Once you have a project idea picked out and a creative direction planned, typically you want to jump right in. Creative minded people usually want to jump head in and start creating things, but very often don’t have a well thought out plan and that’s when things tend to get off track.
“Apparently, people who are disorganized and messy aren’t necessarily less productive or lazy. They’re just bold and more spontaneous. Actually, messy people are more imaginative.” (William) This spontaneity can get worn down though overtime so having a plan to flesh out when things need to get done and when the hard core research and business work needs to get done so the fun spontaneous creative can get started it always good.
For “The Boy Band Breakdown” project it has multiple moving parts and separate stages that need to be completed on time in order to have 3 professional quality videos. In order to achieve this, this past week I created a project management plan on Asana. Asana is one of many project management platforms, other include Trello, Slack, Wrike, Clickup and more.
In my project board I chose to break the project down into 4 main sections and also a have completed column that I can move completed tasks to so that the other sections don’t get cluttered with green check marks and then I miss an unfinished task.
In the past I’ve used almost every other project management platform that I listed earlier and after doing multiple different projects on each one and working for different companies using different ones I found Trello to be the simplest and most user friendly, but then I came across Asana and it had very similar features the one difference I saw was that after creating my columns and lists I could also see all my tasks in a calendar view. This is something very important to me because I am a very visual learner and having a visual showing when tasks need to be completed and what tasks over lap is very important.
Personally for me the biggest broken down section is Pre-Production because it has the most amount of writing and organizing and business level tasks and that can be very grueling for me at times. I love designing and filming and editing and can get very frustrated with the planning stages of things. So knowing this about myself I strategically made my project management plan have smaller more attainable task in pre-production so that I could get that gratification by checking boxes off.
Another huge thing for my project plan that probably differs from many other video project plans is that I have a separate uploading section instead of keeping it with in the production section. This is because when I’m editing the different episodes together I want to only be focused on that episodes visuals and audio and not thing about the thumbnail and youtube description. So to keep me from getting sidetracked and try to edit and create too many things all at once. I wanted to plan the dates out so that the videos will be completely done and exported before I make and the thumbnails and descriptions.
Many other project management plans have sections like mine and then create bigger tasks to go under them and then create checklists and subtasks inside of them. For me, I know that I personally wouldn’t like or even remember to click on each task and read down a checklist so instead I made mine to just have a bunch of separate task under each section and then with in some of the tasks I left myself desperation notes so that I remember any specifics that I might need to do. For examples in my contact interviewees task I listed some of the people I should reach out to so I don’t forget when I go to complete the task.
When reading about creative people and how we love to dive into a project I came a across a very interesting quote that I felt summed everything I was feeling up pretty well. “I’ve met two kinds of artists in my life: the creative who jumps head first into water and the creative who dips her toes in the well.” (Brummer) Often I find myself wanting to be the artist that jumps head first into a project and a few times I have been that person, but with out fail I always get stuck some where along the process. Other times I’m so disorganized in my head and I feel like I have no jumping off point to start the project. But with by stopping and taking some time to actually come up with a fully fleshed out production plan and create a project management board I feel more reassured about starting and actually completing this project.
If you want to check out my entire project production plan click the file below.
taylorsniffen.com 