Part 4: Keeping It In Scope
Are you familiar with “Parkinson’s Law”? It’s an adage that goes: “Work expands to fill the time allotted.” Essentially, if you have a task that would take you 20 minutes to complete, but you give yourself two weeks to complete it, the task has been made much larger even if the actual parameters of it haven’t changed. This is because, with more time, the scope of the task has increased and there’s added stress and procrastination.
“Parkinson’s Law – work expands to fill the time available for its completion – means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two hour task, then (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to fill that week. It may not even fill the extra time with more work, but just stress and tension about having to get it done. By assigning the right amount of time to a task, we gain back more time and the task will reduce in complexity to its natural state." [1]
How does this relate to creative work? Creatives often struggle to accurately identify their bandwidth for a creative project and therefore set unreasonable project scopes.
What is scope? “Scope is the defined features and functions of a product, or the scope of work needed to finish a project.” [2] Scope involves “getting information required to start a project” and the tasks needed to complete a project. For example, writing a novel or starting a new YouTube channel each have a project scope: planning, researching, writing, editing, producing, facilitating a launch/release date, etc.
Setting a project scope means setting the following:
A timeline. When does this project begin and end?
A deliverable. What’s the final “output” of this project?
A list of to-dos. What are the individual tasks that must be completed within this project?
This might sound like another word for “process,” but setting a project scope is part of your creative process. It may seem pedantic to distinguish between the two, but it’s important to factor scope setting into your process and make it a habit. Every time you have a new idea, you should set a project scope for it. Why? Because it will help you think through everything that’s needed to see the project through to fruition. Many creatives jump into a shiny new idea without taking the time to plan it, and then flounder halfway through, ultimately giving up.
More important to setting a scope is sticking to it. Too often, a creative project expands: an idea for a novel turns into an idea for a series without ever putting a word on the page.
Here’s an honest truth: we can’t really get that much done every day. Time is a finite resource, and many of us have a warped idea of how much we can actually do within 24 hours (myself included). Do you ever fall into the trap of making overly ambitious to-do lists? Perhaps in the morning you feel great and motivated. Then, one task takes longer than expected, and then you feel the afternoon slump, and by the end of the day, you only got through half of your list and now feel... not great about it.
Let’s do an equation together:
8 hours dedicated to sleep (do not scrimp on sleep. It affects EVERYTHING.)
+
8 hours (minimum, usually) dedicated to work (day job or caretaking). This may be closer to 10 hours if you have a commute or a more intensive job.
+
4 hours (minimum) of personal care (making meals, bathing, exercising)
=
This leaves a possible 4 remaining hours — which, for people with kids or other family responsibilities, means that “possible” is more like “improbable.”
So where do we fit in time for our creative endeavors? If you have a mere 1 hour a day, this doesn’t mean you can’t dream big — it just means that your scope should take this into account. It also means that you can’t compare your project scopes to another creative person who may have a completely different life situation. At certain times in your life, your scope might be really small, and that’s totally OK! Perhaps you write a short story in three months rather than committing to a full novel. Small, incremental goals lead to big wins over time.
See how this all relates to our process? Setting reasonable goals, timelines, scope based on our actual, current life and not an aspirational version actually helps and fuels our motivation and ambition.
Activity and Worksheet
Learning how to do set a reasonable project scope can take some practice! Use the attached worksheet whenever you want to start a new creative endeavor. The worksheet helps you think through each step before starting a new project, including steps like: do I have to learn something new to complete this project? Do I have to find or raise funding? Not every question may apply, but this should help you refine your scope so that you can embark on a new creative journey with clarity!
If you want to share your project and project scope, pop into my Discord channel!