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get organi z ed

and squirting a few drops on the hinge . . . and wiping up the oil
that dripped on the floor. If you know where to find the oil and if
you don’t drip oil on the carpet, the whole project is a five-minute
job. Heck, you can do that on the way to dinner, and other than the
lack of a squeak, no one will even notice.

If you don’t know where the oil is, or if you don’t have any oil,
or if there’s a white carpet under that hinge and you are incorri-
gibly messy, then the job involves more steps and is going to take
much longer. But by going through this definition stage, you can
account for all these factors.

For larger tasks, this definition stage is proportionally more
important. If your assignment involves other people, getting them to
agree, money, contracts, the government, the weather—this list can
get fairly long—then the process can approach the complexity of proj-
ect management. That makes the definition stage crucial for complex
tasks as it permits those tasks to be broken down into smaller, more
manageable tasks. In fact, it is only by breaking down a large task into
small tasks that it’s possible to understand what steps are involved and
in what order they must be completed. It is in the defining stage that
the seemingly impossible and intimidating becomes possible.

If one of your tasks is writing a report, for example, and you are
enthusiastically avoiding the project knowing the amount of time and
effort it will consume, defining the parts of the report will make it
much more controllable. You were probably told in school that writ-
ing an outline is the best way to develop a report; it still is an excellent
method for organizing your thoughts. Or, you may prefer the mind
map method of capturing ideas as described elsewhere in this book.
By allotting even half an hour to this organizational step, it will pro-
vide a sense of accomplishment towards the overall goal.

Prioritize

Prioritizing is an important part of the organization and control
process. Priorities are those activities that influence your ability to

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