Always closing: an essential practical tip for finishing your projects

If you want to follow through on the initiatives and projects you take on, your mind needs to be wired for always closing.

What is the "always closing" mode?

It means looking at your project and asking yourself:

"What do I need to do today to move this project forward a little more?"

Every single day!

What happens in practice?

We take on too many workstreams in parallel and it becomes hard to finish things. Capacity isn't respected, and bottlenecks start building up in our workload.

Sometimes it's a personal trait, a habit of starting things and then losing focus because something else seems more interesting.

The natural difficulty of getting things done ends up setting limits in the mind of whoever's doing the work, like missing some kind of feedback (dependencies). Many factors lead people to get stuck and fail to follow through.

What should I do?

Project management is a process, and you need to keep pushing things forward. We have to lead and drive the change in things at every step of the process.

In the mind of someone who makes things happen, there's no stopping, no giving up because something went wrong, no giving up because it got stuck, no abandoning the project because there's been no feedback.

💡 In practice

When you start your workday, look at the current stage of your project and ask yourself:

• What do my team and I need to do today to move things forward a little more?
• Is it in the contracting stage? Who has the contract?
• What does the person currently responsible need in order to move forward?
• Is it being signed? Who has it right now?
• Do we need to kick off planning? Can I send the invites already?
• Is it in execution? What are the current workstreams?
• Can I help move things forward in some way?

Closing out your projects

As a project manager, we need to think a few steps ahead of the team.

But every single day, we need to put in energy to close out a bit more of the current stage.

Do you know why this mindset matters? Because we need to start following through on things.

Every company is full of initiatives. Look around at your own work, I bet it's full of things stuck in the gerund: doing, developing, building, in progress.

A ton of things started and not finished.

Or worse, a bunch of things done halfway, which is pure waste.

We have plenty of initiatives, but no follow-through.

So start adopting the mindset of closing things out, a little every day. People who follow through are always evolving, delivering work and results.

If you're committed to delivering results on the project you took on, you know exactly what I'm talking about!

That's it! Making things happen, getting them off the page.

MOVE FORWARD EVERY DAY TO ALWAYS BE CLOSING!!!

I'm sure you'll grow if you become someone who finishes things!

Tell me, have you been able to follow through on your projects?

Take care,

Leandro