Managing Your Writing Project
- Christopher Farmer
- Mar 1
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 19
To manage your writing project, you need to follow well-designed communication strategies while managing your teams through actionable feedback and situational leadership. If you are managing a team of writers, the following guidelines can help you plan for success:
Make effective use of technology
Set clear deadlines
Plan to revise
Execute
Make Effective Use of Technology
Whether communicating with and managing your team, creating content, managing deadlines, or revising work, you will need to choose the right technology for the job.
Choosing the right technology entails several considerations. Does the entire team have access to the technology? Does everyone know how to use it? Does the technology do what you need it to do?
Some examples of technology you might employ for writing include:
Some examples of editing technology include:
There are countless other applications available online that can help you and your team craft and edit content. Start with your task and then search online for that task paired with keywords such as “software” or “programs” when you are planning your writing project.
Choose your technology based on the specifics of your project and the team you plan to work with. And, be ready to adjust your plan based on feedback from your team.
After you’ve identified the technology you’ll use, it’s time to set your deadlines.
Set Clear Deadlines
Deadlines give your project structure, provide clear goals, and offer the means to measure success. Projects without deadlines become hobbies—think about how many hobbies you’ve started and never finished…
In Parkinson’s Law, first presented in a 1955 article of The Economist, C. Northcote Parkinson wrote that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Parkinson isn’t discussing managing writers, but the law of expanding work based on time is very relevant to those managing writing projects.
Professional writing projects must be completed within a certain time frame. People are waiting for your work. For simple projects, additional deadlines might not be needed. But complex projects need to be broken down into manageable pieces.
Setting proper deadlines for each piece of your project ensures that you have time to put those pieces together into a final project—in time to meet your final deadline. One strategy to manage deadlines is to create something called a soft deadline.
In an article in The New Yorker titled What Deadlines Do to Lifetimes, Rachel Syme discusses Christopher Cox’s book titled The Deadline Effect. In the book, Cox describes these soft deadlines.
A soft deadline, according to Cox, is “a way of gaining the virtues of the deadline effect (focus, urgency, cooperation) with none of the vices (rashness, desperation, incompleteness)” that can occur when people procrastinate. Put more simply, if you set a deadline for your team that is earlier than your final deadline, you'll create a more focused team that operates with more urgency, and you'll have time to deal with unexpected setbacks and still meet your final deadline.
When I managed a team of writers during a graduate course at Northern Arizona University, I set deadlines for my team. I examined our final deadline and worked backwards to assign deadlines for each team member to complete their portions of the project.
I also made a mistake. I worked backwards from the final deadline—I didn’t create a soft deadline. I also broadcast that final deadline to the team, effectively letting them know that there was room to procrastinate and even miss deadlines. As stated in Parkinson’s Law, work expanded, and some team members missed their deadlines.
Fortunately, with extra communication and work, our team completed our projects, and we completed them early. But had I set soft deadlines, and broadcast those to my team, they might have worked with more urgency, and we might have had more time to edit and revise our products.
Creating soft deadlines gives you time to revise.
Plan to Revise
Kyle Wiens (CEO) and Julia Bluff (Lead Writer) of iFixit, published the Tech Writing Handbook. In the handbook, they describe how content creation is just the beginning, and that you must allow time to “edit for organization, content, flow, and grammar . . . [to ensure] that your readers get a polished product.”
No matter how careful you are, your first draft will probably not be error free. In an article titled Why Writing Mistakes Happen [And How to Avoid Them], Hudson Fusion writes, “typos are almost impossible to prevent during the drafting process, which is why policing written text needs to be a high priority after the fact.” The article explains how typos occur because of the way our brains store and process information. If you can’t prevent errors, you must allow time to fix them.
Now that you have your plan, it’s time to execute!
Execute
Several years ago, I attended a leadership school called Senior Enlisted Academy (SEA). One of my classmates at that school was a Navy SEAL, and he inspired our class’s motto: “shoot, move, communicate.”
Our classmate explained that “shoot, move, communicate” developed as an expression of small unit tactics comprising the three things they MUST do to survive: shoot accurately, move tactically, and communicate effectively. Failure to succeed at any of these tasks would mean failure of the mission.
How do these tasks relate to managing a team of writers? Let’s examine them:
Shoot accurately. Follow a plan. Meet your deadlines. At its core, this step is about execution. If there isn’t an effective plan, then execution suffers.
Move tactically. It’s impossible to plan everything. You can’t control the feelings and motivations of others. Flexibility is critical. A member of your team might get sick. The technology you chose may cause unforeseen problems. YOUR boss might move the deadline up, affecting your soft deadlines. Observe the situation and move as required.
Communicate effectively. Your communication strategy is the foundation for this. Listening and giving actionable feedback make the previous two tasks possible.
While all the above tasks contribute to success, communication is arguably the most important. It provides the means to fulfill the other two, and it provides the method of correction when execution is failing, or when flexibility is required.
Creating a well-thought plan, being ready to adjust it as needed, and communicating with your team will ensure your project is successful.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, and if you haven’t already done so, please checkout my other blog entries: Communication Strategy and Managing Your Team.
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