Project management doesn't apply just to project teams. The best project managers understand that the entire workday is a project, and that they need to apply the same skill sets to protect project teams from scope increases or unclear action items.
After all, it's all very well and good to push back against a client who wants to increase your scope without increasing your budget or time frame, but what are you you going to do when your boss asks you if you can pick up the slack for another staff member? Or when someone in Human Resources asks you if you have time to serve on a committee to help choose new office furniture?
Here are a few ways to use project management best practices in other aspects of your work day:
Hard-block your calendar
The best way to make sure you get all of your work done during the day is to create hard blocks in which to do it. If you have a presentation to present to a boss or a client, it's easy to assume you'll get it done in a single afternoon, until the afternoon gets eaten up by emails and people knocking at your door.
Yes, it is appropriate for you to actually do your work at work, not at home after midnight! To do so, you'll need to set out hard calendar blocks on your office calendering system. That way, no one can schedule last-minute meetings during your work time -- or if they do, you'll be able to decline or reschedule anything that can wait until after your own work is done.
Set down the path for others to follow
On my last project, I worked with an international vendor. This person was essential to keeping my project running on time, and yet I found myself unable to get in touch with him.
Then I decided to change the situation. Maybe my international vendor couldn't get in touch with me because I hadn't given him a path. I signed up for TollFreeForwarding, a service that provides virtual international phone numbers for businesses. Then I sent our new international phone number to my vendor, which he could dial as if it were a local number in his country. Once I gave him the path, he was able to follow it, no problem.
Use the same techniques with people outside of your project. If you want to negotiate a raise, for example, set down the path -- clearly show how you have added value to your company. If you don't want to get stuck in an all-day email exchange with a coworker, turn the conversation into a phone call or a face-to-face after three messages. Set down the path you want to take, and other people will follow.
Focus on your bottlenecks
Eliyahu Goldratt’s project management book The Goal includes the idea of focusing resources on bottlenecks. If there's something that's preventing you from getting a task done, don't sit around and wait for it, and don't try to backlog a bunch of separate, completed tasks behind it -- instead, throw everything you have at the bottleneck until it's gone.
I was recently planning an anniversary trip with my wife. The bottleneck, of course, was waiting to learn if HR would sign off on my vacation. Instead of just sitting and waiting (while the cost of plane tickets rose higher) or focusing on other parts of the project--like getting our SCUBA recertifications--I went straight to the bottleneck and explained what I needed. Turns out my request was lost in the stack, but you bet she signed off on it right then.