Project management

Ottercat offers ten reasons why project management is like passing a kidney stone.

10. Only after a long painful process results are achieved.
9. The expected results do not fit the available constraints.
8. You start drinking. A lot.
7. A lot of biproducts are produced along the way.
6. The process will finish when it’s ready, and not before.
5. Both involve blood, sweat, and tears.
4. You feel as though you’ve brought something new into the world.
3. It seems as though product delivery will never occur.
2. The release is rough around the edges, but at least it’s finally out.

And the ^#1 reason.....

1. You constantly remind yourself that “This, too, shall pass.”

Igloowhite has a more sanguine description.

Throw a glass plate on the floor and it will fly into a hundred-odd pieces of chaotically regulated size and shape, as determined by the material properties of the plate and the Hertzian propagation of force through it.

Here's what won’t happen. The pieces will not zip back together like amorphous choreographed cockroaches pulling a cheerleading routine. The plate will not reassemble itself for the fuck of it, and if you don’t like it take it up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because that's entropy kids and all atom-smasher coffee-house thought experiment bullshit aside it means cry your baby eyes out I don’t care — Time has a direction. And on a strictly personal scale it means you get a finite amount of it at the starting gun and the meter is running down to zero RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

You can chop it up like julienned carrots. You can melt it down like TNT and pour it into shell casings. You can manage and schedule and pencil and move around little rectangles of blue pixels on your monitor with your mouse and it’s all shit because the one thing you can’t do with time is get more of it.

The Project Manager’s job is to manage time. Time and resources. And Resource Number One is time.

I am a time machine in a button-down cotton shirt from J. Crew.

I know the past, control the present, and create the future.

I almost wound up a project manager. Dodged a bullet, I did.