Becoming a professional project manager.
Whether you are creative, artist, freelancer or entrepreneur, your work requires you to manage projects.
Projects are not jobs. They don't work if you just keep showing up and doing the tasks and chores that are on your plate.
Projects require you to define who's it for and what's it for. They require constraints. They require intent and initiative and they require someone to be accountable for them.
It's not about hustling. It's not about more effort. It's not about heroic effort. It's about making hard decision and choosing what we want to focus on, what matters. It's about looking at systems that enable us to reach where we are seeking to go.
It's not easy. It's not easy because we have been trained to do jobs. To show up at a set time and do what we are told. To hide, to not be on the hook.
But that doesn't work anymore. If all you can do is your job, sooner or later, technology or another cheaper resource will replace you.
What we can do is to see that project management is a skill and like any other skill, we can get better at it.
Here are a few resources that can help you build that skill:
On project management:
- https://seths.blog/2023/06/project-management/
- https://seths.blog/2014/07/project-management-for-work-that-matters/
- https://seths.blog/2024/12/project-product-managers/
Ship it journal resources:
- https://seths.blog/2012/05/the-shipit-journal-now-in-free-pdf-format/
- https://seths.blog/2012/05/an-audio-introduction-to-the-shipit-journal/
- https://www.moo.com/us/notebooks-journals/seth-godin
On writing project specs: