TLDR - Do Gantt charts help to focus on long-term tasks which don't tend to have an immediate impact?
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I've just had a kid, and along with a full time job that eats into my evenings and weekends, a wife, trying to learn a language, and attempting to get fit again, my old regime of four to six hours a night building businesses on the Net has been whittled down to a pitiful one or two hours max.
One major problem is that I've got a large website to build for a product that I'm commissioning. At two hours a night, it's going to take months to build, and I keep bumping other short-term daily tasks ahead of what I should be doing towards the long-term. So much so, that I haven't touched the site for about 12 weeks (it's frightening how fast that went). It's so easy to say 'tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow' when the task has no immediate impact, and you have several short-term tasks that do.
I use 'outliner' software to force myself to complete daily jobs, but this is where the long-term tasks are continually being 'bumped' to the bottom of the list - it's not working well for for large, long projects. So I was thinking of setting up a Gantt chart for the project so I can see it in its entirety as tasks, deadlines and milestones in a calendar format.
It just seems like the act of moving an entire project back everyday would feel a lot more sobering than keeping one individual task at the bottom of my to-do list forever.
However, since it's a lot of work to set one up, I was wondering if anyone else here was using Gantt charts for sizable projects and whether it actually helps you to focus on the long-term?
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I've just had a kid, and along with a full time job that eats into my evenings and weekends, a wife, trying to learn a language, and attempting to get fit again, my old regime of four to six hours a night building businesses on the Net has been whittled down to a pitiful one or two hours max.
One major problem is that I've got a large website to build for a product that I'm commissioning. At two hours a night, it's going to take months to build, and I keep bumping other short-term daily tasks ahead of what I should be doing towards the long-term. So much so, that I haven't touched the site for about 12 weeks (it's frightening how fast that went). It's so easy to say 'tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow' when the task has no immediate impact, and you have several short-term tasks that do.
I use 'outliner' software to force myself to complete daily jobs, but this is where the long-term tasks are continually being 'bumped' to the bottom of the list - it's not working well for for large, long projects. So I was thinking of setting up a Gantt chart for the project so I can see it in its entirety as tasks, deadlines and milestones in a calendar format.
It just seems like the act of moving an entire project back everyday would feel a lot more sobering than keeping one individual task at the bottom of my to-do list forever.
However, since it's a lot of work to set one up, I was wondering if anyone else here was using Gantt charts for sizable projects and whether it actually helps you to focus on the long-term?
