Daunted by the prospect of many projects sitting incomplete, I’ve found myself lately being pulled in a number of directions. My own personal website, a client project, WordPress plugins & themes that will be used on a number of client projects – although not immediately, helping my wife with our new business venture, and a number of personal hobby projects of mine, it’s safe to say that I’ve had a lot on my plate. All over this is on top of my regular day job!
In order to get anything done, I’ve been taking a new approach to my free time. Using lessons learned as part of the agile environment I work in day to day, I’ve been breaking things down into small manageable pieces. Really small. Once done, this has enabled me to start working on a really small task, and get it done quickly, building momentum in getting things done. For a long time I’ve known that I need to update and fix a few things on this here website. But what did that mean? ‘Fix website’ sitting in the back of my mind always felt like a behemoth task. I needed to break it down.
When I sat down to think about it, analysed what it was that I liked and didn’t like about my site, it really just came down to a few things. Update some content here, fix some styling there, remove a page here, add a different menu over there and there. When broken down into small, well defined tasks, somethings could be knocked out of the park in under 5 minutes. Two days, and maybe 2 or 3 hours of actual work later, I had managed to ‘fix’ my site like I’d been thinking about for months.
The takeaway here is that taking 5-10 minutes per project to gather your thoughts and keep track of what you want to get done in the near future can be an invaluable exercise. Doing it often, at least weekly for each project, can be enough to keep you motivated and getting things checked off the list quickly. When you know that you can get 3 items cleared of your list in under an hour, it’s easy to jump right in and do it, creating momentum for more and more tasks to get done.
I’ve been using Trello to keep track of my tasks, but any system old or new can be used, the important part is taking the time to think about how your big scary projects can be broken down into manageable tasks. If you’ve been weighed down by the daunting prospect of having so much to get done, give it a shot and watch your productivity sky rocket as a result.