Breaking Down Complicated Tasks vs Summarizing Exploratory Tasks

It’s common advice within the Getting Things Done philosophy to suggest breaking down complicated tasks into smaller pieces.

This is generally good advice because when a task is too broad, it becomes easy to defer and harder to complete. By breaking down a complicated task into smaller pieces, each sub-task is easier to understand and check off.

This practice becomes problematic when a large task is exploratory or creative. The next steps aren’t clear, and the smaller pieces are harder to anticipate.

In cases like these, you can either try to break tasks down anyway to the best of your knowledge. But you’ll end up re-writing these steps in the project each time you discover something new.

The alternative is to keep the task description high-level and not break it down at all.

I tend to prefer the latter, as breaking down tasks with unknowable next steps is a waste of time. But how do you know which tasks are complicated vs which ones are abstract?

If you see yourself either a) deferring the task continuously while taking no action, or b) taking a lot of action around the task with no real progress, then chances are the task needs to be broken down.

However, if you feel you need to experiment first before knowing what to do next, then you are dealing with an exploratory task that is better kept broadly defined.

Keep things light. You’ll keep your task manager easy to manage, your weekly review will remain quick and painless, and you give yourself room for creativity in your tasks when the situation calls for it.