How to ‘baby step’ your way to productivity

One day early in the pandemic, I didn’t start making good choices until early evening. The move toward productivity started with something quite small: eating two dried-up gummy vitamins. Once I did, further good choices cascaded upward to changing out of PJs (gulp), taking out the garbage and on to bigger things.

Even adults walk one step at a time

Maybe the notion of baby steps sounds lowering. We’re all adults, right? Shouldn’t we be able to set grander goals for ourselves? But as I learned in a time-management workshop years ago, top-line goals like “make a purple coat” or “change Rosco’s oil” involve a host of hidden steps.

As long as you leave out the smaller tasks, it’s easy to stay overwhelmed by the main goal. When overwhelmed, we procrastinate.

Even Chandler from Friends ran into this, in the form of pre-wedding cold feet. The advice by which Ross eventually persuaded him to follow through on his nuptials was the same I got from that long-ago time-management course: subtask.

Ross, of course, didn’t call it that. Instead he encouraged Chandler to break down getting married that very day into its individual steps. Step 1: take a shower. Could he do that? Of course he could; he did so every day — or something like that. Step 2: Get dressed, except in slightly fancier clothes. And on it went.

Like Chandler, the more I’ve learned to subtask, the more I start to make actual progress on once-daunting tasks. The secret here isn’t to do something special with the challenging stuff, but to apply the same process we unconsciously follow with much of life.

Even a task as basic as eating dinner involves this: we don’t fill our bellies via a single, mouth-stretching gulp, after all. No, we take a series of bites and sips ideally interspersed with conversation.

With hard or daunting tasks, I take the same approach, except with one tweak. Whereas I almost never check off the bites required to finish a meal, with most other projects, I find it hugely helpful write my list with details I can tackle. Once I have an entry point, it’s much easier to get started.

The secret sauce: lists within lists

At this point, maybe you’re thinking, “But isn’t this just making a list?” Yes and no. Until I learned to subtask, my lists revolved around distinct projects. For example, a work to-do list might have looked like the following.

But when I ran into trouble, it often involved the fact that some of those simple-sounding tasks entailed a mini-project. Here's what a subtasked version of that list might look like.

Big difference, right? Now, let’s talk about why that matters.

Subtasking in the work world

With small tasks, subtasking might be the difference between starting a project today or ... eventually. We often get by without it, but with larger projects, subtasking becomes quite important.

Whether you’re working as a freelancer or full-time employee, subtasking helps you plan more accurately. That in turn helps you better manage your workload, delegate tasks, and negotiate and set schedules.

For example, if you’re a freelancer who bids projects on a lump-sum rather than hourly basis, you need to accurately predict your time. Say you bid $1,000 for a project you think will take 10 hours. That’s a $100 hourly rate before taxes.

But say you overlook steps and underestimate how long some tasks will take. The project balloons to 20 or even 40 hours. Since you agreed to $1,000, your hourly rate has plummeted to $50 or even $25. Big difference!

Subtasking helps in full-time, salaried, work, too. Let’s say your boss gives you a new project in addition to your regular duties. You agree to finish it in a week.

If you don’t subtask, you’ll probably underestimate how much time you need. Maybe you’ll wait till Thursday to start a project you promised Friday. But what if something comes up or the project actually needs more like 20 hours? None of your options are good:

• Pull an all-nighter.
• Miss the project deadline.
• Meet the project deadline but miss another deadline.

Say you do subtask, though, and estimate the project will take you 15 hours to complete. That gives you and your boss important information. Is one week a reasonable deadline? Should you do all the work yourself? Can you temporarily reassign or delay some of your work?

In the subtasked list shown above, maybe you could delegate image resizing to another co-worker who’s good with Photoshop. Maybe a more-skilled coder than you could tackle building the table. Maybe your boss edits the email for you or changes the deadline.

Only when you’ve estimated the project well — and thoroughly subtasked the steps — can you identify when you need help like that.

Wouldn’t you want to avoid more overtime, if you could help it? It isn’t often paid, after all.

Subtasking in your personal life

The fun part to all this is that subtasking can help you make better progress on hobbies, too (even chores!). Take my sewing wishlist. When I only jot a basic list of projects, I can quickly get discouraged.

Where to begin? What if I only have short blocks of time to invest before bed — is it even worth trying to sew? To make matters trickier, some of these projects depend on completion of others. Maybe I’d be better off watching TV or scrolling through Facebook.

Here, again, subtasking is my friend. By breaking down my sewing projects, it’s easier to see all the steps, any places where I’m stuck and — most importantly — tasks I can do out of order.

First, I draw arrows, showing which projects have to be done before others.

Now I can pick a project and subtask the steps to finish it. As with the project list, I’ll indicate the steps that affect other ones. (As a side note: identifying causal relationships like this can really help you work more efficiently on professional projects that involve teamwork. If you have a step that depends on someone else’s work, is there another task you can do while you wait?)

As it happens, I wrote this in approximate order of completion, but I could actually jump to the strap stage if desired, since that involves cutting out a long, skinny rectangle, sewing it into a tube and then turning it inside out. (Yes, if I were particular, or just eager to show even the smallest accomplishment, I could subtask that, too!)

With other projects, I might skip the decision phase, but the fact is that many projects often do start with some mental work. In the case of sewing, I might need to decide:

• Which fabric?
• What kind of garment?
• What pattern?

Years of battling my own procrastination has shown that I often get stuck at that very first stage of thinking. To overcome the hurdle, sometimes I find it helpful to add my first decision or calculation step, even if it’s a less-concrete task than the others.

Pro-level subtasking

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The last subtasking secret is that I sometimes also stick sewing lists to the wall behind my machine. I don’t do that with every list, but one of the rare business books I read, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, talks a lot about the importance of visual reminders.

By its lights, my lists don’t qualify as “score boards.” But the authors recommend a similar process for achieving goals of all kinds.

1. Identify 1-2 “wildly important goals” (more than that, and you won’t get anywhere, they say). Goals should take the form of, “From X to Y by When.”
2. Determine actions that predict or can create the result you want (in other words, the change desired). These often prove counter-intuitive. For example, the biggest predictor of impulse purchases (and therefore saving) turned out to be how I got to and from work. When on foot, I walked past stores, which increased the likelihood of stopping in to check for a sale, which often led to “bargain” buys. But once I switched to a folding-bike commute, impulse buys dropped dramatically.
3. Track progress on an easy-to-read, visible “score board.” The authors say it makes a real difference when you and/or your team can easily see if you’re “winning” or “losing” as you progress toward your goal.
4. Meet regularly to report on the prior week’s goals and set new ones. This applies more to teams than individuals. In my sewing example, it might involve making sure to cross off tasks completed.

The great thing about the four disciplines’ charting is that it gives you a way to track your progress that’s more than a list. Maybe it’s stickers on a calendar. Maybe you put cotton balls in a jar and reward yourself each time it fills up. The method is up to you, but anything that clearly shows how you’re “winning” or “losing” should help you progress.

With that in mind, I’ll go cross “Finish post” and all its related subtasks off my list.

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