June 10, 2016

How To Simplify A Complicated Project

Daily Writing Blog, How to's and Tutorials for Writers

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How To Simplify Your Complicated Project Idea

Yesterday’s post saw me drip woe onto the screen as I realised that instead of creating an online product, I’d actually created a monster. Said monster/product became too complicated, and this demoralised me – hence my product isn’t complete yet.

Yesterday’s article shows you how to recognise if you’re suffering from the same problem.

Today’s work involved me trying to untangle the knot, simplify my approach and cut down the excess of information that I’d accumulated.

Untangling the knot was a lot easier than I thought it would be, and it didn’t take as long.

That’s because I’ve used two things: The Golden Rule and the Golden Tool. (Don’t snicker.)

Let’s go into them right now, before expounding upon them.

The Golden Tool & The Golden Rule

If you’re stuck on a project, there are going to be two things that bother you:

  • How to simplify your overcomplicated project
  • How to know when you’ve simplified your project enough so that you won’t get bogged down again

In this article, I’m going to go over how I used two things to answer the two above problems. The great news is that there’re no sneaky affiliate links or anything – you can do these things for practically free.

Let’s start with the equipment you’ll need.

The Golden Tool

The Golden Tool – or should I say, Golden Tools – are two items.

  • Pen
  • Paper

A curse of the modern age is that everyone suffers from information overload in one form or another. Whether it’s online business guys who have a million ideas and a million tools to build them with, or teenage girls with social media addictions – technology is bad for condensing information because whichever avenue you go down, you’ll find more questions than answers.

A pen and paper combination is the golden tool to untangling knots because there are inherent limitations; space, line sizes and the fact that you can’t open up another document or browser-tab on command mean that your brain is forced to contain itself and the ideas that spring from it.

Bonus: Microsoft Excel or Other Tables.

Typically, I bit off more than I could chew with my first online product. It’s a flaw of mine that probably won’t change anytime soon.

For the monster/product, I wanted to create a year-long course. One lesson a day with multiple elements in every lesson.

… You can begin to see why this became a nightmare pretty quickly.

Microsoft Excel has helped me today. With Excel, you can easily create a grid, hide elements and cross-reference multiple sheets within a single document. This isn’t plausible on paper.

Also, the fact that the cells are unworkably tiny means that you can’t write endless information within them. It has to be a simple A+B=C type affair.

The Golden Rule

Above, I’ve told you to use a pen and paper. However, the keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I didn’t say what you should do with the pen and paper.

That’s where the Golden Rule comes in.

The Golden Rule is this: If you can’t summarise it on a sheet of paper, it’s too complicated. I wrote about this before with business plans, but the idea is pretty universal.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

  • Your Unique Selling Point – or main gist of your product – should fit in a single sentence.
  • The contents of your product should get a single sentence each. (Take a chapter in a book, for instance)
  • From the above sentences – you’ll get a list of benefits, a common-sense order and selling points for your marketing materials
  • Format = simple explanation. “Video course in twelve parts.” Or, “ebook + physical book later”

This isn’t to say you have to include everything, but you should be able to summarise your course, product or service on a single sheet of paper. If in doubt, use this template:

Name of Product

USP – Major Problem It Solves

Medium – (Video/Book/One-to-One Coaching etc.)

Contents – (Intro/Content 1-X/End) (Create your selling point bullets from this)

Other Stuff You’ll Need – (Like the Website Master Key – But don’t worry about this until after you’ve created the course)

Practically everything else will come from answering the questions that the above template provides.

If you write a single USP sentence, then your market will be inherent in that. “My product helps you lose your baby fat without having to diet, do strenuous exercise or kill your cat in a blood sacrifice” implies a certain market.

If you have a reason for including something in your contents, then that’s a selling point that’s occurred naturally.

Your medium will dictate how much information there is and the requirements of the medium will dictate how and when you put that information in. So on and so forth.

Final Thoughts

This article has been pretty short, but that’s because the worst thing you can do when trying to simplify something and take action is to complicate it.

(Slightly indirect call out of all those “27 ways to minimise your life now” articles.)

Essentially, if you’re stuck on a project, you should aim to do two things:

  • Summarise your project, it’s goals and contents precisely and concisely
  • Backwards engineer your course from that, taking out anything that’s overcomplicating the process.

If you can’t concentrate for a spinning head, then switch your computer off and sit in solitude and silence with pen and paper until you’ve done the above.

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