Vol. 4 - A big thing is just 10000 little things
Manage big deadlines by breaking them down into smaller, manageable tasks.
Let's talk about time management!
One of the trickiest things to manage for me is big deadlines that are very far away. This is a perfect storm of anxiety: they are both too far away to feel the urgency to act on them, and too big to ignore without them becoming a constant source of stress.
The brunoise cut is when you dice a vegetable into 1mm sided cubes. It is a pain to do well, but also strangely meditative. And more relevant, these little cubes of vegetables are much easier to handle and cook. And so, when I am staring down a Big Task, I brunoise it.
I am working on a grant application that will have taken about a year to prepare (from when we started designing it to the schedule submission day). How many hours will it take? A hundred? More? It doesn't really matter!
A trick that has been very effective for me is to divide the task as much as possible. We have an internal review deadline, which requires three documents. One of these documents is a two-pager, which should usually be six paragraphs. I can write a decent paragraph in 30 minutes, and revise the two-pager in the same amount of time. This means I have to schedule seven 30 minutes sessions of work.
I can do two or three sessions like this a day in between my other tasks. It's fine. These are low-stakes, low-effort items, with a rapid turnover, so I will process them faster than they will stress me out. Every component of the Big Task is split into many little tasks. Not being able to see the forest for the trees is the entire purpose of this approach.
The new challenge that emerges from working in this way is that the pacing of the tasks needs to be done just right.
There is a delicate little dance of establishing milestones, and then scheduling the little chunks of time around them, that takes some getting used to. Working backwards from the various deadlines helps a lot. Setting a good rhythm to maintain momentum over a long period of time is also a must.
One of the most interesting features of splitting everything into chunks that are as atomic as possible, is that it applies to many situations. Writing a paper? That's just 16 paragraphs (give or take). Preparing a class? That's just a series of 20 minute modules that are chained together. Preparing a 12 minutes talk? Sorry, this one is still going to be a last-minute scramble. It's not a perfect method.
But it's good enough! It is, specifically, good enough at distributing the big, important, long-term commitments over a period of time that is long enough that I do not have to sacrifice other parts of my job to get them done in time. As far as I am concerned, the secret to doing more is to do a lot less, but a lot more often.
And now, stay tuned for Vol. 5 next week, where I will talk about why I believe we need to cite pop culture a lot more.