IS THERE A CHEAT KEY?

Getting To The Root Of the Matter

Five whys to the prize. It may help me yet. More importantly, it may help you.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

A fair chunk of my job is managing projects, and I do a decent job.

Project management is an art and a science, much more science than art. Sure, you need people skills, but you also need a toolbox and those tools come from training. Earning my Project Management Professional (PMP) certificate involved thousands of hours of practicing project management, months of study, and passing a wicked exam on the PMBOK, a good book to read at bedtime if you want to cure your insomnia. The Project Management Body of Knowledge is the authoritative textbook of project management techniques.

With all that study and practice, you’d think I could apply some of the techniques I routinely use managing projects to manage myself. But unlike a project, which is a finite endeavor with a clear beginning, middle, and end, with clear objectives and measures of success, we humans are porous blobs of dysfunction from beginning to end. The best we can hope for is to figure a few things out before we check out.

I still haven’t figured out why I eat when I’m not hungry. I do that pretty much all the time and I know it’s not good for me. Mentally…