Simple Tips to Plan Your Projects So You Get Them Done | Podcast Episode #105

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Do you struggle to finish your projects?

It’s so hard to get them all done. There’s an old saying that goes “Failing to plan is planning to fail”. I have this posted on my wall as a daily reminder that in order to finish my projects, I must have a plan. I’m convinced that the only way you will be able to finish all the projects you set out to create this year is to have an action plan in place – a rigid yet slightly flexible way of keeping yourself accountable for the projects you want to make. That’s what we’ll discuss in this episode.

In today’s episode, you’ll learn:

• How to manage your projects on special occasions
• How to set these occasions in your calendar and create deadlines
• How to estimate the amount of time a project will take
• How to set up reminders in Google to keep track of your projects

Episode Transcript

Brittany:
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 105 of the BHooked podcast. I’m your host, Brittany, and let’s check in, shall we? So we are two months into the year, if you’re listening to this episode, the day it comes out. Even if you aren’t, though, there’s a lot of good information here that will help you plan your projects in the future.

But my goal for today is to be your accountability partner. At the beginning of the year, we always set these lofty goals for all the projects we’ll create, and I’m guilty of this too, but it’s super difficult to follow through, right? Life happens, things come up, maybe we don’t get to the projects that we said we wanted to, and I’m here to help with that in any way possible.

First, I have to ask, did you do that this year? Did you think about which projects you wanted to create? Maybe you were really organized with it and you’ve already done some of the things that we’ll cover here, but think about the projects you set out to create and look at where you are right now. How are those projects coming along? Are you behind? Are you ahead? How many projects do you have in the works right now? Do you have a lot of works in progress? Or do you have just a couple?

We have a ton of stuff to cover today on this topic, but I want to start with this. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer or if you crochet as your hobby. The one thing we all have in common is that we finish projects, no matter who they’re for. If we’re publishing them, if we’re gifting them. That is where we all come together, and so this topic is important to all of us.

We have a lot of stuff to cover today, so let’s just dive right in. The goal for today’s episode is to give you an action plan. Whether you have one already or you don’t have one, doesn’t matter. Let’s work together to think about what we want to accomplish and then work back from there, figure out when and how we’re going to do it.

Now, the first step to all of this is to define what you want to accomplish this year. What projects do you wanna finish? For me personally, it works better to do this quarter by quarter. Now, if you’re a pen to paper kind of person, get some kind of designated notebook or better yet a project planner to help you in this organizational process.

But if you’re a digital person like me, here are the apps I use to plan my upcoming projects. So because I am a designer and I do publish my patterns online, I use a really cool tool called CoSchedule. It’s basically like an editorial calendar on steroids and it allows me to organize my content and therefore my projects for the entire year.

Now, you’ve probably heard me talk about CoSchedule on the show before, and if this is something you’re interested in, you can visit behooked.com slash CoSchedule. That is my referral link. If you are willing to go through that link, of course, I will not get compensated for that. However, I will get some money off my monthly subscription. So if you go through that link, thank you very much. But of course you don’t have to. Just visit CoSchedule. You can see what it has to offer and see if it’s right for you.

I will say though that CoSchedule is not going to be for you if you aren’t publishing your patterns online. A good digital tool for you then might be Evernote. I used Evernote for so many years and honestly, I still do even in conjunction with CoSchedule and a couple of the other apps I’ll mention. It’s totally free and that’s what I love about it. But I also like the fact that I can access it from whatever device.

So if I’m sitting here at my computer like I am now, I can go to Evernote’s website and have access to all of my stuff. But if I’m sitting on the couch working on a design, then I’m able to access Evernote on my phone.

With Evernote you can create notebooks which are sort of like folders and then within those folders or within those notebooks you can add notes or pieces of paper. So from there what I like to do is create a notebook for each project and then create a note for each item or each thing. So maybe I found a photo that inspired me or a color palette that inspired me. I can create a note that has a picture attached to it. And then let’s say I’m ready to write the pattern. I can create a note and just jot down the pattern right there.

If you aren’t a designer, you can still follow this same pattern. You can create a notebook for each project and create a note for each of the items related to that project. Perhaps you have some progress photos that you want to hold on to. You can upload those from your phone directly into Evernote and it’ll organize them there for you.

You can also create a note to hold on to the pattern link. So let’s say you found the pattern on Ravelry. Maybe it wasn’t a digital download. Maybe it was just on a website where you can have the link there. You can also make notes on the hook size, the yarn you used, maybe the lot number if you feel like you might run out of yarn. It’s just a really great tool to help you in this organizational process.

So these are the two tools that I recommend for the digital type. If you’re a designer, you might look into CoSchedule. If you are a designer or aren’t a designer, I think you’ll find Evernote helpful too. It is, like I said, completely free. CoSchedule is not. There is a monthly subscription involved in that. So that’s why it’s not right for everyone. But Evernote is a really versatile program that is free and that could be perfect for anyone.

And of course, that pen to paper type, get a notebook or get some kind of project planner. And this is going to be what you use throughout the year. In addition to this notebook or this note taking system, I recommend that you get some kind of calendar that’s designated for your projects.

Again, if you’re a pen to paper kind of person, I like those big desk calendars because it gives me enough space that I can take some notes and I can write some things and I can keep it in a separate place. It’s just my calendar for my projects. But I do love my digital things, so I tend to use Google Calendar the most. Again, it’s completely free and I can access it no matter where I’m at on my computer or on my phone. And I like to use that to organize my calendar.

Now, the Google Calendar has another feature where you can set reminders for yourself, and this will be important as we move into the next steps. So for now, what I want you to do is think about what type of notebook and what type of calendar you want to use for the rest of the year.

Once you have those things in place, the next thing we need to do is make a list of all of the major events that’ll happen in the year that you need a project for or a gift for. Is somebody having a baby? Is somebody in your life getting married? Are there birthdays that you know you wanna gift an item for? And the holidays? I know a lot of us crochet and gift for the holidays.

So write these things down, not only noting those events, but perhaps noting the projects or the person that they’re going to be for. This will be particularly helpful for the holidays because you’re not just making one project for the holidays. You’re typically making multiple. So first, start with a list of all the projects you want to make for these major events.

And then here’s the really important part: assign a due date for them. So it’s simple if you have somebody’s having a baby, then of course you can assign perhaps the baby shower date or somebody’s birthday. That’s a pretty big giveaway. You assign their birthday as your due date.

So think about that, assign a due date and then input that into your calendar. Whether you’re working on a paper calendar, write it in on that date or go into Google Calendar and create an event for that project or a due date.

Once you have those dates inputted into your calendar, now we need to think about how much time you need to actually finish the thing, right? One thing I always try to do is keep track of the amount of time it takes me to make a project. And that’s so I have a reference point for times like this.

But if you have no clue how much time it’s taken you to finish a project in the past, here are some general guidelines based on how I crochet or the amount of time that it takes me to crochet a project. Now note that it will be different from person to person. I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a fast crocheter, but I’m not really a slow crocheter either. I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle, just completely average. Also consider that some projects will inevitably take more time than others. If you have a really detailed pattern or if you’re working with smaller yarn, you want to keep these things in mind.

So just take this list for what it is, a general guideline or a starting point so that you can figure out how much time it’s going to take you to make those projects that you said you wanted to make.

So for afghans, just the standard size afghan, maybe a throw size, I usually budget 30 hours of crochet time. For baby blankets, I budget about 20 hours. For things like scarves or cowls, about 12 hours. And this is on the high end of things. It really depends on the size. Of course, cowls don’t take as long because they’re not as big, but about 12 hours is a good estimate for how long it’ll take you to make those projects.

For garments and wearables, I like to budget 20 hours and I would even say possibly more. These typically involve some type of shaping and assembly and that takes time as well. So keep that in mind when you’re planning for a garment or a wearable.

And the last one—for hats—and this is an overestimate too, but I usually budget about eight hours. If I’m using a bigger yarn, it doesn’t take me nearly eight hours. Sometimes I’ll work for three or four hours, but there have been hats that I’ve made in the past with a lightweight yarn that did take about eight hours to do.

So think about this list and think about the projects you’re creating. You may have an idea in mind of the yarn you want to use or the weight or the intricacy of the pattern, but whether we know those details or not, we should really overestimate because things always take longer than we expect.

Now, once you have this figured out, go back to your list of those projects and just scribble in a number next to it—and then add a few hours to that because it’s inevitably going to take longer.

And now that we know what projects we want to make, we have a general idea of how long it’s going to take. The next piece of the puzzle is to figure out how much time we can devote to this project. I like to figure this out on a weekly basis.

So think about your availability during a normal week. Can you spend one to two hours, maybe three or four evenings out of the week? Or can you spend five or six hours in one big Sunday session? Like before, we should be conservative here and underestimate the availability that we have.

If you think reasonably you can spend an hour every single evening, that’s wonderful. But I would record and maybe plan for only doing that maybe four days a week. Because like I said, something always comes up and we don’t want to get behind. We need to plan for those unexpected events.

Once you figure these times out and when you can work on it, treat them like any other appointment. If you make an appointment to the dentist, you are there that day, that time, no matter what, right? We respect an appointment when somebody else is involved, but we don’t necessarily want to respect an appointment that we’ve created for ourselves. I’m guilty of this too.

And I think it’s because we don’t treat it as an appointment. We just say, oh yeah, I would like to do that. But let’s be a little more rigid with this because we know we have these goals. We want to create these projects. So treat the time you’re setting aside for it as an appointment. So you know you can accomplish those goals.

Okay, so once you know what days are best for you to crochet and about how many hours you have to do so, now we need to do a little calculating. So look at the estimated total hours for that project and then figure out how many sessions you need to finish it based on your availability.

So let’s think about an example here. Let’s say I’m making a baby blanket. I’m estimating that it’ll take about 20 hours to create. And let’s say I have two hours, two evenings each week. So that is four hours a week that I have said—created appointments for myself—that I will sit down and work on that project.

Since four goes into 20 five times, I’ll need to budget five weeks to finish that project. So once we have that information, we can go back to our calendar and then work back from the due date.

So let’s say I have the due date for that baby shower on my calendar. I would work back five weeks, because that’s what I’ve calculated it’ll take, and then set your start date.

We can’t end things there though, because we have to consider getting the supplies. That takes some time too. If we’re planning really far in advance, stuff like this is really easy to overlook or to forget about, and then we’re starting off on the wrong foot.

So first, figure out if you need to order the yarn or if you plan to go shopping for it at your store. When I am ordering yarn online, I like to overestimate because it’s different for every place that you order, but I like to budget two weeks to get the yarn that I order online.

So what I would do in that case is go back to my calendar, work back from my start date, and set a reminder to myself to order the yarn before I need to get started.

Google Calendar is really cool in that it allows you to set reminders for yourself. You can do this on your phone or on the website, and it’ll ping your phone on the day and time that you set.

So I might be working really far in advance. Let’s say I have a baby shower in September of this year. That’s several months away. I would set my due date five weeks before that—or my start date rather, five weeks before that. And then I would set my “need to order yarn” reminder two weeks before.

Because I’m working so far in advance, I’ll completely forget about that. So I need that reminder to come up on my phone that says, “Hey, you need to order your yarn today for this project.”

Now, if you’re not ordering the yarn online, you may only budget a few days or perhaps you set that reminder for the weekend before so that you can go buy the yarn. I set a reminder still.

Because you’re potentially working so far in advance, you will probably forget that you need to go buy the yarn. And I need to be reminded. My brain just can’t hold all of that information. I’m a very forgetful person. So that’s why I’m so regimented with this sort of thing.

So set yourself a reminder for perhaps the weekend before when you know you can go shopping and you’ll be all set. You won’t have to worry about forgetting to get the yarn and starting off on the wrong foot.

Now, all we need to do is repeat this process for all the projects you want to create for those major events that you already wrote down.

Now let’s think about this. We’ve done all of this planning, but here’s the thing: things change. As a general rule of thumb, I really like to work quarter by quarter.

Now I might pick out those major events because they’re really important and go ahead and put those in the calendar. But for smaller projects or for projects that I’m not 100% sure will work out, I like to plan those just quarterly—a few months in advance. And that’s because things change. Other projects will come up and you’ll have to pivot and you’ll have to do things a little different.

However, we’ve given ourselves the best chance by planning ahead. And so that’s why I say it’s always a good idea to treat these major events, these big projects, like they’re an appointment. Respect that time because you will be so happy you did.

When you finish that thing and you can gift it or publish it—whatever your intention may be—you’ll be really glad that you did. Even if you had to do a little planning, even if things had to get a little uncomfortable to get them done, you’ll be happy you did.

I found that this level of planning is the only way for me to finish what I want to do. And I wouldn’t worry if the first two months of this year have been completely unproductive for you. Let’s just get on track right now.

If you’re serious about finishing these projects, then take the steps that we’ve outlined here today and set yourself up for success. Now, it may seem a little silly to be so regimented with a project, but hey, we’re serious about our craft, right?

So let’s do a quick recap of the things that you’ll need to do to be serious about finishing your projects this year.

First of all, get a project planner or a notebook for those of you who are a pen-to-paper type, or set yourself up with a free Evernote account and set up your Google Calendar for those of you who are the digital type.

Next, you’ll need to make a list of the events you need a project for for the rest of the year and assign a due date. Then look at those projects, estimate the amount of time it’ll take you to make it. And remember, be conservative here and add one to five hours to that number based on the project.

So for a big project, I would add more time. For a smaller project like a hat, I would add less time. Then set your availability to work on it or create your sessions. From there, you can figure out how many sessions you need and then work back to create a start date—that is that many weeks before your due date.

Then we’ll set up a reminder to buy or order the yarn and that’s it. We have our action plan for the rest of the year for those big, major, important events that we’ve set out right now.

Sure, you’ll add projects to that list or perhaps you’ll take projects away. Doesn’t matter what’s going to happen as the year progresses. You’ve already set the expectation and you’ve already set yourself up to finish those projects.

Now, I would love to know how many projects you plan to complete this year. Please tell me in the comment section at behooked.com/105.

Now lastly, I want to let you know that today’s episode was brought to you by Red Heart Yarns Colorscape.

If you’re looking for a beautiful yarn that will grab anyone’s attention, Colorscape is a really great option for you to try. It’s smooth and sturdy, and it’s a roving-style yarn. It has really long, flowing colorways, and they’re sort of a mix of fibers here and there for lots of visual interest.

It’s made up of acrylic fibers, which is really great if you are making something for someone with an allergy or if you just prefer the feel of acrylic. And it’s really soft to the touch. And I found that it holds up really well to wear.

Colorscape is one of the newer yarns to Red Heart’s lineup, and I’ve seen it at various different craft stores, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for it there. But if you want to check it out today, you can do so by visiting redheart.com.

Now, next week, I sit down with Tony from TL Yarn Crafts to chat about Tunisian crochet—one of my favorite forms of crochet. If you haven’t tried this technique or type of crochet, I totally recommend doing it and listening in next week is a really great way to get started.

So if you haven’t subscribed to the show already, go ahead and do that now so you don’t miss this episode. And I will see you there, my friend.

Plan your projects, tell me about it on the show notes page, and I’ll see you next week. Have a wonderful weekend. Bye bye.