Productivity Tip #13: Small Steps Taken Regularly…

Regular readers of this blog will know how keen I am about the whole idea of breaking your work down into tiny chunks of activity (or next actions if you’re a GTD fan). I do it so often in fact that any little project I have I will look at how it can be broken down. When I decorated my bedroom recently, I did one wall per day. That might sound obtuse and on the surface a little counter-productive, but what’s the alternative? Several hours one weekend doing a big, laborious chore.

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about this approach is that nothing really gets done. If all you’re doing is little steps, you’re just basically tip-toeing around the work and not getting anything substantial completed. Understandable critique, but don’t mistake procrastinating on something with taking clearly defined mini-strides towards completing your work.

It’s important to realize that when you break your work down like this you make it much more appealing to do. With a large, time consuming task like my decorating work or the big writing projects I’m currently doing, you’re going to feel resistance. It’s only natural. Faced with the prospect of doing my book for the next couple of years it’s no wonder I spent so long fluffing it. But then I shifted my focus to doing just one page at a time.

Sure, in and of itself it’s not much, but because it’s so much easier to do and so much appealing I can gladly do it everyday. Over a month that’s a decent number of pages. Over a year… well that’s a potential book done. Compare that to trying to do a large bulk of something in one sitting. Finding the time and energy to commit to a task like that on a regular basis is far from easy. Small steps taken regularly create more results than big steps taken occasionally.

Productivity Tips: 10 Clever Ideas For Getting Things Done is an updated and expanded collection of the first ten posts in my popular productivity tips series and is now available to all for free.