Beyond Deadlines
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Break This Rule in P6 🛠️, The Perfect Contech Role 🚀, and Secrets of Design Schedules 📐

Break This Rule in P6 🛠️, The Perfect Contech Role 🚀, and Secrets of Design Schedules 📐

Micah Piippo
December 23, 2024

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Welcome back to Beyond Deadlines newsletter—a free perk for people looking to improve in Planning and Scheduling. Each week, we provide tactics, prompts, jobs and food for thought. We want you to succeed today, tomorrow and throughout the rest of your career.

The only way to accomplish a new goal is to feed it your most valuable resource: time. And what we never like to admit is that you don’t just give time to something, you take it from something else. To be good at one thing you have to be bad at something else.

Finish by Jon Acuff

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Every Primavera P6 user has heard the "rules" — Don’t use Negative Lags! Avoid Open Ends! Never over-allocate resources! But here's the real truth: sometimes, you have to break the rules to master them.

If you've been playing it "safe" with your schedules, you might be missing out on powerful techniques that experienced schedulers quietly rely on. Here's a preview of the infamous "blacklist" items you should know how to use (not just avoid):

Negative Lags: Tricky, but useful for modeling overlaps (think design reviews or procurement).
Level of Effort (LOE) Activities: Great for showing QA or management support that runs in parallel.
Constraints: Yes, logic-first is ideal, but sometimes you need to lock in immovable deadlines.

Mastery isn’t about playing by every rule — it’s about knowing when and how to break them.

Create a Persona of Yourself

Copy and paste this prompt into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.

Act as a skilled Persona Development Specialist with expertise in character analysis and brand voice creation. Your task is to analyze a collection of content from a specific individual to develop a comprehensive and authentic persona for them.

The context is that this persona will serve as a guiding reference for creating future content, generating dialogue, and maintaining consistency in tone, style, and character portrayal. Draw on recurring themes, language patterns, and storytelling techniques observed in the provided content as examples of the individual's unique approach.

The format should be a detailed persona profile that includes key personality traits, communication style, core beliefs, signature phrases or expressions, humor style, and emotional tone. The tone of the profile should be insightful, clear, and professional, offering actionable insights for consistent future content creation. Before you begin, ask me 3 questions to help improve your answer.