Peace of mind isn't knowing what you're doing. It's being confident nothing has been missed.
The illusion of control, and the surprise of failure
When you’re asked what you’re up to, you’ll usually have a quick answer. You know what you’re doing. But you’ve likely also had the experience of being asked about something you were meant to achieve, and were surprised that you’d completely forgotten about it. So you can feel in control and still know that you’re not.
This blind spot comes from the fact that it is intuitive to know what you know, and impossible to know what you don’t know. This happens regardless of scale, it’s just as true of a whole project as it is of a checklist item in a task.
Peace of mind comes from being able to see what you don’t know easily and being confident that you’re seeing everything together, that nothing’s been missed. You need to keep what you’re doing together.
Put it in a box
We know life’s easier when everything is kept together. If you’re lucky, you have the luxury of space to make this easy. A kitchen for everything food. Your bathroom is the collection for clean. But work is not so easy. We call the conceptual box for getting a big job done a project. But you can make this function much more like a box. In a well designed system, you can open a project and see everything you need.
- Who is doing what
- What has been done, is being done, and what’s coming up
- The business and people who want the project outcome
- All of the information required by and produced by the project
- All of the communication, and meetings, about the project and its tasks
- Even the time that it has taken so far, how that matches expectation, and how long to go
A box of boxes
And the beauty of having all of this in one box is the information can flow up into summaries. You can have a dashboard that lists all of your projects, marking red any that are at risk. Or you can see a timeline of where all of your projects are up to based on what tasks are still outstanding.
By having all of this information collected together, doing becomes reporting. There’s no need to chase around to see what’s currently being worked on, if the deadline is still on track, or anything else. When someone marks a task completed, project information is updated automatically.
Once you have a clear and reliable overview of your projects, and by opening a project you can see everything that matters, you’ll have peace of mind. This is because you’re able to see what you’re managing and know that you’re in control. If you want this sort of clarity, the Complete Business Management Suite has been built to give it to you out of the box.