I'll do it when I feel like it!

How often is "I'll do it when I feel like it" thought of as a statement underlying laziness, lack of discipline, procrastination and other condemnations?  I was prompted to use it as a subject for this post by my wife, Sandie, who recently made the statement.  Before she files for divorce, let me explain the background to her outburst.  She needed to make some scones for a charitable event the next day.  She had a sore throat and was feeling pretty rough.  Enter me, Mr Programme Man, who believes in working to schedules, which inevitably include things you don't want to do as well as your favourite tasks.  I have to say I'm not as disciplined now as I was when I was at the coalface of industry, maybe a little bit of wisdom has crept into my life and that wisdom tells me my wife was right!

Anyone who does cooking, which includes making scones, will know that it is highly creative, not mechanistic.  The finished product is complex.  Unlike a clock, you can't pull a scone apart to see how it was made and then reproduce it!  So cooking is always creative and very often innovative.  Creativity and innovation cannot be institutionalised.  You cannot be creative on command.  So my wife decided that she would make the scones later in the day or even early the next morning, before the charitable event, when hopefully she would be in the right frame of mind.

I am very familiar with industries engaged in projects, which often include design, manufacture and in-service support with overall programme timescales up to two or three decades.  In such environments, effective project management is the name of the game.  I guess what I have learnt from many years experience of that game is that some things can be programmed with a fair degree of certainty of cost and timescale, but others can't.  It is usually dependant upon where the task sits within a spectrum from 'simple' to 'complex' with 'complicated' being somewhere between the two.  Generally speaking complex tasks are not just difficult to programme because of the complexity and therefore the unknowns, but also because of the "I'll do it when I feel like it factor".  The slogan on the tee shirt in the photo suggests it is the 'shit' tasks that get put to one side and that's very often the case.  But it also applies and indeed should apply, to activities requiring high degrees of creativity.

Good project managers are well aware of the need to tailor project plans to not just the 'hard' measures of specification, timescale and cost, but also the intangibles of complexity as well as individual and collective motivations.  Combining the what has to be done now with what needs to be done when you feel like it, is no mean task.  Indeed, no matter how simple a task might seem, if it involves human beings then by definition it can become complex.

So thank you, Sandie, for once again dragging me away from my Mr Programme Man roots.  By the way, I prepared and published this post three days ahead of schedule.  Why?  Because I did it when I felt like it!