We all want projects to run smoothly. But it’s hard to find good help these days, right? And yet, we will become more effective and useful if we learn how to manage these kinds of projects efficiently by helping people to help themselves.

Creatives. Innovators. Problem solvers. They're not fundamentally different from accountants, doctors, or factory workers, all of whom may tend toward a linear process. Creatives simply spend more time in what researchers (and John Cleese) call the "open mode;" that mode where ideas and new solutions come.

To understand how to coach — and delegate to — creative, smart people, it doesn't hurt to have a process. But to build that process, let's build a foundation of understanding.


Principles for Creative/Innovative Work
Let’s take a look at how people work.
Task and Purpose
The military does a great job of defining task and purpose. They don't just tell you what to do, also why you're doing it. “Do this so that he is able to do that.”

We do the same thing in development work when we talk about user stories. “The user wants to fill in the email signup so that she can get the monthly email.” Defining this helps people to understand the scope. Because if I tell them why, they can understand the value of the task. He or she can then choose for themselves when to give up because it's not worth it, and how to get the best result given the reason for the task. Read: they can make decisions without you
An Organized Mind Leads to Improved Focus and Time
Focused work doesn’t take as long. You get in, you get immersed, you finish and you deliver. And it’s satisfying. But how do you get there as a project worker? And as a leader, how do you help them?

You have to solve a few problems for them, and then they can solve everything else. Your project workers have problems:

They’re overwhelmed by the world. They probably filled their brain with emails, social media, and the news before they started work.
They’re overwhelmed by competing priorities. If the workplace asks too much of people — too many small tasks — for creative workers, they lose focus.
They get interrupted. It’s hard to work with interruptions, like people talking to you about other things when you’re trying to focus. This is especially true for strategists, writers, or developers — people whose work benefits from bringing a system of thinking into their short-term memory to play with.
They try to hold too much in their brains. They have a bad working process and think that fewer steps mean faster work. But skipping steps can make work take longer and lack depth.

Problem: Short-Term Memory is Limited
With short-term memory(STM) in short supply, it’s folly to build work practices that depend on it being abundantly available. The solution? Save all that short-term memory for the task they’re working on, allowing them to absorb the work and really get into it.

Why is it important to allow them to immerse themselves in their work? Because if you can protect their fragile STM, you will preserve their focus and prevent the disruptions that will cost them time, attention and frustration...and will cost you missed deadlines.
Problem: Task Switching Costs You
When you interrupt them, they have to break away from their thought and attend to you. Sometimes that thought took 15 minutes or more to develop. It could have been a Eureka moment, or it could have been building toward that.

This is the task-switching penalty you may have heard about. If you're task switching (multitasking is actually not a thing; we're just task-switching):

You complete fewer tasks.
You make more errors.
All this compounds for cognitively complex tasks.

This saps motivation, too, because it's always motivating when your brain is immersed in a problem that you can solve.
Solution: Get them Organized
Most times, people need you to help them organize their thoughts. You can’t do anything about the news they saw on TV ...

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