Daily Dose 54: Bits and Bites

Sweet Bites

In our house bits and bites happened two ways: for the children it meant an occasional weekly cycle of receiving treat tidbits for very distinct, specific practicing, chore, or school tasks. They might get one M & M for practicing a scale once. Five times, five M & Ms. Another day might be one goldfish cracker for playing four measures of a song. Or maybe they would get a  slice of a snack cake for doing a math problem or reciting one verse. These were not big rewards, just a little fun way to spark up the practicing, school work, or chores once in awhile. In our low budget atmosphere it made bags of M & Ms, and boxes of Little Debbie cakes go a long way!

Broken Bits

For me, bits and bites was less tasty. It meant home tasks broken into smaller tasks that would usually take fifteen minutes or less to do…the closet divided into four or five straightening zones, a dresser reorganized one drawer a day, the kitchen deep cleaned a shelf at a time.

Whether tiny treats for the children or tiny tasks for myself, bits and bites meant the same thing: building a routine or habit by attending to small parts of a bigger task. Why break tasks down into bits and bites? Why not just do the whole job all at once?

Advantages of Bit-sized Tasks

1. Timing. If something only took ten or fifteen minutes, I was fairly sure I could find a time to do it during the day, or a child could do it, and not lose interest or vigor for the task.
2. Designing how to break down, or divide up projects is the executive work behind the janitorial doing of routine tasks.
3. Children and other apprentices can master discrete tasks easier than large complicated assignments. After several discrete tasks are learned, they can be combined to build a complicated assignment, that won’t seem as large or complicated after all.
4. Smaller projects can receive clearer attention and focus.
5. Smaller projects make it easier to attend to the intangibles of attitude, thinking, and character, while doing the actual project.
6. Reminding ourselves (or apprentices) what a thorough job entails is more straightforward when the task is small.
7. Cleaning up after small tasks, i.e. a Sherlock Holmes Finish (removing every trace of a project), is easier to achieve.
8. Delayed or waylaid task tidbits can be readily rescheduled.
9. Connecting divergent process bits (praying for European missionaries while ironing Sunday shirts) is easier when big tasks (praying for the world and laundry) are broken down.
10. Successfully breaking down tasks means understanding the component parts of a task’s process:

• You know what has to happen to make the job or project succeed.
• You have determined where the task’s components range on a scale from vital to optional.
• You probably know the best order to complete the various parts of the task.
• You have an accurate time estimate for doing the discrete tasks and the entire project.
• You understand the entire process, and could probably show it to someone else.

Perhaps best of all, you can easily put the designed small parts back together to do a big task all at once and almost at a moment’s notice, if you need or want to do so.

Disadvantages of Bit-size Tasks

But for all these benefits, there are a few drawbacks to breaking up big tasks into smaller ones.

• It takes a fair amount of thinking time to wisely divide up a project. Some people view this as wasting time that could be spent just doing the job.
• Some people find it hard to “rest” when a job is in process, but not yet finished. They don’t like having half the drawers cleaned and organized and the other half waiting to happen.
• It is hard to see the profitable inefficiency of getting out and putting away the same cleaning supplies or tools out day after day, rather than doing so only once for a single marathon session.

What sorts of bits and bites projects might work for you?