Getting stuff done: Oh how business owners and freelancers everywhere love a to-do list that is completely crossed off! I know that I always sleep way more soundly at night when I’ve actually crossed everything off my day’s to-do list!

Each day, business owners face a variety of tasks to be done. Some are fun and easy, but not all of them are! There might be boring projects or very challenging projects, or projects that seem big and unwieldy. No matter what kind of project you face, the fastest, easiest, and most efficient way to get stuff done is when you…

Achieve critical mass quickly.

Critical mass is a term used in science to describe the amount of fissile material needed to sustain a nuclear reaction. For us non-science-types, it’s basically the amount of something you need initially in order to facilitate the creation of the rest of that thing.

Every project you do has a critical mass. It’s the amount of work that you expend at the beginning to bring the project to the point where you can coast a bit – where you can do the work quickly and easily (and even enjoyably) with a lot less effort than it took at the very beginning.

Each project will be different and everyone has a different idea of when they achieve critical mass on a project. But, every project does achieve critical mass at some point! I’ve found that e-books tend to achieve critical mass at the 50% point while blogs tend to achieve critical mass after the first or second paragraph. As I work with clients, I’ve found that some businesses (like coaching and freelancing that rely on the skills of the owner) achieve critical mass much faster than those businesses that rely on a lot of up-front development (like technical or web development). Even your day will hit a point of critical mass. If you start your day at 9 in the morning, you’ll likely hit critical mass at about 10am and sustain it through to about 2pm or 3pm when you start to slow down a bit.

Here’s why it matters to you:

The faster you achieve critical mass on something, the easier it will be to get that thing done. Find your peak work time when you’re most focused and energetic and start on a whole bunch of projects. Get critical mass as quickly as possible. (Yes, you might go back and have to revise something later during editing; that’s okay. The point is to get as far as you can as fast as you can). Once you’ve achieved critical mass, the rest of the project will go very quickly. If you want, have your assistant or colleague help you achieve critical mass on a project before passing it off to you to run with it.

Think of each of the projects you work on in the day. Over the next few days, figure out what the point of critical mass is for each project and work to achieve that. Critical mass achievement is a focused, creative, intense burst of effort that will result in the core of whatever you are trying to create. Later, you’ll add more but the effort will be faster and easier.

It’s like an airplane: It takes more fuel to get off the ground than it does to fly through the sky. Likewise, your projects will require a lot of fuel to get off the ground, too, but once it gets airborne, you’ll glide smoothly.

Good luck!

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So, how can you give your daunting, unwieldy project a fighting chance at success? I’ll give you one of the top secrets to make it happen: “Just get started”.

That’s it. That’s the secret. Okay, I know it doesn’t sound that profound but in my coaching and in the project management and business development work I do, you’d be surprised how little that secret is employed. Most people spend more time thinking about the work than doing it. It’s action and not cerebral activity that gets projects moving.

To borrow some principles from physics, it takes more energy to start moving an object than it does to keep it going. Or, as my science teacher, Dr. Harris, said, “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion”. The idea here is to just create critical mass. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be the most obvious place to start, but you need to create something. You need to do something to get it going.

Projects are often delayed or stall early in the process because there wasn’t enough critical mass built up. Project members end up dwelling on the details or acquiring “analysis paralysis” because those things seem important they are often easier than rolling up the sleeves and getting to work.

Want to write a book? Just start writing. You might not start at the front and, the truth is, you might end up scrapping most of what you write by the time you’re three-quarters of the way through, but you’re more likely to get to that three-quarter mark sooner by just starting somewhere.

Want to create a new marketing effort for your business? Just dive in. You may not have all the details finished and you might not have all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed in your plan, but having something started will make a difference to getting it done. Otherwise it will sit on the backburner for months or years.

Want to start a business? It can be tempting to spend time doing the research and reading up about the marketplace and visiting the competitors, but you’ll be closer to success by minimizing those things and instead creating a website and marketing your product or service.

Want to get started on Twitter? Forget thinking about the best way to do it or how it might impact your business. Sign up. Start Twittering. Figure it out later.

I’m not saying that you should blindly rush into these things or that there is no place for preliminary thought. But I am saying that there comes a point when your thinking becomes less advantageous than any action you take.

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We laughed, of course, because no one really loves to do that kind of stuff. But it needs to get done and we know that putting away the leftovers and loading the dishwasher will take just a few minutes and will give us the entire evening to visit. And we can envision the annoyance if we didn’t do it now… later in the evening when we’re relaxed, NOBODY is going to want to load the dishwasher.

There’s some truth to that in project management. Actually, in all aspects of business. If you need to do a project (or sell some product or prepare for a conference or build a website or generate leads) then do the hardest thing first.

Do the hardest thing first. That’s it. It’s not a pleasant way to start the project. But it gets that part out of the way and gets the ball rolling. It also generates a certain amount of critical mass which is an important element in project management.

There’s a similar concept in sales. If your conversion rate is 10%, then you have to hear nine “no’s” before you hear that tenth reply “yes”. Salespeople who adopt that mindset don’t find “no” so troubling anymore because they count it as one of their nine and move on, expecting to get through eight more “no’s” before they are statistically likely to hear “yes”. In a sense, that “no” becomes a goal. It’s similar to the concept of doing the hardest thing first because it sets up the rest of the project for enjoyable success.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I would warn you: Choosing to do the easy and fun part of the project first and leaving the more difficult parts to the end is one type of problem that this advice is meant to overcome. But it can cause procrastination. After all, if we’re already reluctant to start a project, we may be even more reluctant to start by doing the worst part!

So it might seem like you’re trading one challenge for another. And in some projects, it’s simply not practical to do the hardest thing first (because, for example, there might be other steps that are required prior to that hardest part). But if you can fight procrastination, do the hardest thing first and the rest of the project will feel like a dream.

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1. The best laid plans will go awry. Project management is equal parts “keeping the project on track” and “getting the project back on track”. There are so many factors involved and you can have a well-detailed plan but something will send the whole thing off the rails. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have plan. Instead, it means that you should have a great plan and a plan B and a plan C and a flexible attitude and a bottle of wine. Things will go wrong. A project manager is there to minimize what will go wrong and to pick up the pieces and get most of it going right..

2. The number of stakeholders in a project increases the project’s complexity by an exponential factor. If it’s just you moving, that’s enough. But if you and a spouse are moving, it’s like moving 4 of you (2 x 2). And if you and a spouse and a child are moving, that’s like moving 27 of you (3 x 3 x 3). It’s like that in business. Every stakeholder in a project has an opinion or ten and they have motivation to be heard (because they want to keep their job or put their fingerprint on the project).

3. Get to the point of no return. We didn’t procrastinate; we had a plan and a timeline. But the move seemed to putter along at the idea stage for a while until something clicked. Suddenly, we were packing boxes and eating pizza and dreaming about where we’d put the couch in the living room. Not much happened before that but when we reached a critical mass, the whole thing came together quickly. In your project, get to the point of no return quickly and the project will move along.

4. Make it easy on everyone… and yourself. A friend told me of a time when he helped his aunt move. He arrived at her house early in the morning on the day of the move only to find that nothing was packed. We had a moving company pick up our boxes and I made sure that everything was packed and labeled properly before they arrived. And guess what happened: the move went smoothly and I found the utensils at the new house when I needed them.

5. Try to enjoy the process. It’s easy to think of a move or a project as something you have to endure in order to end up at a goal. But taking a few moments to relax and collect your thoughts can help put into perspective the fact that the journey can be as important and enjoyable as the goal… even in a business-related project management scenario

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