Making up for lost time

What happens if you plan your project in immense detail and a tough assignment comes along and blows your schedule to pieces? What happens when you don't bother planning, don't work steadily on your project and the deadline starts to look scarily close?

When you seem to be heading for disaster, keep hold of two things:

• The main objective of your project - basically what you hope to achieve by doing it
• Flexibility

Why think about your main objective?

If you have a really clear idea of the most important thing your project should achieve, you can be realistic about whether you need to do all of the other things you had planned. 

Do you really need to do such complicated statistical analysis or is there a simpler way of examining your data?  Do you really need to write that extra section or can you cover the one or two useful points it would include somewhere else and forget about the rest?

Why be flexible?

By working to a flexible plan you can:

• See what you have achieved
• See what is left to do
• Define priorities once research is underway.  If it isn't important and there isn't enough time to do it, don't even start
• Keep control of your work
• Balance the time you are spending on your project with all the other demands on you - other modules, work, family, etc

Estimating time is not easy - build in a contingency for unexpected occurrences.

To enable yourself to keep on track, try to do these four jobs whenever you get the chance:

• List what still needs to be done before you can finish your project
• Put those tasks in order.  You might decide one is more important than the rest and choose to start with that one. Or one might be easiest to finish so that one gets done first.  Doesn't really matter how you choose to organise your work just so long as you are being organised and getting the work done
• Work out how much time you have available to do each task.  Be pessimistic when you do this and you might be pleasantly surprised and have extra time
• If you find yourself with too little time to complete a task, think carefully about what your project is meant to achieve and ask yourself whether the task you are working on can be simplified or made easier in any way

A simple form of plan is shown here, partially filled in.  If you want to use more complicated types of plan, such as Gantt charts, go ahead.  Just make sure producing the pretty time planner doesn't get in the way of actually doing your project.