Managing creative projects or being creative and managing projects requires a different approach than what is commonly taught. Most project management is linear, but that does not always work in creative environments. In addition, creative people can become overwhelmed at working on a single step until it is finished, but many times we can partially complete a step that will allow us to move forward until we are ready to come back and finish.

I will admit that I see things differently from most people in my life because of my background and experiences. For example, when I was brainstorming ideas for this blog, an image that jumped came to my mind of how JPG images load on web pages.

Check out this page for illustrations of what I am referring to below.

The standard way JPG images load and display on web pages is from the top-down, one line at a time. You may not completely understand the image until at least half of it has loaded.

The other way is a progressive load. With this method the full image loads, but it looks out of focus. As more of the image loads, more details appear until the image becomes clear. I liked this method because you get an idea of what the image looks like before all the details load.

How does this apply to creative project management?

Standard Project Management Approach

When we typically approach project management, we work on each task until the project is complete. For some projects, the product becomes useful before the entire project is complete.

When I have a project that seems daunting, I look at the project to find a place to start that will help me feel like I’ve made some progress. For some projects, this works because I can start and ride the wave of momentum through to completion. I talked about this last week.

For other projects, the sheer quantity of tasks and the time involved to complete each task make it nearly impossible to get any serious momentum going. But it could be perfect for another approach.

There is an approach to project management called Agile Project Management that takes an iterative approach that is similar to what I am proposing. It’s good for groups working on multi-faceted projects that tend to be long-term, like software development.

Progressive Project Management

I have a rather large project that I’ve got on my “Need to do” list. Every time I think about it, the project seems larger. Then I realized that I was looking at the project the way I wanted it to look when it was finished. It dawned on me that there was an intermediate point that I could work toward that would be good enough. It would not be the perfect final product that I imagined. The good-enough state would make the project usable so that I could make it available to others. As I have time, I can work on each piece to bring it to my imagined perfection.

Embracing this approach meant giving up my need for the project to be “perfect” before I released it. Yep, once again, mindset comes into play for successful project management!

Better done than perfect, right?

My Monster Project

I have been recording all kinds of videos, between the coaching calls for my Business Confidence Coaching program, and the lives in my Facebook Group and Lighthouse Marketing Plan Challenge. I want to catalog and organize the videos and make them available as resources.

Right now, the videos live on an external hard drive attached to my computer. I’ve downloaded them from Zoom recordings and Facebook lives. Most have names that do not indicate the content of the videos. I typically download them from Zoom after they’ve let me know I am out of storage space. Then I get distracted before I organize them.

As a creator, I LOVE to make videos. As a consumer, I am not a fan of video content. There is usually a lot of unnecessary content in videos. And there is no way to “skim” through to find the good chunks like you can with a document.

A few months ago, I went through a video training program where the creator presented the topics in videos of five to twenty minutes in length. I loved consuming the content in this way, so it’s become my goal for my video library.

How I am Making it Progressive

I plan to edit out the unnecessary parts of each video and break the video into pieces that are five to 20 minutes in length. To do that, I would load the full video, watch it, and make a note of good places to break it apart. Then, with an editing tool, I would break the video into pieces and process each section. Next, I would upload the video to YouTube. Finally, I would embed the video in a resource on my website.

For an hour-long video, this can take three hours or more to accomplish. Currently, I have 30 or more videos of varying lengths. When I think about slogging through all those videos, I dread even starting. As a result, the project moves further and further down my project list.

But I want to get this project done. I kind of NEED to get it done. It is a priority for me.

I realized that in a few hours, I could have all my videos uploaded to YouTube and embedded on my resource pages. Can I live with that? I’d like the project to be “perfect”, but, yes, I can live with my unedited videos uploaded to YouTube, for now.

What to Consider for Managing Your Creative Projects

If you are creative, any project can be approached with a creative project management mindset. Look at the big picture of your project and try to find one or more tasks that might have intermediate points of completion.

• Do you need to build the whole website or will one page suffice?
• Does the web page need perfectly coordinated colors and polished custom graphics or will good old black and white with some stock images get you up and running enough to bring in a customer?
• Does your lead magnet need to be a 25-page formatted and polished PDF file or will the basic content in a Google Doc work for now?

I don’t want you to feel like you’ve sacrificed your brand or image in the name of getting something out there, but do consider the possibility that good enough will do just as good a job as perfect. Get it out there and as time permits, come back and refine and polish it until it shines just like you had imagined.

Want to learn to create task, time and project management structures for that work for who you are? Join us for this month’s Mindset Think-shop on “Organizing Outside the Box”.