“Have a bias toward action – let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.” said Indira Gandhi
Her words are as true today.
If you have decided you want to change something in your life and yet you do nothing it may be because you have set yourself a task which is too big to do in one go. What the quotation above is describing is the job of chunking down your big goal into small and manageable steps. It is so much easier to do something small especially if it is so small that you hardly realise what you’ve done. Yet each small step you take is moving you towards what you want to achieve.
On the other hand when you think about your goal as a big task then it can seem so daunting that you are unable to make a start. You try to plan a whole day to do it and yet there never seems to be one available. Small chunks are so much easier to fit into the odd five minutes between appointments or while you are waiting for a phone call.
How do you get your chunks small enough?
Can you complete them in ten minutes or less?
Do you feel relaxed about doing them?
Do you actually enjoy getting them completed?
Are you amazed at how easy it is to do small things when you are confident that you are working towards your big goal?
Do you find you can do several of these little chunks each day?
If you can answer yes to these questions you are on your way!
If you feel tension in your muscles or can’t complete your task in ten minutes then it is too big and needs to be made even smaller.
Get yourself into a relaxed state for a minute or two and say to yourself ‘I can do this.’ Decide you will spend not more than ten minutes so before you get on with whatever you spend your day doing, just do the smallest part of the task as much or as little as you can do in just ten minutes. Then move onto something completely different. When you come back to it later or the next day you will be further along your path to success.
Each time you do this you will be moving towards your goal and your sense of satisfaction will increase when you finally get there.
Chunking is of of course a well known tool of the psychologist. I recall being well impressed by the progress that my psychiatric patients used to make with a psychologist keen on chunking!
Doing it yourself………………
This may be less easy.
I am though an inveterate list maker and this is a form of chunking. I then prioritise the list according to need working my way through it.
What I like here though is the ten minute advice. I am currently working through a long and troublesome issue needing research in the context of a post graduate course. Whilst I am keen to “get it done now’ there is considerable benefit in pacing oneself in the way that chunking tends to suggest.
Most useful – as always!
GD wishes Clive