Chunking Can Save You Vast Amounts of Time

If a typical picture is worth 1,000 words, the image below may be worth 1,000 days' worth of saved time over the course of your career.

Until I saw this graphic, created by Ozana Giusca at the Tooliers blog, I always thought of "chunking" merely as a tactic for overcoming difficult obstacles. It turns out I was thinking too small.

Ozana proposes that you consciously chunk tasks both up and down (see her original article). Let me explain with a few personal examples.

As a writer, I've watched with dismay as English teachers have taught my kids to write (ridiculously short) papers by breaking up the process into 20 or 30 steps. This week, my 14-year-old son has an assignment to create a plan for writing a paper. He will never actually write the paper; his entire assignment is simply learning to plan how to write a paper.

Now I realize that the teachers are showing students how to take a challenging task and chunk it down into many pieces. You keep chunking a difficult task into smaller and smaller pieces, until each piece becomes manageable.

But once you master a task, chunking it down is a waste of time and effort. Instead, you should chunk familiar tasks up, until a 30-step process becomes a single task, or something close to it.

For example, I write one or two dozen articles a week; there is no way I could do this if each article required 30 steps. In many cases, I get - or am given - an idea, and simply sit down to write the piece. Idea, write, proof. That's three steps.

When I take on the challenge of writing a book - a dramatically larger challenge than an article - I chunk down. For example, I might seek to write 1,500 words per day, or to come up with five useful pieces of research in an early morning session.

Chunking can also be a wise strategy in a group setting. Imagine that your team has to introduce a new product or start using new software; it makes sense to chunk each of these innovations down into a series of highly detailed procedures. But as everyone gets comfortable, you will want to chunk up and start eliminating the lion's share of these baby steps.

Chunking saves you time in two ways.

First, if you try to tackle a large challenge without chunking it down, you risk failing repeatedly, or quitting before you succeed.

Second, if you fail to chunk up once you master a task, you are taking far too long to perform functions that should be done with barely any thought.