Last week, I wrote about a difficult project, and asked you what some of your hardest project was. I also promised I’d tell you about my hardest project, and here it is.

My hardest project is actually a small one. Just one person was needed to do the work on the product, and the project management of that work took only a small amount of my time – theoretically. In fact, I found myself spending longer and longer on the planning of the work.

Soon, the project management load of this one small project started to crowd out other work. I spent more and more time assessing the risks the project faced, planning what tasks needed to be done next, and thinking about quality tests.

The reason for all this was, of course, that I didn’t want to face the person who was supposed to be actually doing the work, and hadn’t been. Mainly because that person was me.

The project I am talking about is one I’ve mentioned a couple of times here. It is creating an information product, a simple course to help you get the foundations of project management clear.

As I was writing it, a strange thing happened. Despite being pretty confident in terms of my knowledge of project management, I started to become more and more uncertain about what I was writing. Doubts would beset me, from everything from the concepts I was explaining to the words I was using to get my message across.

Now, I know this is a pretty special case when it comes to project management, because the Executive, the PM and the team are all the same person. But I still think I’ve learnt something from the experience.

Because, like any human being, I had some self-doubts, I retreated into something I was comfortable with, something which I knew I could do well – in this case, project management. The actual work of writing what I had planned to was getting pushed aside so I could focus on what I did well – even if that didn’t actually move the project along.

Luckily for me, the thing I am good at was also the thing telling me I wasn’t making progress, so it was pretty difficult to ignore. (Though, believe me, I made a good stab at it.) Eventually, I forced myself to knuckle down, to step out of my comfort zone and work on what needed to be done.

I’m actually pretty happy with what I’ve produced, and you’ll get the chance to judge for yourself. I’m releasing a sneak preview today, and you can go to this page to download it. (I hope you like it!)