Leaders Have No Rules’), and it’s very easy to implement.

3 times a day, you read, process, and respond to emails.

21 minutes per session, so a total of 61 minutes per day.

0 emails left, you aim for an empty inbox.

By taking control of when you review your emails, you can give yourself the time and focus needed to work on tasks that require your brainpower and sole focus.

Batching emails is also extremely satisfying, especially if your Mac has the whoosh sound turned on!

It’s rare emails need immediate attention or a reply.

If you’re reactive to your inbox, you sometimes find yourself sharing the minimum in terms of response to move it off your plate, but all this does is increase the likelihood of getting another email back!

This is optional, but before you try this method, create a new folder called Old Emails and move everything in your inbox there for these reasons.

1. The nice feeling you get from having no emails in your inbox
2. The majority of emails you’ve moved probably don’t need a response now, as they’re so old.
3. If any of your old emails still need a response, you’ll get a new email (in your new, very empty inbox) asking for it, which you can respond to in one of your 21-minute sessions.

So take control of your inbox, don’t be a slave to it, and try out the 3-21-0 method. Then, you'll have more focused time so you can work on providing more value for yourself and those you work with.

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