One day recently, the kids had just finished up with dinner and it was just about time to get ready for bed. Part of our nightly routine is that before we head upstairs, the kids (mainly my son at this point since my daughters are too young) help with cleaning up all their toys they played with throughout the day. On this day, the kids must have went hard because there were toys everywhere. My son looked at me and said “Dad, I can’t do this, there are way too many toys!” He seemed defeated, gave up and moved on to laying on the couch.
Personal Meets Professional
Watching this made me think of a few things. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, I currently manage a professional services team in my career. One thing that my team is responsible for is guiding new clients through an implementation of our application when they are coming on board. The application we work with is not an easy thing to implement as there is a substantial amount of functionality to consider and it is dependent upon a tight integration with client upstream and downstream systems.
Needless to say, it is easy to take a look at the work ahead and get discouraged. However, into each implementation we bring a project plan that attempts to provide both a high-level view of what’s required and also drill down into specifics, establish timelines and milestones. The project plan allows us to track our progress and communicate status effectively throughout the entire implementation.
Approaching a new implementation is just like my son approaching a room full of toys. When my son got discouraged I sat on the couch and had a chat with him. We took a look at the room together and talked about what kinds of toys needed to be cleaned up and how we may be able to approach it. He and I broke it down into part of the room he could clean and parts that I could clean – we started small, one toy at a time and before you know it the room was good to go…and my son couldn’t help but smile when I hugged him and told him he did a great job.
The Lesson
The lesson that was reinforced for me, and hopefully one that I taught my son, is that anything is possible if you take a methodical, organized approach to working through what’s required – baby steps. Whether the task at hand is implementing software or cleaning a room full of toys, the approach is the same. It’s all about being organized and breaking down the work into small, manageable chunks. Don’t let yourself get discouraged the next time you’ve got a large task ahead of you. Take it one toy at a time and the next thing you know, you’ll have a clean room and will be ready for bed…and ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Another Source of the Lesson
As lessons are all around us, I found this particular one reinforced in another place just recently on 
- “Any task, no matter how big it is…you can reduce it to small components and methodically execute it…that is organization”
- “Doing well at school, graduate or any other kind of school, is not about being smart, it’s about being organized and breaking down learning into small chunks”
Get the book here, it’s a good one!
…anything is possible if you take a methodical, organized approach to working through what’s required – baby steps…