With any goal or vision, it’s best to write out a plan, have a direction and break it down into smaller steps. Indeed, setting a vision is good, setting goals and breaking them down into smaller steps is good, however setting a fixed timeline for the overall goal is inconvenient. Timelines are usually based on your past experience or the experience of someone else. Based on the past experience it is determined how much time it should take someone or a group to complete a particular step. However, past experience and current knowledge is worthless when the goal you’ve set out is something that has never been done before or you've never done before. You have no idea how long or complex or what issues might arise from the journey to accomplish your goal. At this point, you are guessing the timeline. With that said, not knowing the timeline due to lack of knowledge also affects the steps.
Setting timelines is easy during the planning phase because it’s difficult to imagine the project encountering road blocks. Even if you did an exercise on possible areas of difficulties you could encounter along the way, there is a possibility that you missed one. Therefore, when you realize you’ve spent three quarters of your time on the second step of six steps and the timeline set out initially do not fit anymore, the pressure mounts. You start to doubt what you set out to accomplish was worth it, you challenge your abilities and you get frustrated.
Establishing timelines for the entire length of the project is a lot of pressure if they are not built on facts. The order of the steps to accomplish milestones might not be in the correct order while new steps can be added or removed mid-way which will affect the overall timeline. Consequently, timelines set from start to finish are not ideal. You are better off to split your project into phases and create mini timelines and adjust as you move forward. When you do it one step at time, you gain knowledge of your project and can better predict your timeline for future steps. No pressure!
Once you complete one step, take time to reflect how that went. What went well, where could you improve and import that knowledge into your next timeline exercise. It’s important to include your feedback from the previous steps in the future steps, to avoid the same mistakes. Although this might seem counterintuitive due to taking more time, you will save up a lot of frustration if any issues arises later in the process. Give it a try!
Take care.