I have 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 be talking about SharePoint a lot here because it’s an integral part of successfully collaborating online to make a project fly.

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

Tim 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, relaxed, and happy when I sit down in front of a keyboard with an excellent topic to write about.

I try to remind myself that I didn’t always type fast and that pecking out blog articles were not always the familiar and comfortable activity it is now. At some point, I felt nervous about laying my fingers on a keyboard, letting the words pour forth, and then putting them out into the ether for others 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, working with Microsoft Project will be like that if I keep at it.