~by Haley Lynn Gray~
You’ve heard the joke. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
It’s decent advice and it’s incomplete, because the part that actually matters is how small the bite has to be. Most people break a large task into pieces that are still too big to start, then wonder why nothing moves.
Write the next physical action, not the task
This is the whole technique and it’s more precise than “break it down.”
“Sort out the insurance” is not a task. It’s a subject. There’s no obvious first move, so every time you look at it you have to work out where to begin, and that small cost is enough to make you look at something else instead.
“Find last year’s policy document in the filing cabinet” is a task. You can picture doing it. It takes four minutes and it has no resistance attached.
Most items that sit on a list for months are stuck for exactly this reason — not difficulty, not importance, but being written at the wrong altitude. If something has been on your list for more than a fortnight, it’s almost certainly not a task yet.
Break it to the smallest unit you can identify. Then do that one thing, without looking at the rest of the elephant.
Stop trying to do two things at once
Multitasking is largely an illusion. What actually happens is rapid switching, and each switch carries a cost — you lose your place, reload the context, and make more errors.
The practical version: the work that requires actual thought needs an uninterrupted stretch, and the stretch doesn’t need to be long. Forty-five minutes with notifications off will produce more than three hours of fragmented attention, and most people have never tested this on the work that matters most to them.
Batch the small things instead of letting them interrupt. Email twice a day rather than continuously. Calls grouped together. Admin in one block.
Important before urgent
When you’re a woman in business, particularly with a family, there’s a pull to do a million things at once and to be distracted out of your mind by all of them.
The reality is that staying half-way sane requires staying focused on the things that actually matter: keeping a roof over your head, food on the table, the children clothed, and the business moving forward by getting clients and keeping them.
Everything else is negotiable, and a fair number of the items on your list genuinely aren’t important. It’s worth saying that plainly, because most productivity advice assumes the list is sacred and only your execution is lacking.
Do the important thing first, while you’re capable of the effortful version. The urgent things will still be there and they’ll take less out of you.
Making the start easy
The hardest part of most tasks is beginning, not doing. Three things reduce the friction.
Decide the night before. Not a plan for the whole day — the single first thing you’ll do. Deciding and doing are separate acts, and doing both at eight in the morning is considerably harder than doing one of them.
Set up before you stop. Leave the document open at the right place, the file on the desk, the equipment out. Future you arrives to something already underway rather than something to be assembled.
And commit to a small amount of time rather than an outcome. “Fifteen minutes on this” is a promise you’ll keep. “Finish this” is one you might avoid entirely. You’ll usually carry on past fifteen minutes, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t — you moved.
Say no to what isn’t yours
Learn to decline the things that don’t work for you and don’t make you happy.
Every yes is a commitment of hours you haven’t got spare, and the hours come out of the important work rather than the unimportant work, because the important work is the only part with no external deadline.
That’s the real cost of over-committing and almost nobody counts it correctly: the thing you gave up wasn’t the evening, it was the pricing review that’s been waiting since March.
The thing underneath all of it
Big tasks don’t get done by people with more discipline. They get done by people who converted them into small ones, and then did the small ones on ordinary days when they didn’t feel particularly motivated.
I’ve used this in every context I can think of — building businesses, running a large community, getting teenagers to complete projects requiring fifty hours of work. The method doesn’t change. Make the next step small enough that starting is trivial, then take it.
One bite. Then another one.
More on why busy isn’t the same as productive and why so much feels urgent.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
