No great project makes significant progress overnight. Everything—absolutely everything—is accomplished by completing hundreds of seemingly small tasks.
I like to think of projects this way: as a set of small tasks that can be done at any time, but whose combined effect, before we know it, lets us achieve a good result, something tangible.
It’s no coincidence that people who seem to accomplish a lot are precisely the ones who know how to break things down into small tasks and have the discipline to work through them little by little. Breaking work into tasks and having the discipline to complete them is, to me, the key to getting good results.
It’s not easy to break everything down into parts that can be done intermittently. Yet this is also what it takes to handle many different kinds of responsibility in our day-to-day lives.
Isn’t this how we program or develop a software project? Perhaps we’re used to dividing projects into phases, requirements, or user stories; essentially, it’s the same thing. We break something large into ordered packages, and when most of them are finished and put in place, we start to see a tangible result.
Some time ago, I read a short book about exactly this: The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy, argues that everything we achieve comes from small steps that accumulate over time, from building good habits to completing any personal project. This runs counter to the usual tendency to want everything quickly and without effort. Most things don’t work that way: behind many projects we admire, even if it isn’t obvious, there’s a tremendous amount of work in getting started, planning, organizing, marketing, and so on.
Sometimes you feel overwhelmed because you have many different things underway. The key to taking them on and bringing them to a successful conclusion is knowing how to break them into small tasks and prioritize them through good organization.
I don’t know if I’m doing it the best possible way, but this is how I’ve spent years pursuing projects outside my full-time job and intrapreneurially at work. I know some things will take a long time, but if I don’t work on them step by step, little by little, they’ll certainly fall by the wayside—and leave me deeply frustrated.
Among the many things I have underway, there’s a project I’m working on that will probably see the light of day in a year. By now, the way I’m going about it should be obvious: I’m identifying a multitude of tasks that I can spread out over time. Some take half an hour; others take a couple of hours when I know I have the energy and time to really get into them—perhaps on a Saturday afternoon. And every week, I finish 100% of the tasks I set myself the week before, even if it costs me a few hours of sleep (= discipline). That way, since I started in the summer, I’m already getting close to releasing an MVP (minimum viable product) that will let me test its viability or usefulness with people around me, including the company I work for.
Working this way in any setting—whether in your day-to-day job or on a personal project—also has benefits that aren’t easy to appreciate at first:
- Breaking any piece of work into small tasks helps you estimate, to some extent, the effort needed to complete it.
- It lets you plan and organize better.
- It helps you see which tasks matter more than others: you can prioritize.
- If you’re getting a new idea off the ground, translating it into tasks helps you define, refine, and polish it.
- Completing a task brings a great sense of satisfaction: you feel a sense of progress.
The day has only 24 hours. We spend some of them working, and too much of that time is usually wasted because we don’t have a clear set of tasks to move forward on. It’s hard to see the bigger picture in the day-to-day battle. Making progress on our responsibilities through smaller, individual tasks helps us become more productive—which simply means getting more done in less time.