Break It Down for Success

Break a task down into smaller pieces and before you know it, the picture will be complete

When it comes to achieving and completing your important tasks, do you tend to procrastinate, aim for perfection, feel overwhelmed or become afraid that you’ll fail ? If so, this success exercise will especially work wonders for you.

Break it down into smaller steps!

All of us want to be successful in life! We want to make a decent amount money, give up our bad habits, and keep improving our life. When undertaking a new project or goal, the initial excitement carries us forward a bit. However, soon we may notice that we get sidelined since the task appears to be tougher than we initially imagined. Often we end up in a situation where the problems and obstacles outweigh the benefit of acquiring the goal and we end up putting it off or plain giving up.

There is a solution, and it is simple – break it down! Take it slow and deconstruct the task into small actionable, concrete, and easy steps. If you feel yourself resisting some of the small steps you’ve come up with, break those steps down even further. The easier the steps, the more likely you’ll be to complete the task.

My experience breaking down a project

I recently took on the huge (in my opinion, at least) task of setting up a do-it-yourself Home Theater in my basement. Every time I thought about it, the idea of being entertained on a 100 inch+ projected 1080p resolution crystal clear screen with a rumbling speaker system made the project seem more and more compelling. As I began to think about the amount of research, effort and cost involved, I felt overwhelmed and kept putting off the project for sunnier days.

Now that summer is here, I no longer have my excuse of waiting for sunnier days.  I applied this success exercise to get the seemingly impossible project launched off the ground. I broke things down into things that I had already that I intended to use, what I needed to buy and what I could put off to adding in the future. I sub-divided my research into the different equipment and materials I would need to purchase and the technologies I needed to familiarize myself with.

As I delved deeper, I  gained clarity on the individual steps that I would need to complete in order to make my bigger dream come true. Every day or so in the last couple of weeks, I worked on just one of these small steps.

Amazingly, the dream that I’d been putting off for the last six months, is now more than 50% done in just a matter of a few days. It all began with breaking the project down into actionable, concrete, and easy parts by putting them down on paper and working on them.

The advantage of doing little at a time is that it takes off the pressure of getting the big task done and provides time to give more thought to the small steps. It also enables progress tracking, allows scope for mistakes and the ability to start afresh, thus contributing to a superior quality outcome (the perfectionists are smiling).

This process takes off the pressure and in fact, the small successes work as motivators for further progress and accelerate achievement of the bigger outcome.

What’s your first step?

So think about how many projects and tasks have remained incomplete just because you failed to break them down? Bring out a pen and notebook now and take them on with a renewed vigor by breaking them down into small actionable, concrete, and easy steps and get them completed.

To your Success and Happiness.