It’s important to define your goals. As we discussed last month, it doesn’t really matter how you think about “success;” laying out your goals is the first step in the process to achieving them. However, what do you do once you’re ready to actually start working on one of those goals?

Feeling a little lost? Not to worry.

I’ve got two words—”project management”—that will change everything for you.

Project Management Basics

The term “project management” describes how you organize and execute the steps in achieving a specific goal. While this usually refers to a long-term, technical process like designing software, you can use project management techniques in just about every aspect of your life.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a team goal that you’re working toward with others, or your own progress toward personal goals. Your project could be a term paper that will take all semester, a business you’re setting up with friends on the side, or just your nightly homework assignment. Either way, this approach will help.

Any project model will involve five key steps: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and completion.

Using this five-step approach in your life can give you the power to accomplish more using less time, and save yourself a lot of stress and headaches along the way. So, let’s go through each of the five steps and see how they work (don’t worry, there will be plenty of examples along the way).

Step 1: Initiation

You can think of initiation as the “pre-planning” stage. Here, you’re pretty much trying to wrap your head around the idea and figure out what your project is, how you can achieve it, and how much time and energy you should budget for it.

This is very conceptual stuff, so don’t worry about getting too detailed, and don’t fixate on what is or isn’t realistic. Give yourself license to imagine and think big-picture, and let yourself go for a minute without worrying about your limitations like ability, resources, or timeframe.

When you’re in the initiation stage, you’re not supposed to be worried about how you’re going to achieve your goal; instead, you’re simply trying to work out what you want to do. For example, let’s say you have an idea for a long-term, complex art project. Initiation would just be thinking about what you want to do, what outcome you want to produce, and drawing up the most basic, preliminary concept sketches.

Step 2: Planning

Once you have your idea and outlined a basic concept, now you move on to the much more detailed planning stage. Here is the point where you take all the loosely-defined dreamwork you did in Step One and refine it into a clear, realistic plan of action.

Start by interrogating yourself. Come up as many questions as possible to ask yourself, then answering them with as much detail as possible. This involves what are called the ten “knowledge areas” of project management. Not all of them will be as relevant, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, but it’s important to keep these in mind at each step:

  1. Integration: How does each part of your project come together?
  2. Scope: How big is the project?
  3. Time: How long is each step going to take?
  4. Cost: What’s the budget for your project?
  5. Quality: If you need to compromise, what’s the minimum you’d accept?
  6. Human Resources: How do you motivate everyone involved to keep going?
  7. Communication: If others are involved, how do you keep them in the loop?
  8. Risk: Do you have a Plan B is something falls through?
  9. Procurement: How do you get ahold of any resources you’ll need?
  10. Stakeholders: Who will benefit from completing the project?

Provide a clear, realistic answer for the question in each knowledge area. Once you have this written out, you can refer to it whenever necessary.

The second part of planning is to break the project down into more manageable sections. If your project is to write a paper for school, you can make it a lot easier if you break it up into smaller steps. Set goals like writing a page every day for a week. That way, you can easily see your progress and whether you’re on-track according to your plan.

Remember to create contingencies, and allow extra time in case complications show up (protip: complications will always show-up at some point).

Step 3: Execution

Execution is all the “action” in the project. This involves taking the plans you’ve created and putting them to work to achieve your goal. For example, let’s say you’re trying to decide which college to attend. You should have already picked out a list of possible schools, application deadlines, and other important information in Step Two. Now, you’re going to take that plan and use it as a guide when you start contacting schools, submitting applications, and visiting campuses.

If you’ve done your planning correctly, the execution shouldn’t be too difficult. Just stick to the plan as closely as possible, but remember not to panic if something goes wrong. As mentioned above, something will always happen that you couldn’t have expected.

Maybe you’re writing that big term paper and the power goes out right before you hit “save,” causing you to lose an entire night’s worth of typing. When that happens, just check your plan of action, and adjust as necessary. A good plan will allow you to adjust and move things around as needed while staying as close to on-schedule as possible.

Step 4: Monitoring

Now that your project is in full-swing, it’s time to take a minute and review your progress.

Monitoring involves looking at how much you’ve achieved, how that stacks up against your plan of action, and deciding if some adjustments need to be made. If something’s not working, examine why, and how it could be improved.

This is something you should be doing regularly throughout the entire process; if your project is scheduled to last a month, you could review and revise 2-3 times a week. If it’s a year-long project, reviewing your plan and progress could be a weekly activity. Of course, those timeframes aren’t set in stone; you should do whatever you think is best-suited to your specific project.

If it would work better to review after completing each phase of your plan, then go that route. Let’s say you’re writing a book, for example; instead of weekly review you can do a review after each chapter. Ask yourself what felt easy, what felt more difficult, and how you can use that information to improve your process for the next chapter.

Step 5: Closing

It’s been a long journey, but you’re finally near the finish line. After all the planning, work, and revision, it’s time to do one last comprehensive review.

If you have the opportunity, try giving yourself some time away from the project; don’t think about it, don’t even look at it for a bit…just give it time to stew. This lets you go back and see all your work with fresh eyes, and you might pick-up on things you didn’t catch the first time. New ideas might come to mind that could dramatically change how you see the project.

After you’ve given the project a final review to ensure that you’re totally satisfied…it’s time to celebrate! Mark this project as done, and do something nice for yourself as a reward.

You should make the reward relative in size to the scale of the project. If you completed a small goal, then promise yourself a smaller reward; treat yourself to a movie or your favorite restaurant, or just take a day off and relax. For a big project that’s dominated your life for months, reward yourself with a big gift, like a vacation to a place you’ve always wanted to visit. It’s your reward…use it as you see fit.