Have you ever had that feeling where you have so many things to do that you don’t know where to begin? Have you felt anxiety that your project won’t get done on time? I think most of us can relate to that. Sometimes when we are working on a project we compare where we are today to where we need to be in the future and can’t imagine how we will ever get there! This is when panic sets in and your project can become adversely affected.
There is a way to make your life easier though. It’s called chunking, which means to break your project into a series of smaller bite size pieces. While
the name is a bit ridiculous, the principle is very useful and has helped me many times when I felt overwhelmed. Back in the 1950’s a psychologist from Harvard named George Miller published an article arguing that the human mind has a short term memory capacity of approximately 7 items. Beyond 7 items it becomes much harder for people to absorb and memorize information. This is why phone numbers are only 7 digits long. This is also why we need to break down large projects into smaller pieces.
A large project is really a collection of many smaller pieces. However sometimes we don’t see the trees for the forest, which means that we forget to think of all the smaller pieces that make up the whole. Whenever I have felt frustrated or overwhelmed by a project, whether it was building a house or a business, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I have to take things one step at a time. This means that I can’t finish my project as quickly and easily as I would like to. To throw out another cliché, we must remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Things of substance and value take a lot of hard work and planning.
Chopping your project into smaller parts isn’t that hard, it just requires analyzing how a project should unfold. For example if you’re building a house, you obviously don’t start with the roof. The first thing you do is design a floor plan, then you work on excavating your property for a foundation to be built and so on. Each one of these steps can then be broken down into further pieces. For example to design a floor plan you may need to go to the library and look at design books, then buy home design software, then draw a plan, then revise it a 100 times then contact a drafter or architect and so forth. Each of these steps is manageable and easier to conceptualize and complete as opposed to something vague like ‘design a house’. Therefore the key to chunking your project is to think about it in a linear way. Think of it literally as walking up a set of stairs, where each steps leads you closer to where you want to be.
The motivational guru, Tony Robbins, discusses chunking in a lot of his work. He talks about the very real problem of using chunking as an obstacle rather than a tool. If someone is not motivated to undertake a project, let’s say it’s starting a workout program, then they will focus on all the steps that you need to undertake to get started. For example they might say that to start a workout program they need to buy new workout clothes, then shop around for a gym, then re-schedule their days to fit in working out, then find a program they like and on and on. These are all excuses of course since if we were doing something that people enjoyed, like going to the beach, then they would simplify their work to just getting up and going to the beach. They wouldn’t think about packing the food, sunscreen, toys, water or fighting traffic and then trying to find a parking spot. The point being that our initial motivation for a project can affect how we visualize it unfolding.
In chunking our projects down we need to find a balance between being too vague and too specific. The whole point of this process is to make sure that we view our projects as manageable and realistic.
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