Working backward

The ripples tell where you’ve been, and the instruments tell you where to go. (Image by Tati Halabi)

As much as I loved teaching music lessons, it taught me some bad habits.

My approach was to meet each student where they were and support them in moving forward. I got really good at doing this.

The experience was entirely about process. There was no defined end goal.

My students performed in recitals along the way, but no two of them achieved the same benchmarks on the same schedule. Everyone got to move according to their own pace.

This was appropriate and probably beneficial for my students under the circumstances, but I applied the same framework to everything. And that meant that I (and sometimes my students) ended up failing to achieve things within a necessary time frame — or at all.

The solution was to identify a desired end state — sometimes an arbitrary one — and work backward from that in order to determine what needed to happen and when.

For example, if a student needed to complete Algebra I by the end of her eighth grade year, we would map out all of the concepts she would need to understand and the skills she would need to have, along with the prerequisites and foundational skills, and figure out how to compress all of them into the time available.

If that student tended to move slowly through the material, she would have to increase the time spent in a given day so as not to lengthen the timeline (or, in a traditional school setting, fail).

Now, this seems obvious to me, but when I went to create method books to teach people how to play piano and guitar, it wasn’t. It didn’t occur to me to picture the skills that a person should have by the time they finished the last book, so I had no way to figure out how many books I needed in the series or what information should be in each one.

I only knew how to start at the beginning of book one and go from there. But without an understanding of the scope of the project, I could never complete it. Thus, I got discouraged and never really got anywhere.

I have gotten more comfortable with defining and narrowing the scope of a project in order to make progress on it. I have soothed the perfectionism and idealism I felt when trying to write the book or the song by reframing it the work as writing a book or a song. As a result, things actually get done.

When we envision the final outcome and work backward, there will still be variables that are uncertain. There will still be circumstances out of our control. Instead of throwing out the whole plan and just drifting along, we can design a plan that allows for a bit of uncertainty. We can build in inflection points at which we will make decisions later on.

In rare circumstances, we might have to change course completely and make dramatic revisions, but that would be extreme — like choosing a new destination in the middle of a plane flight. Instead, we can expect to adapt and adjust in little ways as we go, and that doesn’t have to throw off the whole plan. We can get all the way to Paris first and visit San Diego on a separate trip. We can finish what we’ve started and save the massive alterations for our next project.

Working backward has taught me a whole new way to accomplish things that matter to me. I no longer start with enthusiasm and then peter out. I’ve learned to keep going based on a plan.

Now, the hard part is deciding what’s next.