How Orchestrating Organized Chaos Frees up 99% of Your Headspace

Image Source: Generated by Copilot

Developing a process to capture your thoughts, turn them into actionable tactics, and streamline working with a team to achieve a shared outcome are a few of the backbone principles of project management. Regardless of your job, industry, and experience, good project management compared to poor project management can make or break the success of your work, and overall joy of a job or project.

After learning about some of the history and methodologies, and creating a project management workspace for myself, I have two pieces of advice for how anyone can orchestrate organized chaos to overall improve processes and collaboration with others.

Use Kanban to Implement K.I.S.S.

One of my favorite concepts that my manager at my first full-time job taught me was the K.I.S.S. rule. Keep it simple, stupid. This is a cheeky reminder to avoid unnecessary complexity, whether you’re working with the CEO of your company or explaining to your 5-year-old son what you did at work during the day. It’s a fantastic design principle to remind you that simplicity is a key to success.

Creating a Kanban with Trello and using it as a project management tool is one of the best ways to implement K.I.S.S.

Image Source: Interaction Design Foundation

As you can see in the two pictures below, I stayed true to the roots of a Kanban by designing a system with three stages that tracks how my tasks (parts) need to move through stages to completion (production within the factory).

Image Source: Created by Author

Image Source: Created by Author

Reality is a Roller Coaster: How to Make the Ride Smoother

One of the biggest upsides I found with creating this Trello board and learning about project management is that it’s not a linear process. Implementing Trello as a project management method is a low-effort, high-impact strategy. It enables you to quickly get organized and move through your work with minimal confusion, and creates more efficiency for yourself and your team.

Something that stuck with me regarding the general and historical overview of project management is the fact that the common, clear indicators of a successful project are determined by factors like:

• Completion on schedule.
• Staying within budget.
• Producing work aligned with agreed upon quality standards.

Using a Kanban in Trello as an agile project management method gave me instant flexibility, was easy to control how much work is in progress and how granular I want to go with tasks so I could improve my overall focus and avoid overload, and has a visual display that uses colored labels to organize and create easy associations in my head for me to better remember and prioritize, almost like a version of a mind map in some ways.

Whether you start using Trello for your project management, or another popular platform like Basecamp, learning about the history of project management, doubling down on a Kanban as an agile method, and implementing it to get organized, focused, and make your roller coaster ride smoother is one of the best ways you can free up headspace and orchestra whatever organized chaos is in your life.