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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.
Oftentimes it’s not breaking out, but diving in, digging deeper, staying in your rabbit hole that brings the biggest gains. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.
Three questions that pull me out of the weeds
When work feels heavy, I run it through three questions before I do anything else.
They keep me from grinding on stuff that doesn't deserve the grind. And they push me through the stuff that does.
Here they are.
1. Is this actually difficult?
Most of the time, no.
We build tasks up in our heads until they feel impossible. Then we avoid them for a week. Then they take 90 minutes.
When I catch myself stuck, I ask: has anyone done this before? Have I done it before? Is this going to wreck my next 48 hours?
Building the initial schedule for a project type you've run a dozen times is not difficult. You've sequenced the concrete pours, the MEP rough-in, the commissioning. The friction is staring at a blank P6 file, not the work itself. Pull up an old schedule, copy the WBS, start adapting.
Most things in scheduling are not actually difficult. We just treat them that way.
2. Is it supposed to be difficult?
If it is hard, ask whether it should be.
Some things are hard on purpose. They're a gating mechanism. A PhD is supposed to be hard. A real schedule risk analysis with the full project team is supposed to be hard because you're surfacing what people don't want to admit. The discomfort is the point.
Other things are hard because something is broken.
Entering monthly status should not take three days. If it does, your schedule has too much detail, your field team isn't tracking the right things, or you're chasing data that should be coming to you on a cadence. The pain is a signal. Fix the system, not the effort.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If a task is fighting you and it shouldn't be, there's a simpler way.
3. Am I willing to pay the price?
This is the one that filters out wishful thinking.
Say you want to become the cost analysis expert on your team. Schedule plus cost is a powerful combination and almost nobody on the planning side does it well.
The price: nights learning earned value mechanics, conversations with the cost team that make you feel dumb, building forecasts that get torn apart, and a year of looking like a beginner before you start looking like an authority.
If you're willing to pay it, go. If you're not, stop telling yourself you'll get to it next quarter.
The price is real. So is the payoff. Just be honest about which side of the trade you're on.
Three questions. That's it.
Is this actually difficult? Is it supposed to be difficult? Am I willing to pay the price?
Run anything sitting on your plate through those three. Most of it gets smaller. The stuff that doesn't is the stuff worth doing.
Smart starts here.
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Create Excellent Process
Act as an expert Project Controls Analyst and Excel dashboard designer. Build a schedule performance tracker that compares each schedule update against the previous update, including a dashboard tab, milestone tab, start date variance tab, finish date variance tab, and duration variance tab.
The tracker should help project teams quickly identify schedule slippage, acceleration, missed milestones, changes in activity logic, and trends across multiple update periods. Use best practices from construction project controls trackers, including variance calculations, traffic-light indicators, charts, filters, and summary KPIs. Format the tracker as a clean Excel workbook structure with clearly named tabs, column headers, formulas, dashboard visuals, and instructions for entering baseline schedule data and recurring update data.
Use a professional, practical, and easy-to-follow tone suitable for project managers, schedulers, and executives. Before you begin ask me 3 questions to help improve your answer
Company - DPR
Location - Denver
Company - Whiting Turner
Location - San Francisco, CA
Company - JE Dunn
Location - Austin, TX
We have no connection to these jobs or companies. Our goal is simply to help you land the job of your dreams.
This week’s episode we dive into the exact year manual scheduling dies. Watch or Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.
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