As easy as it is to commit oneself to a large project and simply power through doing it as it comes, it will never truly be successful unless the project has been planned. That brings up the concept of what I'll call the pre-step, or the step before every other step in the project, namely, timely calculation.
Timely calculation for a project entails designing a personal schedule and a game plan. Moreover, it would assign goals for each day and week that would contribute to the project's final goal.
In my case, I must take the pre-step before I embark on the journey of designing an engine for my final product. With such a rigorous goal, I must remain diligent with the timely calculation phase. Therefore, I have produced the Final Product Log and Schedule where I declare my daily objectives and created an engineering design process or method. With this process that engineers use to create products, I am allowed to learn the exact procedure to move forward in working and model my work after it.
A condensed version of the engineering process is as follows:
0) Pre-Plan; Timely Calculation
1) Research the Problem
2) Identify the Needs in Constraints of the Product
3) Imagine Possible Solutions (this is where the help of an expert will come in)
4) Plan by Selecting a Promising Solution
5) Create a Prototype
6) Test and Evaluate the Prototype
7) Improve and Redesign if Necessary
The perks of the pre-step is that with my work all scheduled and plotted out, I can spend more time on constructing solutions to a final goal with less stress placed on the timeline. With that in mind, I encourage all of you to take this pre-step whenever you encounter a project. Through it, you can enjoy many more benefits that wouldn't exist without it.
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