A few summers ago, I hiked the ancient Camino de Santiago trail across Spain. It was the best month of my life for many reasons. Along with a lot of other great things I got by walking almost 500 miles, it also taught me some valuable project management lessons that I can use at work.

Less is more

When you are carrying everything you need for a month on your back, you soon become smart about differentiating what you need vs. what you want. Variety in clothing colors and styles drives complexity and weight in packing a backpack. By the end of the trip, I found that I used 20 percent of the clothes I packed 80 percent of the time, and the rest was dead weight. I ended up throwing away a lot of the “I want” clothes and just washing and wearing the “I need” clothes more.

Lesson: As I scope future projects at work, I will ruthlessly force myself to differentiate between what is essential to deliver well, and strip out all the “nice to have” parts of the project that aren’t absolutely required.

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