How To: Break a Big Project into Smaller Tasks

You don’t shove an entire burger in your mouth; You eat it in smaller bites. When you have a large project you need to finish (and are maybe dreading) it’s best to break into smaller, easier-to-digest (and complete) tasks.

The basic idea is this:

For example, I need to file my taxes. That’s a big project. Here’s how I’d do this:

1. List out what documents I need to gather up this year. I’ll complete this today.
2. Gather up all of those documents by March 15th
3. Contact my accountant or pull up a tax filing service around March 16th
4. Upload/send over my documents on March 16th
5. Fill out my tax forms on March 17th
6. Review yesterday’s work & make corrections, then complete filing on March 19th.

To break this down a little further, here’s what to do when you have a big task or a big project and don’t know where exactly to start.

1. Brainstorm and make a list.

Again, the most important thing is to take this one, big project and break it down into a bunch of smaller projects.

Before doing anything, spend a few minutes making a list of what needs to be done. You can change this list as you go; don’t worry about making it perfect or trying to anticipate everything. The project may be complex and you may not have a clear idea of what all needs to be done; that’s fine! Just spend ~2-10 minutes to identify what you believe, with the knowledge you have now, are the major milestones or actions that need to be taken.

If it helps, you might even make a visual diagram or “mind map”. You can use draw.io or any sort of visual diagram app for this.

While you’re writing down your list, you may realize that you don’t have enough information or need clarification on something before you can finish. That’s good! Identifying & filling gaps in knowledge is always a crucial part of any task/project. So, simply add in ‘Clarify myself on {{whatever}}’ as a task!

If one of your “subtasks” or “subprojects” itself seems pretty big, then just break that one up too!

2. Gather up all the resources you think you might need.

This can be wiki pages, tutorials or information you found on Google, etc. If you think you need a spreadsheet for this, pull up a spreadsheet. If you think you need MLS for this, go ahead & pull up that page. If you think you need to Google how to do something, or look something up on a website’s knowledge base, go ahead & do that.

During the process of gathering up resources, you start your creative & critical thinking process, and then you can often find & hone your direction this way. When you pull up a given resource, you may see something there that reminds you “Oh, I should do this too”, or “Oh, this task here can be completed easily here”.

3. Prioritize.

Once you have your list of everything that needs to be done and have everything you think you need to get started, take a look again at your list and see if any of the tasks are “higher impact” than the others.

This goes back to the Pareto Principle: 80% of our results come from 20% of our actions.

Essentially, take a look at each and see if any task or set of tasks would produce more and/or quicker results than the others.

Not all lists will have tasks like these, but when they do, those are the tasks you should focus on first. (Unless something is time-sensitive, in which case, you should do that first.)

Likewise, if there’s a task that probably needs to be completed before you can start on another task, it makes all the sense in the world to complete the first task before moving on.

4. Set deadlines

Next, set some ambitious-but-reasonable time limits for accomplishing these tasks.

This relates to Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”.

By setting down some ambitious deadlines, you get out of the mindset that this is a bigger task than it is. You force yourself to just get started and try to finish within that time frame. If you get to that deadline and feel you need more work, then you can reassess at that time. What’s great about getting to that point in the first place is that now you have made progress.

For example, you can note down ‘Complete by 1/5’ for the entire project. Then, you can set deadlines for each sub-project/task, i.e. ‘Complete by 1/2’.

If you think it’s helpful, you can also ‘timebox’, or estimate how much time to spend on each task, i.e. 1 hour for this task, 15 minutes for this other task, etc.

5. Drop any notions of “perfection”, and then just get moving.

Attaining a completely optimal outcome is neither likely nor expected. Your first step might end up being a bad first step, and that’s fine. You may find out that you were wrong about a task being necessary; that’s fine. You may run into delays with a certain task; that’s fine.

Progress & incremental improvements are the key here. As long as you correct your course after making mistakes, you’ll be good to go.

6. If it makes sense, document this!

Once you finish the task, see if this process or procedure would be helpful to document! You might be able to save another team member a lot of time & effort by writing down how you approached this situation.