There are many approaches to break down projects into tasks. What was always bothering me is the result for any medium or large project. When I see a list of dozen or more tasks in project, I feel a bit frustrated. Then I thought, what if I add one more level of organization.
I’ve spent two decades in software development and I’m a big fan of Agile methodologies. When customer comes with a need or an idea, we formulate it as an epic (the project), break it down into stories (parts we need to implement), and eventually actionable tasks in stories when it’s time to work on specific story. Later when looking at stories progress, it’s easy to see overall progress for the epic. That’s exactly what I miss, I thought.
So when I work with personal project, I break it down to steps and at some point I define tasks for those steps.
Steps
They follow their name exactly. They are steps in the project needed to get it done. They are not actionable by themselves. Instead they define logical steps in the project.
Suppose you want to go in vacation to Italy. Steps would be research potential places of interest and prices, pick cities and main attractions to visit, book transport and hotels, learn some basic phrases in Italian, take care of your dog while you’re in vacation, etc. Down the road new steps appear and it’s completely fine. For example, you may find out that your current credit card is not a great option in Italy and you need a different one.
Look at steps as a helper to organize the project. It’s easy to see when there is a blind spot (missing something important). It’s easy to see the progress. And it’s easy to decide what to take into week to act on.
With my approach to execution where I move one week at a time, it’s beneficial to size steps so that one can be completed in a week. Some steps are smaller and I may choose to take multiple steps from one project to a week. Some steps are larger and I may expect step to take multiple weeks. Definitely I can’t recommend artificially splitting steps just to fit in a week. When splitting, it has to make logical sense.
Tasks
Tasks are actions needed to accomplish steps. Tasks are actionable and atomic.
I bet you know a lot about tasks and use them every day. So I don’t see a need to go deep into a topic of what the task is. Instead let’s take a look at one aspect in step-tasks relationship.
Sometimes step may be so simple that it requires only one task to complete. This usually happens in small operational projects. There could be temptation to omit step and dive into task directly, but in my opinion that’s a bad idea because in my system steps and tasks are from different horizons of planning. Each of them have additional meaning at certain stages of the project.
Organizing projects can be challenging, especially for medium and large ones. Two-level approach with Steps (as logical phases) and Tasks (as actionable items) helps to plan, execute, and monitor projects efficiently. You should try it if you get lost in myriads of tasks existing in your project directly.