In order to make the joint research with our partner organisations more successful, one topic of our Balatonfüred workshop was the introduction of research results Project Life Management conducted among private individuals in 2017, including discussion. The importance of planning, especially creation of written plans and using them got specific focus, including conditions and characteristics related.
The methodology of project management is a life outlook, which can also be employed to our everyday lives easily as well, meaning we can also make plans for everyday use, and implement deadlines and descriptive tasks, which, however, is sadly a rare occurence.
People usually write plans for themselves, maybe their family members, including projects. In itself, somebody writing out his/her tasks and thoughts is already a great achievement, not to mention if they use the processes and tools of project management (PM) to boot.
Based on the research of PLM, those who know the principles of PM “well” include roughly 60% of people that write out plans for themselves. Plans written for family members are much more rare, however, plans and projects written for family members also show strong correlation with knowledge on PM. The research results support that knowing PM doesn’t only aid initiative to use, but also practical implementation. At least, people who know the principles and / or practice of PM write plans for themselves more often.
66-75% of the participants apply concrete, easy to validate and evaluate numbers to the plans they write for themselves “sometimes”, “often”, or “always”. However, only half of those who “often” write out their goals and tasks do so with numerical values. About 70-88% of written plans contain deadlines and to-dos as well. Even in the case of plans written for ourselves, the ratio of “often” and “always” appearing deadlines is 47%, 55,6% for plans written for family members, and 87,7% for plans made for co-workers.
Checking up on ourselves, monitoring ourselves requires a great deal of discipline. As such, it’s no wonder that managing our everyday lives is less represented by checking and monitoring processes. More notable is the usage of planned numbers as stated above, however, even in this case, we can see how following deadlines and the plan variables have significant relation to each other.
Research results suggest that those who learned about the PM perspective and its methods likes to use these tools in private life and work as well.