Sometime near the end of the Spring semester, I decided it was time to take another crack and reorganizing my life. I’ve gone through years of on again / off again burnout, some of it my own fault (I’m disorganized and try to do too much) and some of it a consequence of things about which I have no control (my former university essentially bankrupted itself, forcing me to find a new job in my field, and I’ve since moved twice — the short version). All that burnout and overfilled plate-ism has made it harder to keep up with grading and find the energy to complete tasks on time. So it seemed only logical to use my university library privileges to borrow a variety of recommend productivity and project management books to see what advice, systems, etc. are out there.
Thus arrived Charlie Gilkey’s Star Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done (2022; Sounds True) on my metaphorical doorstep. Gilkey is a U.S. Army Veteran who founded Productive Flourishing, a company dedicated to, as they say on their about page, help “individuals do their best work,” “teams work better together,” and “executives, entrepreneurs, founders, and owners lead better, starting with themselves.” Like Productive Flourishing, Start Finishing is similarly wide in scope. The concept of “best work,” defined as “work that leads to our thriving,” takes center stage in the first chapter and is the focus of that chapter’s call to action: essentially, the goal is the entire book is to get you focused on your best work by sorting out distractions and taking a project-minded perspective on the work that matters. Throughout the book, Gilkey describes various aspects of the problem the book wants readers to solve (distractions, having too much to do, having no plan, have too few resources, etc.) and attempts to provide solutions to getting around them. Some of this is tough love (you’ll have to set aside some projects because you can only do so much) and some of it is practical advice (narrowing your focus and road mapping). While Gilkey positions the book as a distillation of a wide range of productivity/project management advice, this ultimately reveals a core fault in the book: a work that is too often trite and too infrequently practical.
Probably the most useful part of this book is Gilkey’s effort to systematize the process of road mapping a project. Once you’ve identified the ideas that matter to you (Chapter 3), converted them into projects (Chapter 4), and time management via chunking, linking, and sequencing (Chapter 5), Gilkey spends exactly one chapter on project road maps (Chapter 6). These are, in my view, the most practical and useful parts of the book because they have concrete outcomes. If you follow the steps in Chapter 5 and 6, you should be able to put together some kind of project pyramid and project documentation which you can plug into something else, like a task manager or other project management tool. I especially appreciated the segments describing chunking, clumping, and other forms of breaking down projects into smaller pieces and linking them together to provide a pathway towards completion. These are things I already do in my own work, and I have found it incredibly useful to break down projects into smaller pieces, though I’ll admit that I’m not good at the setup or sticking with it — hence my interest in this book.
These sections, though, would benefit from significant expansion, especially in the form of concrete examples and more thorough explanation of the steps and processes involved. While there are some planners on Gilkey’s Productive Flourishing page and homepage, there are few actual examples of what a finished product would look like. For the lower order planning documents, this is probably not an issue; the Pick Your Project document, for example, is probably self-intuitive even if you haven’t read Gilkey’s book. For others, though, I had a hard time visualizing the end result. Take the Project Pyramid Quarterly as an example. This process is discussed in Chapter 5 and 6, but only briefly. Yet, to create a pyramid for a single project involves potentially dozens of steps. If Gilkey used this process while writing this book, it’d be useful to share a portion of that process as a road map with the same project pyramid he gives readers in Chapter 5. Even Gilkey acknowledges that large projects are hard to visualize at scale, which is one major reason to break things down into more manageable pieces. Yet, there are scant examples of the various steps in action. Overall, I liked these sections. They give some practical advice that I could figure out how to implement without examples (eventually); however, Gilkey’s book doesn’t spend as much time on its more practical elements as it does on talking to the reader about their possible experiences or presenting anecdotes that do more to pad the book than help concretize the aforementioned practical steps.
Chapters 1 and 2 are particularly egregious examples of this over indulgence on describing experience and relying on anecdotes. By the end of Chapter 2, I began aggressively skimming the book because most of what I was reading had little to do with the the very real task of organizing and finishing a project. As a result, the practical advice in the book is often overshadowed by stories and speculation about reader motivations, limitations, or needs. These stories are punctuated by occasionally trite advice. One ridiculous example is in the “Intention” section of Chapter 2, where Gilkey writes, “To make a plan, you have to set a goal” (26). This is so obvious as to be nearly meaningless, and the section doesn’t provide any practical endpoint to make this trite statement more meaningful. The book is littered with examples like this alongside Gilkey’s love of anecdotal stories that might be profound if they were anchored to something real. Even the chapters I found most useful were padded with these types of statements and stories, which did more to draw attention to the incomplete nature of the idea-to-completion pipeline the book intends to provide. This is additionally punctuated by the sandwiching effect of the book, wherein a significant chunk of material on both sides of the practical meat isn’t clearly tied to the notion of “finishing.” If you can’t adequately manage your project as the book encourages you to do (without sufficient example), it doesn’t much matter if you spend time correcting your work environment, choosing the right people to surround yourself with, or developing appropriate debriefing procedures. If finishing is the goal, why isn’t the book primarily focused on the idea-to-completion pipeline? The book doesn’t answer this.
Overall, Start Finishing is easy to follow and well-organized, though this is expected given the book’s genre. If you’re someone who simply has no idea where to start, this might be the book for you. But if you’re looking for something with more concrete information, processes, and ideas, you’ll likely have a similar reaction as I did. You’ll likely start skimming, too — and wondering why the book wasn’t trimmed down to sub-200 pages.
