When preparing for a large, complex project that involves multiple people, it is best to work out a detailed plan—what tasks need to be accomplished, in what order, and by whom. Even if you discover in the middle that some or all of it could have been done more efficiently, it is often better to stick with the original plan in spite of its shortcomings, because it is more or less certain to get you where you want to go, while the disruption caused by replanning might introduce new risk.
Still, even carefully planned projects are only planned to a certain level of detail. A given task will cover days, not minutes, and the person responsible for it will have many different options for how to go about completing it that aren’t specified in the plan. So even in this environment it is good to know how to do on-the-fly planning, to know how to decide which of the possibilities ought to be done next.
In the everyday life of the household, on-the-fly planning is more the rule than the exception. Our goals are less specific, our timetables are more flexible, and our circumstances are constantly changing in unexpected ways. Rather than carefully plotting a path to a specific goal and then following that path faithfully, it is better to know what direction we want to go in, and then decide at any given moment what is the best way to make a little more headway in that direction.
Let me give a couple of examples of projects we have underway which we’ve pursued in this manner. Constant readers should be aware that one of our high-level goals is for the Ridgewood Boys to go as far as possible professionally within the constraints we’ve set (minimal time spent away from home, minimal interference with the main work of the household). One of the steps towards that goal is to record our music. We’ve done that in various ways over the past two years. We’ve made minidisc recordings of our performances to review later, so we can hear problems with our playing and work on them. We’ve made homemade CDs to give out to friends and family. We’ve recorded a four-song demo CD in the basement, taking the time to make it sound as professional as possible.
Recently it’s become clear that it would be helpful for us to have a professionally recorded CD. Our performing skills are just barely to the point where such a thing is worth doing. When we perform we are often asked if we have any CDs, by people who enjoyed the performance and would like a souvenir; we could easily sell a few such CDs at every performance for $15 apiece. And it would be helpful to have a CD that is a good snapshot of where we are right now, to give to folks who might book us for a performance or otherwise help us out.
This idea has been in the back of my mind for months now, and periodically I would pull it out, think about it, do a little more research, and get a little more specific about how it might happen. Finally, I realized that because of the way our year is developing, if we were going to make such a CD at all it would be best to have it ready by the beginning of September. That realization was enough to push me to do another, lower-level round of thinking. Could we get it done by then? When would we have to do the recording in order to have the CDs in hand by September? Would we be good enough by then to pull it off? Did we have enough good songs to make the CD worthwhile? Should we do it in our basement, or enlist some friends who have better home equipment, or pay to have it recorded in a real studio?
This was followed by a phase where I assumed that we would go ahead, and then figured out everything I could figure out without actually committing to going ahead. I talked to some trusted friends to find out whether they thought it was a good idea. I figured out the best way to get the CDs manufactured, and made a note of the price. I began to put together a tentative song list for the CD, then played through those songs with Chris, listening to see if I really thought we could play them well enough for a recording.
Even though some decisions hadn’t been made yet— whether to do it at all, whether to record in the home or at a studio—much of the prep work turned up additional prep work that could be done independently of those decisions. One friend told me that people who made a CD often ran later than expected because they forgot about packaging until the last minute. So I sat down for a few hours and designed the CD cover and label; that work is now done, and even if the song list or other information changes it will only take a few minutes to change the artwork.
All this prep work has made the project more real to me, which has made it easier to go ahead with some concrete decisions. Because I had a tentative budget for the project, and had done some research into the cost of various options, it was easy to make the final decision to pay for studio time; I knew that the end product would be much higher quality, I knew that it would be much quicker than trying to record it at home, and I knew that the things we would learn about how to record music in a studio would by themselves come close to justifying the cost. So this week I talked to friends who would be helping us out to find out their schedules, and tomorrow I will contact the studio owner to schedule a time to record, probably the end of this month.
That decision puts another list of short-term tasks on our plate. As I write, Chris is practicing the introductions and solos on the songs for the CD so that they will be as clean and mistake-free as possible. I will be scheduling time myself to go over the recordings we are using as references, to make sure I have the melodies and phrasing right. Over the next couple of weeks we will fine tune the twelve songs we will record, to make sure we have the harmonies right and that our phrasing and pronunciation are in sync.
This all has to fit in with the rest of our everyday lives, which are pretty busy right now because of the upcoming move to Kentucky. But because we have not treated this as a huge, complex, carefully planned project, but rather as a series of smaller steps towards the general goal of getting a CD made, almost always our only planning chore is to figure out how long it will take to get a certain number of clear-cut tasks done given the commitments we’ve already made. We will be able to focus on final preparations for a studio date because so much of the other work was already done before we decided to go into the studio.
This example has gone on longer than I had expected, so I will save the second example for the next post.
