When I go for a run in my neighborhood, I have a ritual of counting down the blocks on the way back. The way back is uphill—the harder part of the run. I’m already tired from the first half. And counting down the blocks is how I mentally chunk up the remaining work to make it feel more doable.
If I were to say to myself “only two more miles to go”, that’s going to cause me to lose some steam pretty quickly. But if I treat each block as a chip away at the greater whole, I can keep myself going.
It’s worth considering this approach in work too. It’s easy to end up with these huge ideas or projects that feel like a massive undertaking. But the trick to getting them done is of course to break them up into smaller chunks. How small? Small enough that you can knock them out regularly, say every few days, and not feel a loss of momentum.
The hard part, I’ve found, is to regularly assemble all the pieces back together again to observe how far you’ve come. The big picture is what gets us started. The small picture is what keeps us going.