Solving small problems is not about discarding bigger ones, it is about dismantling them into smaller and more manageable tasks.
If we take an example that most (responsible) adults have to face at some point: Cleaning the house/appartment.
So if we take it as is, “Cleaning the house”, it seems rather vague and possibly quite time consuming. We have to decide what it means concretely, does it mean that I have to clean the whole house, inside and outside, or just parts of it? Most likely, we are talking about a general cleaning of the interior, but is it a spring cleaning or just a “standard” cleaning that we have to do every (few) week(s)? This is the weekly cleaning of the stuff that gets dirty fast, the floor, the toilet, sinks and bath, maybe wash some clothes and dishes too.
I made the list from what I said in the previous paragraph:
- Wash floor
- Clean toilet
- Clean sinks
- Clean bath
- Wash clothes
- Wash dishes
It already feels a lot more manageable than “cleaning the house”. We could go a step further, like precising which sinks we want to clean and which type of clothes. So the list becomes:
- Wash floor
- Clean toilet
- Clean bathroom sink
- Clean kitchen sink
- Clean bath
- Wash work clothes
- Wash other clothes
- Wash dishes
It feels even more manageable now, because some tasks have gotten smaller than they were before, but the list gets a little longer.
We are now at the part where it becomes more personal, we have to decide how specific we need to go the get the right balance between the amount of tasks and how precise they are. For the sake of this article, I will stop here, because for this particular example, I don’t think it would be logical to decompose further than it already is. But for other types of tasks, we could probably go over the list and decompose it a few more times, if necessary.
The reason why balance is important is because too few big tasks and too many small tasks will amount to the same thing in the end, more anxiety towards what has to be done. As with pretty much anything in life, aim for the middle ground.
As I already said multiple times, using lists will make us more efficient, but they can also discourage us by making us realize how much work we have to do. So this is why it is important to build the list in a way that will help you be as efficient as possible.