Reaching large goals can feel almost unattainable if you don’t have the right systems in place to aid you. Whether for work or your personal life, you probably have goals you aim to accomplish, and you’re wondering how to reach them. That’s where compartmentalization is vital.
Breaking down your larger goals into smaller, more achievable tasks can help you make larger goals more actionable in shorter pockets of time. They can motivate you through progress snippets, all leading toward a greater end goal. This post contains tips and strategies to help you distill your long-term goals into more manageable milestones.
Why Big Goals Can Be So Overwhelming
Ambitious goals often have an inherent allure, motivating us to aim high and strive for things we care about. However, the same qualities that excite big goals also make them feel unwieldy. When you think of the dozens of steps, hours, or months required to accomplish a significant goal, you easily feel overwhelmed or daunted. Sometimes, your motivation might feel deflated the second you fathom how much work it will take to reach your goal.
This sense of enormity can hinder progress, often leading to procrastination or burnout. Recent studies highlight this; almost 92% of people don’t achieve their New Year’s goals each year, frequently because they set their sights too high without a clear, actionable path to reach them.
Without breaking down the goal into manageable segments, it’s too easy to fall into the all-or-nothing mentality, expecting immediate, massive progress or giving up when it doesn’t happen.
You need to pace yourself and learn to be satisfied with small wins. Those count—and they’re worth celebrating, too!
Enter Micro-Tasks
Micro-tasks are small steps within the framework of a larger goal. The idea is simple: instead of tackling an entire project in one go, you break it down into easy-to-complete portions, focusing on one small action at a time. This turns big projects into small ones and helps generate momentum by giving you a series of quick wins. Think of micro-tasks as stepping stones.
While each step may feel insignificant on its own, micro-tasks lead you closer to the ultimate goal. In other words, they are greater than the sum of their parts individually. When you get into the mindset of achieving small wins daily or weekly, you’ll maintain motivation and momentum toward your ultimate goal.
Benefits of Breaking Goals into Micro-Tasks
Focusing on just one small task at a time reduces the mental weight of a more grandiose project. For instance, instead of thinking about writing an entire book, you can concentrate on a single chapter at a time. The key to doing this is not to let the scope of the entire project bog you down. That will likely inhibit you from concentrating on making that one chapter as great as possible.
But that’s just an example. This applies to almost any project or goal. Effective compartmentalization requires you to concentrate on the details of one task, however tiny it might be. It has to help progress toward the end goal.
Think of it like you’re hacking through tall grass with a machete to get from one end of a field to the other. If you don’t pop your head up occasionally, there’s no telling where you might end up. That’s why, with all of your micro-tasks, you need to make frequent checks. Ensure that the scope of your smaller actions isn’t veering off course from the desired result.
So long as you keep the scope of each micro-task in check, this approach can make tasks more attainable, helping reduce stress. Completing small tasks also provides an instant sense of achievement, releasing dopamine. This “feel-good” hormone reinforces the behavior and motivates you to continue working toward your next micro-goal. Sometimes, I say, “Do a micro-burst,” meaning go as fast as you can on the goal for 15 minutes. It helps.
How to Break Down Big Goals into Micro-Tasks
Breaking apart significant goals into small parts requires scrutiny and a dissecting mindset. You need to have a plan in place of the stage you need to reach to reach that end goal.
Defining the Goal Clearly
The first step in breaking down big goals into realistically doable actions is being clear about the objective for each task. State, in the most precise language possible, what the desired outcome is. From there, it will become easier to subdivide tasks into parts that help you reach that goal. This can’t be vague. It needs to be specific and obvious, whether completed or not.
For example, “I want to be healthy” is a pretty poor definition of success or failure because so many factors go into being healthy, and there are different interpretations of what “healthy” is. Your ultimate goal needs to have clear win/loss conditions. A better example could be, “I want to run a 5K in six months.” With this, you have a clear timeline, which is six months, and a clear outcome, running a 5K.
Losing your intentions this way will help inform each move to get there. This is where your micro-tasks start working their magic. Each micro-task should be so small that it feels almost trivial to accomplish. That’s the point. They must be so easy they can be done in a day or less.
Plan Your Task Lineup in Reverse
If you encounter blockers at one step, back up and create a prerequisite task that will allow you to complete it. Think of it as working your way backward. Start with your end goal in mind and consider the last step before reaching that goal. Then consider the step before that one and the step before that. Keep doing this until you reach a task you can complete right now.
Once you have the sequence established, all you have to do is execute it. Don’t feel like you must have every minute detail planned out beforehand, though. You will encounter hurdles you didn’t anticipate along the way, but this ought to be expected. Surprises will pop up, you’ll gain new information, and micro-tasks may prove more challenging or time-consuming than originally planned. Stay flexible with your own plan, and be ready to take a step backward to take multiple steps forward.
Track Your Task Progression
To keep track of your tasks, many scheduling tools, such as Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and Google Calendar, offer task-tracking and reminder features to help you stay on track. Calendar, for example, allows you to set up daily, weekly, or monthly reminders for each micro-task, ensuring you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture while focusing on small steps.
Last Thoughts on Micro Tasks
Reaching big goals doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. It just takes reasoning with yourself about the knowledge and resources you have at your disposal now. Then, consider how you can apply that toward your greater goal.
Celebrate your wins each day. Reaching goals like these is rarely a sprint. It’s a pacing game. It requires patience and constant re-evaluation of your actions to ensure you’re on track. The progress you make each day, no matter how small it appears, still culminates toward your ultimate ambition.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Diva Plavalaguna: Pexels
Angela Ruth
My name is Angela Ruth. I aim to help you learn how Calendar can help you manage your time, boost your productivity, and spend your days working on things that matter, both personally and professionally. Here's to improving all your calendars and becoming the person you are destined to become!