Project Journals: A Creative Way to Get Things Done

If you’ve ever struggled with completing a creative project, you probably don’t have a big hang up about commitment or finishing what you start. You probably just get stuck somewhere in the middle.
A Project Journal documents the both the process and the production of any type of new creation or goal, from initial idea to completed product. It’s a visual and tactile project management technique that is especially helpful for creative thinkers.

Here’s my tried and true method of project management. I call it the Project Journal. If you come up with a sexier name for it, please let me know. Enjoy.

What is a Project Journal?

Think of it like the logbook a ship’s captain makes for a long voyage. There is a daily record of weather, direction, encounters, notes about the crew, supplies consumed/purchased, creatures, flora, and fauna. All of this information is used to navigate the unfamiliar more successfully and help plan future trips.

Since taking on a new creative endeavor is a lot like voyaging in unfamiliar territory, I’ve come up with Project Journals as a way to navigate and demystify the experience of creating something new. But their real value is that they help me be more accountable and get things done, without going too far off the deep end when the going gets tough.

What kinds of projects?
The word project is used broadly. All sorts of things benefit when tracked in a Project Journal.

I’ve used Project Journals for:

• Travel planning
• Writing a book
• Working on a new series of paintings
• Going back to school
• Developing workshops and classes
• Moving house
• Budgeting and financial planning
• Tracking goals set in my annual review

Why keep a Project Journal?
Getting from A (where we are/our initial idea) to Z (where we want to be/a product we are happy with) is not only a long, strange trip, but there are myriad attractions along the way to divert our attention and focus.

Not to mention potholes, flat tires, sick days, delays and other potential derailments. Or the fact that it’s tempting to skip over a bunch of steps to get to Z faster. Which usually backfires.

In between beginning an important project and a successful completion, lies a vast and largely unmapped territory: the middle.

It’s pretty easy to begin something new. Recall those New Year’s resolutions and best laid plans. It’s not so easy to bring something-especially a creative project, or a goal spanning many months-to completion. It’s not because we’re bad at finishing what we start. It’s because we don’t know how to navigate the middle. The part in between starting and finishing.

A Project Journal is a way of mapping your way through the middle as you go. Once you’ve done this with one project, you’ve got some very potent information about how you work that you can use to inform other projects.

How to Make a Project Journal
A project journal is simply a notebook of any kind, separated with specific sections. It’s what goes into the Project Journal that is most important. First you’ll get your notebook together, then you’ll add your project content.

Supplies:

• Notebook of choice (see hints for choosing, below)
• Sticky notes in various sizes
• Clear tape
• Glue stick
• Highlighter pens (I use these primarily for coloring)
• Paper clips?
• Types of notebooks to use for your Project Journal:

Hints for selecting your notebook:

Where to find notebooks
Composition-style books can be found at office supply and department stores, and sometimes at the local dollar stores.

University bookstores sell a wonderful selection of lab books designed for math and science projects with some interesting visual elements. These appeal to the geeky side and are a nice alternative to plain or lined paper.
 
Other types of notebooks that make great Project Journals

• Spiral notebook
• Sketchbook (if you’re a moleskine fan or have another favorite brand)
• Ring binder with loose leaf paper

The perfect notebook does not exist
If you are a procrastinator/perfectionist like me, you might be tempted to seek the perfect notebook for your journal. I’ll tell you now: the perfect notebook/sketchbook doesn’t exist. I’ve been creating using journals for about a million years now, and I have not yet found the Perfect Solution.

So use what you’ve got?
Chances are, you’ve already got a 3-ring binder or spiral notebook laying around. Or some very beautiful journal you’ve been saving until you had something important to say. Use one of those.

It’s empowering to use the tools that we already have on hand. It interrupts the part of us that thinks we need the right something or other to make a start.

You’ll learn by doing
By working in any old notebook, and by making Project Journals for various projects, you’ll find you’re own way of working. It’s by doing the work that we find our technique, our voice, our own process.

A Project Journal is a perfectly non-threatening way to makes these discoveries, as it’s not for commercial use or for someone else to see. It’s for our own information only. You’ll figure out the best form for your project journal by working in any old notebook, and evolving to a different one for the next project.

How to Prepare and Use Your Project Journal

• 1. Get a notebook that will be used just as your project journal.
• 2. Use some sticky notes as tabs to create some sections in your notebook. Reinforce the tabs with tape, to make them more durable.
• 3. Fill in the three sections with content related to your project.
• 4. Decide on how often you will chart your progress.
• 5. Keep going until the project is complete.
• 6. Make a final entry on main take-aways and key points to remember for next time.
• 7. Have fun and enjoy the journey!

The following sections with help you organize your Project Journal.

Section 1: Project Notes
This section describes the project and serves as a place to catch ideas and brainstorm. Since creativity is non-linear, you’ll have a place to capture ideas as they flow.

The tabs in this section will be specific to your project. For a writing project, they will be things like chapter ideas, structural ideas, characters, topics. For a health/fitness project you would have tabs for menu ideas, supplements, workouts, inspiration.

Section 2: Progress Goals
The more you can quantify the project with a series of measurable goals, the better you will be able to objectively track the progress.

Quantifiable measures include: time frame, duration, quantity. (Stuff you can measure.)

So you may have tabs that mark things like:

• Project Timeline/Key deliverable/Deadlines
• Your daily/weekly/monthly quota of some deliverable, i.e. 1 drawing per day, 1,000 words per day, 3 workouts per week, amount and type of calories consumed.

If you like spreadsheets, charts or checklists, these will give you at-a-glance info about your progress, and can be glued or taped in to the journal.

Section 3: Process Notes
This is where we document what happens in the middle, en route from A to Z. Process notes are journal entries that document our thoughts/feelings/actions that happened as you worked. It’s like a diary, except that it is specific to the project.

This is especially helpful to keep the momentum building. You’ll immediately spot when the project is lagging. For longer, ongoing projects this is normal. Momentum ebbs and flows. Circumstances and life impose themselves upon our good intentions and best laid plans. That’s OK.

Commit to making a weekly process note entry, or even daily, depending upon the type of project. It’s important to take some notes, even if you are just checking in to write, “I’ve been sick as a dog. Not doing anything.” or “For some reason, I just don’t want to be working on this. I wonder what’s up with that?” or “Well, the holidays are here and I’m not only stressed, but eating my body weight in simple carbs”. You note taking will help you unravel what sorts of scenarios help or hurt your focus and momentum.

A little bit of history
I got the idea for process notes from my days, long ago, when I was a therapist working in psychiatric hospitals. Every day, we were required to chart on (make process notes about) our patients. We learned an objective way of writing about our interactions with, or observations about, our patients, and this went in to their medical record. Doctors, nurses, and other therapists all added their notes.

This way, there was a coordinated narrative that informed the treatment plan and filled in details about medications, treatment goals and progress/setbacks. This was the only way dozens of people on a team could track dozens of patients through their hospital stay. Chart notes were made a minimum of every 4 hrs., or twice per shift.

Process notes allow you to chart on yourself — and you can be as subjective as you want. The more you talk about how you feel about what you are experiencing, the more information you’ll have to inform your way of working.

Mapping the mysterious
The whole reason behind making and keeping a Project Journal is to begin understanding our own creative process. Your notes and observations provide clues and facts that you can sort out and, gain insight from, and use to make going through the middle of any project easier, faster, and more fun, next time.

When we do something challenging, we often forget what exactly the steps were that helped us navigate the hard parts, or make our job easier. The Project Journal has it in there.

That’s more than enough info for you to get started. Try this at home. Let me know if you have any questions. Tell me how it’s going for you. What are you making a Project Journal for? How is it helping you navigate the middle, that place in between here and there?

Related posts:

1. Getting Regular: Project Check-In’s To Support Creative Plans + March 2010 Review
2. Embrace Stuckness
3. 50 New Works + A peek inside my project journal: 1008 Paintings Update #10
4. The Halfway Point:1008 Paintings Project Update #14
5. A Day (12 days, actually) in the Life: 1008 Paintings Project Update #13