Be More Productive by Making Each Task Small

One of the primary reasons that so many people avoid taking action towards their goals is because they have made their goals massive in their minds. And they believe that unless their actions are equally massive, then the action is worthless. But really, every small task completed is a step towards your goal.

And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.

Deuteronomy 17:19

The problem is that this paralyzes people and prevents them from taking any action at all. We forget that small action beats no action every day of the week. We forget that you can still get to a destination by taking a few small steps instead of sprinting several miles.

When we make tasks massive in our minds, we then require some massive amount of motivation to get us started. How could we ever imagine tackling some massive task if we aren’t extremely fired up to attack that task?

The problem is that most of us can never generate that motivation on our own. The average person often gets his motivation from external sources. When it comes down to internally generating motivation for his own goals, he falls short.

We are so accustomed to having the luxury of external pressure that we forget how to internally generate that same pressure. Without that ability to generate the pressure, we are never able to make any progress on our own individual goals.

We can perhaps make progress on the goals that others have for us. At work, we can generate results on a project or rise up to meet a deadline. In school, we can finish assignments and perform when it is required. But for some reason, we lose the ability to push ourselves for our own goals.

Part of this is the fact that we do not really want our goals.

In fact, we structure our goals based on what others think and based on arbitrary desires. But on the other hand, we do not take action because we think that only massive action is adequate. And by this thinking, we eliminate 100% of the benefit that would come from taking small actions.

While we won’t make massive progress with tiny action, we will still be making some progress. That small amount of progress is infinitely better than staying where we are.

Related :AchIEve as a Man By Making Everything Into a Goal

Here is a protocol for simplifying action taking in life.

I – Identify your objective.

You would be shocked at how often you do not know what you really want. It doesn’t matter if it is work, relationships, personal life – most people have no idea what they want, myself included.

It would surprise you how unclear you are on your own life objectives. clarity of purpose and goals comes in part from taking time to think about what you truly value. You also need to think about the things you truly want. These are not the desires that come and go with the wind. Pay attention to the things you want and identify those desires that are consistently around week after week, month after month, and year after year. Even if the desire doesn’t feel powerful, the fact that it has lived so long makes it incredibly powerful.

II – Identify where you currently are in relation to what you want.

For a GPS system to work it needs two pieces of data. It needs to know where you are, and where you want to go. You just defined where you want to go, now you have to figure out where you are. How much progress have you made towards these goals of yours? Have you made any progress at all? If your goal is to read the Bible through and you are stuck in the book of Leviticus, that’s fine. At least you know where you are. Now you can develop a strategy to get to where you want to go.

III – Identify the major steps to get there.

To read through the Bible you need to read through each of the books. That breaks 1 massive goal into 66 medium-sized goals (66 books of the Bible). But that is not small enough. You still need to make your objectives smaller.

IV – Break each major step into the smallest workable unit.

Continue to reduce the goal until making your objective smaller would reduce its functionality. The smallest workable unit for reading the Bible is 1 sentence. Notice that the smallest unit is not just one word, because that would not be a workable unit. You need to have a task small enough that it can be accomplished, but just big enough so that it is a functional goal.

V – Once those incredibly small objectives have been identified, see if you can make the goal any smaller.

You want your daily objective to be so simple and small that it is almost impossible not to do it. It must be so small that it would be embarrassing to miss your habit.

VI – Once you separate the task into each of the parts, resist the urge to look at how many parts you need to accomplish to complete your goal.

All that work of fine slicing the task would be for nothing if you suddenly look up, realize you have tens of thousands of verses to read, get panicked, overwhelmed, and quit altogether. You have to focus only on the one block of work in front of you. Put a box around it in your mind. Separate each individual task out and keep them all separate from each other. Do not allow them to mix.

VII -Start right now and complete the smallest workable unit.

If the task is small enough, you should be able to accomplish it without issue.

You will also need to get rid of the objects of friction that are preventing you from achieving your goal. These types of things are often environmental in nature. If you control your environment you can control yourself.

These items are friction are most often external to your goal. Take for example your goal to read the Bible every day. One of the external friction points for that goal that might get in the way of your accomplishment is where the Bible is physically in your house. This seems silly, but it actually makes a huge difference.

Even though your goal of reading one verse per day is small, you can still have problems initiating if your Bible is located inconveniently. If you keep your bible in the closet, out of sight, you will have a problem reading. Because now you not only have to read one verse, but you have to go to where your Bible is stored, find it, get it out of your closet, then open it and start reading. That is several extra tasks that cause unnecessary friction that can keep you from achieving your goal.

If you are trying to read the Bible on your phone, you will have to resist the urge to do everything else you already do on your phone.

You carry a 10-ounce box of distraction with you at all times. If you try to read every day on your phone, you will have to deal with the competing interest of your phone. I would suggest a paper Bible, conveniently and strategically placed to maximize the likelihood of you reading it.

Look for any of these points of friction in your life and remove them. This is absolutely critical. Remove all points of friction for good behavior, and create as many points of friction for negative behavior as possible.

The main point is to make every task small so that you can achieve it without any problems.

If the task is small enough, you will be able to achieve it.

But be careful about tasks that seem small and simple but really have multiple hidden tasks inside them, such as reading the Bible when the Bible is in the closet. Simplify and reduce friction to succeed.

Organize your environment for success. Place the Bible in plain sight, where you will easily access it each day, and then follow through with reading the smallest workable, functional unit. If your task is small enough, you should have no problem with follow-through.

If you are still having a problem with follow-through, reexamine the behavior. Find out if you simplified and removed enough points of friction. Make sure there is nothing else pulling you away from the task at hand.

Every great task is just the accumulation of thousands of tiny tasks. Worry about each small, achievable discipline and it will add up to success.