Small Manageable Chunks, For the Win!
Divide and conquer to reach your goals. All of them. Every time.
My gentle fucklings, ya girl has been under the weather, so today’s NFG tip will be short and sweet—and very much connected to last week’s organizational revelation: The Must-Do List.
Ready? Here goes…
Accomplishing big stuff is just accomplishing a bunch of small stuff, over time.
I know, right? If I could insert the mind-blown emoji here, you know I would.
And this maxim is especially true when applied to GOALS.
Real talk: lots of people have goals, and lots of people never achieve those goals because they are too overwhelming to contemplate. They can’t even get started because it just feels too huge. Too many moving parts. Never gonna happen, so why bother? It’s a whole thing.
This is where small, manageable chunks come in!1
If you want to make your goals LESS overwhelming and MORE attainable, the way to do it is to DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
And much like the Must-Do List is helpful for breaking down your day-to-day tasks, the concept of “small, manageable chunks” is effective when applied to larger, more complex or long-term goals.
For example, your big bold goal of “moving to the Caribbean someday” can go from cold-weather fantasy to hot, sunny reality if you approach it in small, manageable chunks.
Trust me, for I know a little something about this one.
My husband and I didn’t wake up one morning in 2016, blink our eyes I Dream of Jeannie-styles, and land in the Dominican Republic—which would have been awesome, not gonna lie—but neither did we accomplish the seventeen million individual steps that led us here all at once, or even all within the same calendar year.
Moving to the tropics was a wacky, sprawling, often overwhelming-feeling goal, but we met it by breaking it down into many, many smaller parts. (Okay, not “seventeen million,” but still.)
Those parts included but were not limited to:
Watching YouTube videos of expats extolling the virtues of their chosen homes. (A thing you can do from the comfort of your own bed!)
Researching countries and cities online. (A thing you can do at your office, while pretending to work!)
Traveling to the town we were thinking about moving to—itself a task broken down into “buying plane tickets” and “booking a hotel” and “acquiring a packable sun hat.”
Putting our Brooklyn apartment on the market—again, lotsa smaller steps involved here.
Packing our Brooklyn apartment—so many steps!
Applying for a loan to help purchase/furnish a new house before the apartment sale went through—STEPS GALORE!
We took them all and ended up on the north coast of Hispaniola with year-round beach days, palm trees in the yard, and lizards all over the fucking place. (Cute little fellas; not those stank-ass iguanas.)
Ironically, we’ve just begun the process of saying adiós to our island home of the past nine years and figuring out what’s next and how and when we’ll get there.
A bit overwhelming? YEP. But that’s what small, manageable chunks are for.
As I say in Get Your Shit Together, “Life is like an adult coloring book. Just work on filling in all the small spaces one at a time and eventually the big picture will materialize before you.”
Or, as just occurred to me when writing this post: if you think of your big scary goal as five little goals wearing a trench coat, it seems much less intimidating, no?
Until next time,
Sarah
Life is like an adult coloring book. Just work on filling in all the small spaces one at a time and eventually the big picture will materialize before you.
—Get Your Shit Together
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Until I published Get Your Shit Together, I had no idea how many of you have a strong aversion to the word “chunks,” but since that’s the word I used when I recorded all my theories for posterity, that’s the word we’re stuck with. Sorry!
This article resonates with me at the moment. In four weeks, I will be moving back to Australia after six years in the US. As someone who usually procrastinates until the last week, I am proud to say that I now have a to-do list and try to tick off one thing a day! Some days are better than others, but today I managed to tick off two tasks: sorting items into keep, give, throw, and sell categories in two rooms. Good luck with your move Sarah!
One of my go-to tips for students is the 3-5 approach. Whether it's things to do, steps towards the whole, starting point of resources - I love it. Sure, you may (likely will) need to break stuff into 3-5 again, and again and again as you get to nitty gritty. But at the start point, just 3-5 will do. After all, writing has a beginning middle and end (3!) and if you break the middle into themes/aspects chances are that's a 3-5 too!