Why small tasks are good

The other day I talked about breaking big things down into smaller tasks (see here for the details). One thing I forgot to mention that I was reminded of last night is that when you have a series of small tasks, typically you can knock them out in a shorter amount of time.

Last night I had about 10 or 15 minutes of free time , so I looked at my list and saw that I had noted that I wanted to debug some code. I had written down specifically what I thought was wrong and what needed to be looked at. Luckily, I had left my coding stuff up and running the other day so I was able to dive right in and get a lot of grunt work done right away.

I didn’t solve the problem, but I was able to utilize the limited amount of time I had to get meaningful and productive work done. That’s the power of having a “to-do” list.