A Little at a Time.

Most things you don’t have to do at once, or in one sitting or one session. Most things you can do a little at a time. Not everything, of course. You really should eat a meal all at once, not spread it across your day, taking fork breaks for another bite. But things like yardwork, or cleaning (whether a filesystem or a physical room), lots of things get done in chunks.

Some things you’ll do better if you split up, even if you could do them all at once. Cleaning tends to go that way. If you’re focused on only a small part, you don’t tire or rush, and you do a better job. With other things, like putting away groceries, your ice cream would melt if you waited.

Another big reason for spreading out tasks is that it can give you a little boost when you finish another piece of it. This is a reinforcement feedback loop. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle—every time you fit a piece to another, it’s a small reward. If you otherwise don’t get a lot of feedback or reward in your daily activities, seeing some little thing made better can feel pretty good.

Doing little bits of a bigger thing lets you spend less time at once. If you walk down the hall ten times a day, and you want to dust the picture frames in the hall, you can dust off one each time you walk the hall with minimal time investment, and by the end of the day it’s done. Or if it’s something that doesn’t have a definite task size, and you can do it to music, do it for some number of songs.

There is a tradeoff: the cumulative setup and teardown time (the time spent getting ready to do the task and cleaning up after) gets repeated over each bout of effort. If the prep and cleanup is time-consuming, it’s often better to do it all at once. For example, washing a car requires a hose, bucket, soap, sponge. If you want to wash the car over multiple sessions, you’ll have to get everything ready each time, and you’ll have to clean up (empty and rinse the bucket, etc.) afterwards. All the picture frames in the hall required was a dust-rag, so no real time difference doing it all at once versus one at a time.

Visual artists might draw the background at first, work on other things, come back and block out the subject, come back and get the subject fixed, come back and add details, come back and add highlights or shading. It depends on the medium, though. If they’re doing it on a computer, it might take almost no setup or cleanup. If they’re working with fussy stuff like oil paints, where it would require brush cleaning, it might be better to do it all at once, or at least fewer sessions.

There are some tasks you can’t do all at once. You can’t read tomorrow’s newspaper or brush your teeth 14 times and take the week off. But you might be able to do prep work separately for some of those tasks. If you wear dentures, for example, you could have your denture cleaning kit ready ahead of time. Or you can plan ahead for possible tasks ahead of time.

These days, lots of people binge-watch shows, while others still choose to watch an episode per week. It’s nice to have the option. I like to go a bit at a time. What about you?