The trainer starts the discussion by asking the students how many tasks each of them has on their list of steps.

They answer: 20, 40, 5, etc.

Then the trainer asks: calculate the tasks where you are the executor.
Who put their name next to more than half of the tasks?

There are some things you can only do, and that's fine, but you need to figure out how much time you have in the day rather than cutting your sleeping hours.

While you are sleeping, your brain is actively sorting through the information received during the day. This is how new nerve connections are created, which is why it is better to sleep, wake up and then make a new decision.

You make worse decisions when you get less than 8 hours of sleep.

Trainer—

Part 1 - Planning

1989, the captain of the Exxon Valdez (1), who was steering the ship onto the rocks, slept less than 6 hours for 2 days in a row.

1. The Exxon Valdez shipwreck occurred on March 23, 1989 off the coast of Alaska. As a result of the disaster, about 10.8 million gallons of oil (about 260 thousand barrels or 40.9 million liters) were spilled into the sea, causing an oil slick with an area of 28 thousand square kilometers. In total, the ship was carrying 54.1 million gallons of oil. About two thousand kilometers of coastline was polluted with oil.

Examples

The NASA team responsible for Challenger (2), which crashed, worked 24 hours without sleep before launch.

2. The Challenger space shuttle disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when Challenger disintegrated during the STS-51L mission 73 seconds into flight due to an internal fuel tank explosion, killing all crew members.

Physician interns who worked 24-hour shifts made 36% more errors (Harvard study, 2004).

So, it doesn't matter how many tasks you have to do.
To be efficient, you need your 8 hours of sleep.

But if you sometimes work very rarely at night, you need to sleep during the day.

Another Harvard study by Sarah Mednick tested daytime naps, and groups that didn't get enough sleep at night but took short 30-minute naps during the day were able to function more efficiently during the second part of the day.

*The way we're working isn't working. T. Schwartz
*Essentialism. the disciplined pursuit of less. G. McKeown

Trainer—

Let's discuss together how many hours per week you have for project management.

Մարզիչ —

Let's say everyone has 3-6 hours a week to work focused on projects.

There is a great way to cheat and increase this number (without cutting back on sleep).

Targetted Skills
learn efficiently

Make notes on your phone or on paper with small tasks that take less than 5 minutes.

Trainer—

Let's look at your lists again. Each of you looks at your list and thinks again about which tasks you will do and which others. But now consider how much time you'll have for it (without cutting sleep). Where you exclude yourself, instead add a relative, a friend who you can involve.

Part 2- Risk Assessment

Do you remember cognitive distortions from reading?

Usually, we don't want to think that something might go wrong with our project, but when it does, we can be in big trouble.

There is an easy way to think about risks in advance which is called Premortem. We imagine the future "death" of the project and ask: "What killed it?" A team working with that method begins by envisioning a dark future. Well, 12 months have passed since then, and our project has been a complete fiasco. It failed. Why did it fail?

Trainer—

Now we will set deadlines for each task. A few things you should know.

Trainer—

And the last one for today. I want to share with you a failure story where we, our Climate Uturn team, failed.

Trainer—

Part 3- A story of a failure

In 2021, we partnered with a popular Armenian online payment system to create the first online marketplace for sustainable products produced in Armenia.

Our green Amazon :) Sounds cool, right? Ambitious.

We thought so too...

We imagined how great it would be, we created the online platform, and we focused on product descriptions, beautiful pictures, sustainability standards, and branding, but we never thought about money.

Finally, when the platform was developed and everything was ready to launch, we realized that we didn't have the money to launch it. To run the platform we need to:

There were so many expenses that we had never thought of before.

And we never calculated the business model. We thought that we could make money from the sales commission. But our products were very cheap, and we needed a lot of sales to survive on commission. And we would need a lot of advertising for that, and we didn't have the money for that.

So, as you can imagine, that platform isn't there either. We couldn't get it to work.

We really want you to learn from this experience.
We will discuss the money at the next meeting.

If your project is something you want to do once, and you have savings or parents who can support you, that's fine and dandy if you want to do it this way because, after all, money is your resource to change something.

But if you want to build something that will work regularly, or if you don't have enough money, you really need to think about funding and income streams before you start.
Next time we will discuss how to do this.