The Five Projects Rule: Define Your Best Work

Teams committed to too many projects shouldn't misdiagnose their overload as a productivity problem

A common challenge I help people and teams work through is figuring out how much work they’re doing and whether (and how) they’re going to be able to finish the projects they have on deck.

The majority of individuals and teams are committed to too many projects — and they’re misdiagnosing their overload as a problem with focus, efficiency, or procrastination.

The Five Projects Rule is a powerful tool for use within teams and organizations because it helps with five critical aspects of finishing great work:

1. It helps with prioritization because it constrains choices.

2. It helps with focusing on the most important projects to be done since it’s a manageable number.

3. It helps with planning projects because it thwarts too-detailed plans (and the need for extraneous plans for projects it will never be possible to do in the time frame).

4. It helps with “funding” projects with the blocks of time needed for their completion.

5. It helps with shifting and sequencing projects as emergent projects come up.

The information included below is a modified excerpt from my coverage of the Five Projects Rule in Start Finishing.

‘Timescales’ = The Starting Point for the Five Projects Rule

Most of us intuitively know the difference between a week-sized project and a month-sized project; we also know the difference between a month-sized project and a quarter-sized project.¹

As I’ve said elsewhere on using the two-hour rule to generate project chunks: while we may tend to overestimate what’s possible in 15 minutes or a day, we have a feel for what we — or a member of our team — can do in two-hours.

(This is useful when it comes to how to use focus blocks for team planning.)

Likewise, we can use our intuition about the size of projects when prioritizing and planning to estimate the types of projects that will fit into our five allotted projects on a particular timescale.

When thinking about what we or our team could do this week, rather than thinking about all possible timescales, we must think about the most important week-sized projects that could be completed this week.

Similarly, when we’re thinking about what our team could feasibly do this month, we should be coming up with the most critical month-sized projects.

People often struggle with visualization, planning, and reviewing because they slip between timescales (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) too fluidly.²

Constraining the timescale is the only real way we can make sense of everything we are or our team is carrying.

That’s because none of us can really process more than one timescale perspective at a time. It’s the cognitive equivalent of trying to look simultaneously at a piece of paper that’s six inches from you and something that’s a mile away.

The Five Projects Rule

Thus enters the “No More Than Five Active Projects Per Timescale” rule, which we’ll shorthand to the Five Projects Rule (or 5PR) because the former is too unwieldy. Let’s unpack “no more than five” and “active projects” separately.

Concerning “no more than five,” decades of my personal research, observation, and experimentation have shown most people won’t complete more than five important projects per timescale.

Since how many projects we finish is more important than how many we start, we do ourselves, and our teams, no favors by committing to more projects than we’ll be able to do.

In reality, three projects is often a better limit for creative and/or professional projects because it leaves bandwidth to use for life and personal projects for ourselves and our teams.

The “Active projects” component makes you commit to projects that are currently being pushed forward as opposed to those that are not being worked on at all, and are living on the collective team back burner.

The Five Projects Rule is simple to understand but may be difficult at first to put into practice since it goes against many of the impulses we’ve been trained into (i.e. taking on more, and too much).

What the Five Projects Rule allows us to do is check our commitments and do routine planning quickly.

For instance, if you’re doing weekly planning for yourself or your team, you don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty of each day — you can just focus on the five projects you’re doing this week.

If it’s monthly planning and you’ve picked five core projects for the month for the team, the week’s projects function as chunks of those monthly projects.

An Example of the 5PR in Action

I’ll give you an example of how this works when applied to my own role(s), and my week or month.

Fixed times for events such as flights and meetings are on my calendar and I know when those are, so I don’t need to include them in my weekly planning. But if I’m preparing to run a training in-house for another organization or for clients, or if I’m running a retreat, I view these each as separate projects.

At the daily level, I don’t tend to specify timing for the five projects because that’s driven by my weekly block schedule. I generally know I’m going to be writing in the morning, meeting with clients after, and eventually completing proposals or other outreach. I also have admin tasks batched in an admin block (that I don’t parse as separate projects).

The tricky bit as far as counting projects goes is the balance between my roster of clients, and other strategic projects. I’ve learned not to give myself five full project slots at the monthly level when my client schedule is full because holding all of those worlds, attending meetings, and doing prep work ends up functionally operating as one or several projects.

The energy taken by coaching and training displaces my ability to do some other monthly-level projects. (In theory, I could write down “serve clients” as one of my five monthly projects, but I’ve been doing it long enough at this point that I know it’s there, and instead leave space for it by limiting the number of other projects I can commit to.)

My service work falls under the category of recurring projects. Like personal projects, they’re often under-counted. If you’re being truthful about what your and your team’s days, weeks, and months look like, you may see that 50–75% of your available time, energy, and attention is already committed to recurring stuff.

If that’s the case, you may only want to be thinking about one or two other major projects to commit to as a team.

This may also mean a need to communicate and negotiate within the team, to ensure there’s not a never-ending stream of projects coming down the pipeline that can’t be fully caught or finished.

The Five Projects Rule vs. the To-Do List of Doom

A major upshot of the Five Projects Rule is that it allows individuals and teams to work from a smaller, more focused list of action items rather than trying to decode and parse the To-Do List of Doom.

Many to-do lists are a mix of projects on radically different timescales (week vs. month vs. year). Lists of doom are difficult to parse because we have to figure out what the sub-steps of some of the bigger projects are — that fit into the timescale.

Is all of that something we need to do today, this week, or this month? They can’t be all we need to do this week or this month, right? What else is missing? What’s most important?

The result of constraining the timescale is we end up with simpler, more coherent project planning.³

If you’d like to see how the Five Projects Rule works, I suggest starting by thinking about what (no more than) five month-sized projects would be possible for you or your team to complete in a month — then work down to the five projects for the given week.

Of all the possible projects the Five Projects Rule could help you to finish, which would make the biggest difference right now to you and your team?

This post was originally published on Productive Flourishing.

1. The difference between a quarter-sized project and larger-sized projects gets a bit slippier, but we can still feel the difference.

2. For instance, when you’re at the monthly perspective, the quarterly perspective informs the why of the month and the weekly perspective informs the how of the month.

That general rule follows for all timescales:

• when you need clarity of purpose, shift up;

• when you need clarity of action steps, shift down.

3. The Momentum Planners bake timescale constraining right in, which is one of the reasons they work so well (and can be quite the paradigm shift).