Discovering the Personal Program

In search for a missing piece in contemporary productivity jargon

In the first post of this series, I left you on a cliff-hanger. I put forward the idea that tasks are small replicas of projects. Then I asked: what are projects small replicas of? In this second installment, I’ll attempt an answer.

​The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logigo-philosphicus (1922)

If we take the concept of a project one level up, we end up with some kind of major working theme. One that spans many projects instead of tasks.

Due to a lack of terminology for this, I started browsing through corporate project management literature and found: managed sets of projects are called "programs".¹

So, for now, I will stick to the term and state that a personal program is a collection of related projects to reach a big outcome.

Of course, the "real" definition is another one. It's that a program is a zoomed-out version of a project. A project is a zoomed-out version of a task.

This implies that by looking at how we manage tasks (and projects) we can learn a great deal about how we can manage programs.

So, let’s put it to the test.

Can we extrapolate from tasks & projects to programs?

Recall the seven best practices from the first article: