Project & Task Management: The Pursuit of Happyness

Project & Task Management: “The Pursuit of Happyness” “The Pursuit of Happyness” is a movie about an African American man, Christopher Gardner, and his journey to reach “happyness” in his life. Christopher was abandoned by his father as an infant and met his father for the first time when he was 28 years old. Because of this Chris vows to be nothing like his father when he has a child of his own. Chris and his son Christopher Jr. are homeless. He takes on a competitive unpaid internship as a stockbroker in hopes to be hired on as a full time employee, all while caring for his son. This movie is a story of determination and hope while being faced with disappointment and provocation. There are so many lessons that can be taken from Christopher Gardner and of those I’ve decided to use a clip from “The Pursuit of Happyness” and teach a lesson on project & task management. The scene that I used to teach my lesson is called: Cold Calling. This is where Chris Gardner demonstrates how to reduce wasteful activities in the office to make a bigger impact in his productivity. Out of necessity to care for his son, Chris has a shorter day and does what he can to make the most of the resources he has. In the clip as Chris is calling potential clients he doesn’t hang up the phone in between calls to save precious time. He also eliminates time wasted using the restroom by not consuming water during the day as well as time wasted conversing at the cooler. Chris gained an extra 8 minutes a day with his method. Obviously, Chris’s ways were a bit extreme, but the lesson to be learned is that if we get focused and put our priorities in order we’ll be able to have effective and productive days at work. Christopher Gardner is such as inspirational character and exhibits many characteristics that we can learn from and apply to our lives. Chris is resourceful, has an analytical mind, and has self-belief. Chris is resourceful because he at his internship he was willing to go above and beyond to make a sale. Chris jumped to the top of his call list and contacted the CEO of a company trying to sell him a product from the brokerage firm. When the CEO extended for a meeting that second, Chris made himself available and ran over to the CEO’s office. Chris also has an analytical mind. At one point in the movie he plays with a rubrics cube and instead of just randomly attempting at it he figured out how the cube worked in order to solve it. This is how Chris approached his job. Lastly, Chris is a self-believer. He never let his own limitations get in the way of his goals. Despite being poor and undereducated, Chris knew he could one day be successful. He was determined and believed in himself. The reason why I choose “The Pursuit of Happyness” is because I believe that we can learn valuable lessons of project and task management. Our book suggests it to be task analysis. Using this method of organization allows us to be productive workers in our fields as well as being efficient and effective. “Task analysis is a systematic collection of data about a specific job or group of jobs used to determine what employees should be taught to achieve optimal performance” (DeSimone & Werner, 2009). My objective with my lesson plan is to teach the class how to organize a complex project into measurable units of activity, establish top priorities for each responsibility or project, and how to use techniques to achieve realistic schedules for keeping track of multiple projects. In order to reach my objectives I’ll teach the class how to work harder not smarter, create a to-do list, how to measure results and not time, and create a schedule. In order to complete a task or project successfully you must first understand and be able to work smarter and not harder. If you break it down to the core, it is all about being efficient. Specifically, how can you spend your workday so that you are producing the highest quality results while investing the least amount of time? You need to constantly question how you are spending your time. So in order to work smarter we must first be able to create a to-do list. To create an effective to-do list we need to make it short and sweet. Write out your to-do list the night before, rework your to-do list, and focus only on today! Your to-do list will keep you focused and on track to getting done all you need to get done for the day. Next, we’ll focus on measuring our results and not our time. Often we focus more on how many hours, days, or weeks we have to complete a certain task instead of focusing on completing the task itself. We must make sure that we’re actually getting work done and not focusing on how many hours we have left until a project is due. Finally, we need to learn how to create effective schedules. We’ve been taught to keep schedules for as long as we remember. However, it’s important to rework our schedules and make sure that we’re actually following our plans for the day. So we should create a schedule that includes our work, class, and home routines. Something else that is very important is for us to track our wasted time. Just like Christopher Gardner did, we need to make sure that we’re making the best of our days and being to most efficient we can be. Overall, project and task management is very important for multiple reasons. In essence it’ important because it helps us become more productive; it reduces the time allotted for setting priorities, encourages us to make use of the art of delegation, and enables us to differentiate individual tasks from urgent to lease urgent. I believe that “The Pursuit of Happyness” teaches us so many lessons from determination to task management. Christopher Gardener taught us how to be resourceful, analytical minded, and to have self-belief. Through his work ethic he also taught us how to work harder not smarter, create a to-do list, measure our results and not our time, and create a schedule. Through project and task management we’ll have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be more productive employees.

References
The Pursuit Of Happyness (DVD) [Motion picture on DVD]. (2006). Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment.
Werner, J., & DeSimone, R. (2009). Human resource development (5e [ed.]. ed.). Mason OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.