<aside> ❗ Focus on goals
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Before starting on a task, the first we need to do is to decide if this is even the right task to be done. What is its goal? Maybe there is a simpler task that will achieve similar goals. If there is, do that one instead. For example, if someone asks us to take care of dinner, do we have to cook the best dinner ever? No, we probably don't have to cook a 10-course menu for them. Depending on what they want, healthy or comfort, a nice salad or some pasta will do. Maybe we don't even have to cook at all! Maybe all we need is to grab our phone, decide what to order, and order it.
<aside> 🚀 Work less, ship sooner & get more rewards
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When something starts being planned and worked on, avoid making huge work at one block and prefer breaking it down into multiple tasks until you have the smallest possible tasks that can be delivered independently.
When a small task that can be delivered independently is done, it can be reviewed and published before the rest is done
→ This means customers can have some benefit sooner
source: https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp
Other advantages of creating small tasks:
<aside> 😃 If a part of a task can be published sooner, over time the overall task has more value than before
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That means that we can be already happy for having delivered something and that the costumers can already have some benefit. Over time, this generates a lot more happiness. If we assume that one month of work generates 1 "satisfaction point" among customers or within ourselves, let's look at the difference bettween one task that takes 10 months and 10 tasks that take one month:
If a task is finished 10 months after it was started, a lot of things could have changed in the meantime, and maybe the original plan isn't that valid anymore. When a part of a task can be published already, it gets feedback. In the example above, instead of waiting 10 months to get feedback, we can get feedback a lot sooner. That means there are more opportunities to correct course, and the final work will be better. But that also means less re-work, which also means:
Imagine what happens if the original plan of a task that takes 10 months was not a good idea to begin with and we get no "satisfaction points" for it? That means 10 months were wasted and we have to start over. Now imagine if after 7 tasks of 1 month, the result is already good enough and we already have 10 satisfaction points? Does the rest really need to be done? Maybe not, maybe there are better things to do like watching A Very Murray Christmas on Netflix with our dog.