I’ve created a short series of audios which answer questions I have been asked from people who have creative minds and a lot of ideas.
You can find them on Substack.
Episode 4 – How do I actually plan a project?!
Transcript
So how do you actually plan a project? I’ve had a few people say to me that even if they manage to choose an idea, they don’t know how to break it down into actionable steps to actually make it happen.
So I’m going to use an example to illustrate this one. I helped a client who wanted to set up a YouTube channel. So she wanted to create a new video every month and then post it on YouTube and share it on various marketing channels. This is an example of a project which has two phases, the setup phase and an ongoing phase every month.
So the setup phase can be quite daunting, doing it all for the first time and having to figure out quite a lot of stuff on the way. So that is part of what often feels quite overwhelming about a project. So I’d say knowing that, first thing to do is to write down what the end product or thing is. In this case it was a YouTube channel with some videos on – so once that’s written down then break it down into parts so what is actually what is very broadly involved in that in this particular case it was setting up the video and doing the techy bits. There was the video content, what she was actually going to say in her videos. There was the recording of the video. And the final part was promoting what she’d completed and published.
So in this particular case, My client had help with the technical part. So she had someone who could set it all up, test it out, figure out where she needed to sit, how to plug everything in, how to make it look really nice because she wanted a really nice professional finish as if it was done in a studio.
So when I started recording videos myself, I also had somebody I could ask for, you know, microphones, what kind of, you know, best way to best way to approach what I was trying to do. Mine, mine was a bit more informal. So it was a slightly different kind of project.
So if you’ve got if you’ve got a technical bit in your project and that’s the bit that feels really scary then find somebody who can help you just ask around people you know may may know somebody who can help with a specific thing that you’re trying to do.
The second part of that was the content. So in this particular case, my client was really confident in what she wanted to say. And she’d done things like that before in the form of talks. So she knew how long it might take. She wasn’t worried about putting all of the content together.
So similarly, if you’re quite happy with all the technical setup, but actually knowing what to put in it and how long to make it and how that would work, if that’s the bit that’s really scary and daunting, there will be somebody who can help with that to help you create an outline, to help you figure out how long it’s going to take to actually talk about the topic that you want to talk about. If that’s, I mean, obviously this is an example of videos, but quite a lot of a lot of other projects have content in them as well.
The third part of this was the recording. So that was actually doing it, putting those two bits together. And in this particular case, my client was able to do that with some help. So the person who’d helped her set it up was also able to help her do the recording and was able to help her do the editing. Coming back to my my video project i did the edits myself because it was it was much more informal kind of project and it didn’t it didn’t actually need well it could probably have done with someone professional but it didn’t actually didn’t actually need it for what i was trying to do with it. That’s something where there are people who can help you to set up technical things, create graphics if you need to add that sort of thing into into what you’re doing what you’re creating.
And so for this project the last part of that was publishing it and promoting it so again the first so the first time she did it there was quite a lot of information she had to collect together so figuring out what went where on YouTube and what kind of words were needed and some and graphics for cover sheets and things like that.
And then also having a plan of once it was actually published where would it go so all of all of the different things like where was she going to put it on the website, how was she going to put it in a newsletter, what social media places was she going to share it in.
So once that plan was created that was there so that every time she did it she would know all the different things that she needed to do so in this particular example she set all of that up did all of those different bits and then it meant that every month after that she was able to follow the plan follow all those different steps and some of them weren’t didn’t take as long the next time she did them.
So you can see that by splitting the project into parts you can look at them as separate things and it’s not quite so overwhelming. So you haven’t got all the technical stuff mixed in with the content, mixed in with the marketing because you’ve got it split up into its constituent parts.
In this particular situation, again, my client actually needed my help to create a plan so that she could follow that. So I did a monthly plan. and said week one you’ll do this week two you do that week three you do that and then week four you do that. And she also needed some accountability to remind her to do certain tasks and to help her when she got stuck and was worrying about a particular thing that didn’t seem to be working right. And she was able to achieve publishing videos and sending them out to her mailing list.
I do have a PDF on how to plan a project, which I can send to you. If you’d like a free copy of my project planning PDF, send me a message via my website, ninalenton.co.uk. You could also ask me what other kind of support I could offer to help you plan the project, plan the marketing or just to remind you to get certain bits of it done.
I hope this has been useful thank you for listening.