Chunky Tasks

Replace the coffee with an iced chai tea latte and you have
my current state of affairs.
(Photo credit: Quinntheislander via Pixabay)

As I write this post late on Wednesday afternoon, I'm taking a break from grading papers. It's the point in the semester where the piles of papers seem only to get larger and never to diminish. Over the past several years, I've played with a variety of strategies for getting through them, and the one that I've finally landed on is chunking.

I started out chunking by time, setting a goal of grading for, say, an hour before taking a break. While this was a good start, it didn't give me the sense of completion I sought. I knew I'd put in my time but, somehow, the pile didn't look appreciably smaller.

This semester, I'm chunking differently. I calculated the number of papers I needed to grade and when I needed to have them all back by, then decided how many papers I needed to grade each day in order to meet my goal. This way, I know exactly how many papers I've done (and how many remain) and that seems to be more rewarding.

Why not grade them all at once? I can do that with exams but, with essays, I grow weary and reach a point where the fifteenth paper is definitely not getting the same level of patience as the fifth, let alone the first. My students and I both benefit when I set reasonable goals.

Though I like this plan (especially since I'm on track to finish the last paper in this week's stack tonight), it does mean that I'm sometimes spending more time on this task each day than I'd like to because other things get pushed aside. I needed to skip church choir practice on Monday night because I wasn't on track to meet my goal and I haven't written much of anything all week because grading has been at the top of my list.

So what does all this have to do with organizing?

It's simple. This works for our organizing goals, too. Some we can face head on, powering through until we're finished. Others we can allot a certain amount of time to and, even if there's work to be done when time's up, we end with a sense of accomplishment. But, in some cases, we need to just break the big, overwhelming task down into smaller bits, building breaks in along the way so we don't stress ourselves out or lose our will to complete the task at hand.

Tomorrow, I'll take a look at three ways to apply chunking to piles and organizing tasks but, for now, I have papers to get back to.