Break a big project into small bites

This article first appeared August 1, 2011.

Have you got a big project that you keep putting off? We certainly have at Taskmaster Enterprises.

Our big project is a website refresh, which as anyone who has built a website knows, is one of those painful, time-sucking-up tasks that you enter one day and emerge a year later looking frail and disorientated.

It’s not that we don’t want to do it, but we seem to always manage to find something just that little bit more important.

But now I am putting my foot down and we are going to attack it. The key is to break the big project into a to-do-list of 10 manageable projects that we can actually address.

Most importantly, we’ll set relatively tight deadlines so we actually feel like we’re chipping away at the big picture.

For example, we’ll start with a SWOT analysis of our current website and competitor sites.

Then we’ll move on to design concepts.

Separately, we’ll examine back-end issues.

After that, we’ll look at transferring data from the old site to the new site.

After that, we’ll get a feel for where we’re at and set up another five projects.

See, the whole thing seems so much more doable already. What big project can you attack in this way?

Get it done – today!