A practical guide to understand the method, best practices, and build your timeline to accomplish your tasks and develop your project step by step, every day.
🔎 Steps, resources, tips… This practical guide was created by the Médianes studio, which has been supporting editorial teams with project organization, coordination, and management since 2020. Want to take it a step further or need some guidance? Discover our expertise in project management or contact us using this form.
1. Backward planning: What is it?
A reverse timeline is one of the fundamental tools necessary for proper project management. It is a practical document that allows you to plan your work by tasks, subtasks, and over time.
Backward planning, whether it takes the form of a spreadsheet, written notes, a Kanban board, or a calendar, is a breakdown of the sub-tasks that make up a mission or objective. The purpose of backward planning is to project the various sub-tasks over time so you can anticipate the order in which they must be completed, how long each will take, and how they should fit together. It's a way of organizing your work by breaking down each task and placing it within a timeline.
When a mission has tight deadlines or a final deadline, backward planning becomes even more essential. It holds genuine strategic and organizational added value. It's a tool that will facilitate the management of your project.
2. Why create a reverse schedule?
Reverse planning should be used systematically for all assignments and all objectives. It is a guarantee of feasibility and work organization.
What a reverse schedule allows you to do:
- Develop a pragmatic and strategic vision of the work to be accomplished in order to achieve a goal within a set timeframe by anticipating the diversity of tasks to be performed and the time they require ;
- Set daily agenda items;
- Organize your schedule over a long period with daily visibility into the time spent on a task;
- Target and solicit in advance people engaged in a task and determine the duration of their engagement;
- Track the daily progress of a task;
- Measure the allocated time (delays, remaining time outside the time required to complete the task);
- Readjust the objectives and mission flow during its execution;
- Review the obstacles encountered or the free time remaining to use elsewhere during a day.
3. Create your reverse schedule
There are several ways to build a backward schedule using different tools. Choose the tool that best suits your needs and environment (collaboration, accessibility). Among commonly used tools, you might consider spreadsheet applications like Google Sheets or Excel, as well as project management tools like Notion, Trello, or Basecamp.
1. Define the roadmap: Identify the key milestones, the project start date, and the end date, and then propose a detailed timeline (by day, week, or month) to create a detailed schedule.
2. List the tasks you need to complete: Identify all the tasks and microtasks you'll need to complete to reach your goal.
3. Prioritize tasks: Determine the chronological order in which each task should be completed, since some tasks depend on others being completed first—for example, creating an Instagram template before writing and posting content.
4. Estimate the time needed: Estimate how long each task will take and enter those times into the calendar.
📌 Keep in mind: the clearer, more detailed, and more accurately estimated your reverse schedule is in terms of the time required for each task, the more obvious the workflow for your project will be. Be realistic when estimating time frames: not too fast, not too slow.
4. Our Educational Resource
The Médianes team has prepared a handy document to help you apply the lessons from this fact sheet to your own project.
5. Learn More
- On rituals and collective organization: Check out our practical guides on the RACI matrix to clarify roles within a publishing organization, on the ideal content journey, and on the role of the product manager in structuring editorial production.
- On management in the media: check out the *Guide to Project Management in Newsrooms*, which we have translated and adapted for a French-speaking audience, or meet its author, Robin Kwong, former head of audience engagement at The Wall Street Journal.
- Management is often seen as the media's Achilles' heel. Here is an overview of best practices.
✉️ Have you read and used this guide? We'd love to hear your feedback! Do you have a question or comment? Email us at [email protected]. Thank you for your help, the team at Médianes.
