First, an arbitrary but memorable milestone: this marks the 100th weekly Tidy Tuesday post I've shared with all of you wonderful people. Whether you've just subscribed or been with me from the beginning, thanks for believing in the value of these posts. 🥳🎉🎈
With that out of the way...
This is the last week of Big Picture Month in Tidy '24. I always find it helpful to take a step back like this to help re-focus big goals into the right small actions that actually achieve those goals. Let's get to it!
Big Picture Week 5: Immediate Tasks
I like to think about the Big Picture journey this month as a parabola, a giant arc that begins on the ground, reaches incredible heights at its peak, and then dives back down to the ground with new focus and purpose.
It's as if you're lost in the woods, or perhaps a giant maze, and you take a massive leap into the air to see your surroundings clearly: an accurate "big picture" view. Once you have this view in mind and you glimpse your destination, it's time to get back to the ground where the real work happens.
You can trace this arc over all five weeks of this month, finishing with today:
- Week 1: Pain points - lost in the woods
- Week 2: Root cause - rising higher to see what's really causing the problem
- Week 3: Long-term goals - looking for the forest exit (or the end of the maze)
- Week 4: Short-term goals - determining which direction to go from here
- Week 5: Immediate tasks - choosing the next step to take
Today, we're at the end of the arc. We're back on the ground. We know where we want to go with long-term goals, and we have an idea of which direction will take us that way with short-term goals. We'll probably have to reorient and adjust several times, but that's fine.
Now, it's time to take your short-term goal(s) from last week and identify one single next step to move you towards that goal.
I'll continue with the example of overwhelming email that I used last week, presenting it inside this five-week "Big Picture" process:
- 😖 Pain point: You hate opening your email inbox.
- 🤔 Root cause: You receive way more email than you read and don't efficiently clean and organize what you have.
- 🎯 Long-term goal: Reach and maintain Inbox Zero.
- 🥅 Short-term goal: Unsubscribe from everything you don't absolutely need to keep.
- ☑️ Immediate task: Unsubscribe from one newsletter or promotional email currently in your inbox.
See the ground-to-sky-to-ground arc?
You can apply this approach to projects where you feel you need better direction, whether big or small, digital or otherwise. But it's certainly handy for many of the tech and data organization challenges we're likely to encounter.
I want to mention that for Steps 3 and 4 (long-term and short-term goals), you might have more than one goal--especially the short-term goals. In the example above, for instance, unsubscribing is a crucial part, but it's not the only step.
Sometimes, you could have multiple short-term or long-term goals, depending on how you define them. There's nothing wrong with this. You can work towards each goal in order or attack them simultaneously if doing so makes sense and feels achievable to you.
The key is that whatever your long-term and short-term goals are, you always return to ground level after a big-picture analysis to define a crystal-clear single next step. Having an immediate task like this avoids one of the common causes of overwhelm and procrastination: simply not knowing what to do.
Also, in the example above, you might notice that the immediate task is repeatable. You can do it daily, weekly, before or after mealtimes, at every restroom break, or any other time. You don't have to come up with something new to do after you complete it the first time. This kind of "reusable task" is great since it minimizes friction as you progress.
So, for this final week in Big Picture Month, take a short-term goal from last week and break it down into at least one bite-size task. Aim for the following:
- You already know how to do it
- It takes 5 minutes or less to complete
- It doesn't require much (or any) setup
- BONUS: It's repeatable, so you can do it again later to continue making progress
See if you can get through at least one such task before the end of the month--only a couple of days away, I know! But challenges provide extra motivation, right?
Thanks for walking through this topic with me this month, and happy data-taming!