I have some little experience with SharePoint. (If you don’t, you might want to follow John Anderson’s SharePoint journey, wherein he documents his ground-up learning of SharePoint. Kind of like this blog, but dedicated exclusively to SharePoint. It’s called SharePoint Blank. Start at the beginning.) I will, of course, be talking about SharePoint a considerable amount here, because it’s an integral part of successfully collaborating online for the purpose of making a project fly.

But a major theme in this blog is, I’m afraid, going to be not just the core concepts of project management, but also tackling the monster-in-the-closet that is Microsoft Project.

When I was talking to Tim, my guru for this journey, I told him how trepidatious I am about Project. I mean, it’s just this ginormous boogeyman for me. It looks hard, it does hard things that are uncomfortably unfamiliar to me, and it’s something that I think I could live a long, full life without exploring.

Tim kind of laughed, because he knows Project about as well as I know writing. It’s comfy and comforting for him in the same way, I think, that my heartbeat slows and I feel all warm and relaxed and happy when I sit down in front of a keyboard with a good topic in mind to write about.

I try to remind myself that I didn’t always type fast, that pecking out blog articles was not always the familiar and comfortable activity for me that it is now. At some point, I felt nervous about laying my fingers on a keyboard and letting the words pour forth, and then putting them out into the ether for other people to read and judge. At some point, doing this, what I’m doing right this moment, was as weird and scary as Project is to me now.

But here I am, pouring out words about five hundred at a time, and it’s as easy as breathing. I keep telling myself that one day, if I keep at it, working with Microsoft Project will be like that, too.