Gone Goal: Project Management Tips From Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl

Amy Dunne is a planner. A wife, a faux-kidnapping perpetrator, a sociopath, yes, but a planner first, and that’s how she was able to pull off the (almost) perfect crime. List after list, Post-it after Post-it, she meticulously plotted her departure and the framing of her cheating husband in a way that would make any type A-person jealous. And boy, are we jealous—not of her wrongdoings, but by her ability to manage a gigantic project like that without any snafus.

So how do you achieve the perfect project? By using some of her get-away-with-murder tricks.

Have a plan

Amy’s issues aside, she was great at creating a strategy for everything she was about to do, down to faking a diary that went back five years. FIVE YEARS! Every time we make a “write in a diary” resolution we make it to January 6th. Not her—she had the wherewithal to create a plan that left absolutely nothing to chance.

While that level of iron-clad structure is simply not realistic for the rest of us (stuff happens), you can design each project from the beginning so you have a roadmap for getting where you need to go. Then when things change, you can adjust instead of scramble and still be ahead of the game. A simple project plan includes: when the project is due, the goal of the project, a list of items to accomplish, a list of what person is responsible for each task and some milestones for progress.

Pray to the church of Post-it

Want to get organized in a visually engaging, super flexible way? Get a planner, calendar or a poster board and some mini Post-its. While plotting her after-disappearance to-dos, Amy created a sticky note bonanza on her rental cabin wall calendar to track her progress.

Called a Scrum board, this development project management method breaks down a to-do list into sprints, or time-defined tasks, then leads each task to completion. It’s easy to see what’s pending, what needs to be verified and what’s #dunzo.

You can make your own board or use a virtual, sharable one, like Post-it Plus. Totally worth stealing from the IT department. Does making a Scrum board sound like too much work? Our very own organization guru, Jess, recommends using a calendar to map out your to-dos, and then transferring the information to your digital calendar.

Make a legit list

Yes, we know—everybody tells you to make a list and check off your tasks to get organized. Like quotes from Abraham Lincoln or the fact that Pumpkin Spice Lattes are going to be a thing every October, it’s cliche because it’s true. It’s a fact: making a list can get you from drowning in tasks to standing on a mountain of accomplishment. Amy knew this and had a CRAZY amount of lists to track her deception before the staged the crime scene and got the heck outta Dodge. Like Scrum, making a list requires some structure to be useful—like putting things in date order or grouping smaller tasks under one big task. Try an online list like Todoist to give your tasks hierarchy, assign them dates and have the flexibility to move things around as your priorities change.

Delegate responsibility

While she planned her crime completely by herself, Amy did need some help along the way. A fake best friend who she “confided” in (*cough* lied to *cough*) to further her abused wife story, a philandering husband who

needed discover the shed full of ill-begotten toys to tighten the case closing in on him, and a pining ex-lover who just wanted to save her (in his own really creepy way) and ended up giving her the perfect alibi. Each of these people were instrumental in helping her plan go off without a hitch, even if they didn’t know it. As someone who is (probably) not planning a crime, you can actually ASK for assistance from your peers.

To effectively delegate, make sure to line up the skill set of each person you hope to bring into the project with the most appropriate work for them. Have a shy co-worker? Don’t make them be your pitch person. Not sure what they shine or shrink at? Ask. It’s always better to have willing participants, rather than a bunch of folks who have been voluntold to help you. Just don’t think you’re done after you hit “share task.” The final—and most crucial element of delegating—is following up. You can’t set it and forget it. You gotta bleet at folks to make sure things are taken care of before you scratch that item off your list.

Gone Girl was thrilling, but the parts that got our hearts pumping were not just the dramatic ones on screen—they were the times when the plan was coming into view and Amy’s project management chops were shown to the world. You don’t have to be a psycho to organize your work life—just think like one.