The men’s organization that I belong to asked me to draft a newsletter that would include some basic elements including a message, upcoming calendar events, and other miscellaneous content. The requirements were originally fairly simple, but I wanted to come up with something that was visually appealing and that desire converted the 60-minute exercise into a task that occupied me for the better part of that evening.
Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I started by browsing Microsoft’s extensive online collection of newsletter templates. They have some great material and I eventually narrowed it down to a few finalists from which I selected my favorite. It was originally designed as a family Christmas update that you might send out to your friends with pictures of the kids.
I thought that I’d be printing separate mailing labels and using an envelope, but the newsletter’s design pleasantly surprised me. It was two pages long, front and back, and was intended to be folded into thirds as if you were going to mail it in an envelope. The cool part was that when folded, the newsletter included sender and recipient addresses and a place for a stamp. A simple Microsoft Word mail merge would yield a complete document that needed folding, a sticker (to hold it shut), and a stamp.
No problems, right? Everything was working out better than I had originally hoped. Perhaps that’s what contributed to my willingness to broaden my goals for the project.
Part of the design included beautiful, colorful pictures, so I replaced them with my own. It had space for the content that I had intended to include, so I quickly filled those. Unfortunately, it also had “extra” space for which I had no content (scope creep #1) and I felt obligated to generate additional content because the design looked funny with large blank spaces.
The template had really cool snowflake “water marks” (by which I mean light gray shapes that subtly contributed to the look) strewn randomly across the two pages and it seemed reasonable to replace them (scope creep #2) with a figure that was more relevant to the newsletter’s new purpose. A couple of hours later I had closely approximated the original look with my new shape, but the result was a little underwhelming.
Combine the sub-par end product with all the extra time I had unintentionally spent, and it’s easy to see why I was fairly frustrated. I will still submit the draft to the other leaders in the organization, but with significantly less pride than I had originally envisioned.
Given the description I’ve provided here, it’s pretty easy to derive some useful lessons from my experience. Part of what I find fulfilling in writing on ThoughtfulConsideration.com is the opportunity to think through things for my personal benefit, so you’ll excuse my stating the obvious (and not perceive my attitude as condescending).
When I work on (even small) projects in the future, I expect to:
- More carefully establish and manage scope creep
- Determine in advance how much time I’m willing to dedicate
- Minimize the influence of pride and/or other emotions with regard to setting lofty goals
- Rather than go way overboard, settle on a workable solution that still addresses the critical needs of the project
Question(s) of the day:
Have you ever spent way too much time on a project that didn’t deserve such attention? How do you keep that from happening all the time?
Magnificent site. Plenty of useful info here. I am sending it to a few friends ans also sharing in delicious. And naturally, thanks for your effort!