Making a task smaller

Take the thing that has been on the list longest. Work down.

The six questions

1. What is the actual first physical action? Not the first stage. The first thing your hands do. "Sort out the insurance" begins with opening one email and finding a number.
2. Is this one task or four? If the name has an "and" in it, or if you could stop halfway and have finished something, it is more than one. Write the parts on separate lines. Four short lines are easier to look at than one long word.
3. How long do I think this takes? Write the number down before you start. Not to hit it — to find out later how far off you were. You may find you are wrong in a consistent direction. Knowing your direction is more useful than getting any one estimate right.
4. What do I need in front of me? The login, the reference number, the document, the person's email address. Gather all of it first, as its own step. A missing piece discovered three minutes in is a common reason things stop.
5. What does finished look like? One sentence. A task with no visible end is easy to leave unstarted and hard to put down. Both are expensive.
6. Is this even mine? Some of what sits on a list belongs to someone else, or to a decision nobody has made yet, or to a month that has not arrived. Those are not tasks. Move them somewhere that is not your list.

If it still will not start

Then the size was not the obstacle, and the useful move is not to break it down further. Check these instead:

• Is it waiting on somebody? Then it is a message to send, not a task to do.
• Is the difficulty that you do not know how? Then the task is finding out how, and that is a different and smaller thing.
• Does something unpleasant sit on the other side of finishing it? That is worth naming, because it usually explains more than the size did.
• Has it been on the list for months without consequence? Then it may not matter, and deleting it is a legitimate outcome.
• Is the task this shape because someone decided it should be? A format, a tool or a sequence set by someone else can usually be asked about. Asking is often quicker than working around it.
• Is something missing that is not yours to get? A login nobody set up. An approval nobody gave. A file on somebody else's computer. That is a request, not a task.
• Is it hard because of where it has to happen? Work that needs quiet, only ever attempted at a shared desk, is not a size problem. Changing where it happens is often faster than changing the task.

Three of those are questions for other people, and that is not a way out of the task. Some of what makes a task hard was decided before it reached you — the format, the tool, the room, the order of the steps. That part is usually the cheapest thing in the whole list to change, and it is the part nobody thinks to ask about.

The part people skip

Number four. Gathering everything before starting anything feels like a delay, and it is the step people most often say they wish they had done first.