How To Keep Multiple Writers Organized Over Many Concurrent Projects (Without Losing Your Mind)
The Mastery Project is a series where we dissect, study, and test a topic to produce rules for our writers and designers. When we learn something, we share.
Emerging research indicates that digital clutter can be just as overwhelming as the physical stuff. For us at Fenwick, it’s an all-too-familiar stress.
When I first joined the team, Chris was working out of a content backlog, a Google Doc where he logged ideas and decided what to tackle next. The theory behind it was great. It was meant to be a place we’d brainstorm, curate good ideas, and cull bad ones. There was just one problem: it wasn’t just a content backlog. It was our project management tool, our record of everything we were working on. Actually, one of many. We also had numerous client-specific backlogs, scattered across different client folders. Not to mention that some work—which existed in Chris’ Evernote to-do lists, my paper planner, or long email threads with clients— managed to circumvent all of the backlogs entirely.
You fall to the level of your systems.”
— JAMES CLEAR, ATOMIC HABITS
We were swimming in digital clutter. And we were also busier than we ever had been before. In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”—and our systems were deeply broken. Something had to give.
Work began to slip through the cracks of our fragmented project management system. Take the client who was in the habit of sending long creative briefs copy-pasted into emails. These emails would turn into long threads, or spark brand new emails which he would begin with a revised version of the original brief. Soon, it was impossible to locate the correct version of each project’s requirements and we started to miss deliverables.
Email was inadequate as a project management tool. These kinds of messages were regularly flooding our inboxes.
In addition to lost work, we lost time. We wasted precious time looking for missing documents—not only so we could do our work but also so we could invoice clients and get paid. Given how busy we already were, we really couldn’t afford to lose any more working hours. It was clear we needed a better solution. But what?
While software developers have a veritable buffet of project management tools to choose from, good project management software for writers doesn’t really exist. There’s Contently, which is great if you’re an enterprise-sized company (and have the budget to match) but there’s nothing designed with small content teams or freelance writers in mind. So, in November, Chris asked other writers and marketers for their recommendations over LinkedIn.
Chris’s post on LinkedIn asking for project management software recommendations.
By far, the number one recommendation was Asana, so we decided to try it out. (That many marketers couldn’t be wrong, right?).
For ease of organization, we decided to create a “project” for each client we worked with and input our various client projects as subheadings, tasks, and subtasks. It did take some time to transition everything over, but it was a relief to know that, from this point forward, all of our work was going to be in one place.
Our designer’s rendering of our initial setup in Asana. Already, it’s looking much cleaner and more manageable.
While Asana resolved our scattered documents issue, it also created new problems. Even though it was great to (finally) have a single source of truth for our work, we did lose something in the transition—an overview of everything we were working on. However incomplete it had been, Chris’ content backlog had provided a bird’s-eye view of our projects. In Asana, we could look at individual project pages (in our case, individual clients) or our personal tasks, but there wasn’t an easy way to see everything we were working on as a company—like when it was just a list in Google Docs. This made it difficult to schedule new projects or see where current tasks were blocked. Moving to Asana was a great first step, but we needed to go further.
While we were puzzling over our own project management approach, I was writing an online guide to the Kanban Method, a productivity methodology often used by software development teams—but one that could theoretically be applied to any kind of knowledge work. (Some parents even use it to help kids manage their chores.)
What is the Kanban Method?
Inspired by the lean or “just-in-time” manufacturing practices pioneered by Toyota in the 1950s, software developer David J. Anderson created the Kanban Method—a productivity methodology that helps workers improve efficiency by optimizing their existing work processes. The most iconic feature of this system is the “Kanban board,” a visual log of work-in-progress. A Kanban board has columns to indicate work status—at its most basic, these could be “to-do,” “in-progress,” and “done”— under which you can organize your tasks. Originally, these boards were made up of index cards or sticky notes, but these days many digital tools can do the job just as well.
I began to wonder, could Kanban work for us?
To try it out, I started by creating a personal Kanban board in Asana, using a workaround I’d discovered to populate it with my exiting tasks (the workaround is that you can add a task to multiple projects). This was my initial setup:
My first Kanban board in Asana, as illustrated by our designer. I really liked having a bird’s eye view of my tasks.
I loved the simplicity of it—I didn’t have to do anything differently, just keep track of the work I was already doing. The system didn’t try to change my work habits, it just reflected them back to me. And it was satisfying to see my progress—moving tasks from one column to the next gave me immediate feedback that I was making headway.
I shared my board with Chris and by December, we decided to start experimenting company-wide. And though we were enthusiastic about trying Kanban as a team, we weren’t actually sure it was going to work. For instance, one of the principles of the methodology is to prevent multitasking and complete one task at a time—but as writers, Chris and I like to jump around between projects (we’re big advocates of the sleep-on-it method to composing great prose). Could we even do Kanban? Or would we automatically be doing it “wrong”?
More immediately, we were worried about volume. With so many projects going on at once, would we be able to fit everything we were working on into one board? And finally, what about all the freelancers we worked with? How would they take to the new system? Here’s how it’s been going so far and what we’ve been learning.
In the three-plus months since we’ve adopted Kanban, we’ve seen a ton of tangible benefits, the biggest of which is visibility. It’s easy for us to see everything we’re working on, at a glance, and quickly address blocked tasks. Having all of our work on one board makes it easy to invoice clients, saving us valuable time and effort. Not to mention that it’s psychologically satisfying—I love being able to see my work move from one column to the next, especially when I’m working on long or complicated projects and progress feels slow.
Many of our initial fears were totally baseless. We did manage to fit everything on one board and we still work on multiple projects at a time (though we are working on setting some sensible work-in-progress limits for ourselves). Our freelancers have also taken to the new system well. Using Asana has simplified communication with the freelancers we work with, minimizing the email load for them as well as us.
That’s not to say we don’t have any frustrations—we do. Asana isn’t designed with the unique needs of content agencies in mind, so it’s not always possible to customize the tool to our workflows. But where possible, we adapted. To streamline our process, we added three new columns to our board—“backlog,” “ready to start,” and “final review.” These have made it easier for us to prioritize upcoming tasks and identify whether we’re causing a bottleneck or if an article is simply being reviewed by a client.
Our team Kanban board in Asana, as captured by our designer—finally a way to capture all our projects, at a glance.
Moving our projects to Asana and adopting Kanban has made a huge difference in how we work. It’s made us more organized and efficient, while minimizing the cognitive load of managing all of our tasks, thereby reducing our stress levels. In the coming weeks and months, we want to continue to refine our Kanban practice and improve the efficiency—and ultimately, the quality—of the work we do.
