A good friend of mine told me over lunch today about how she recently re-discovered the importance of breaking huge, nagging tasks into bite size pieces. I completely agree with her, and found that whenever I don’t do just that, I end up procrastinating and not working on the problem at all. It’s interesting that both of us were math majors, and both of us are only now beginning to apply the lessons we should have learned in school, in the math and engineering classes.
As any engineer would tell you, to begin to solve a large and complex problem, the first step is always to break it up into multiple individual simple steps, that on their own pose little challenge, but summed together accomplish seemingly impossible.
Of course, this strategy is not new (aka Divide and Conquer), but I find that I struggle with having enough self-awareness to recognize a complex problem for what it is, and thereby fail to solve it effectively, piece by piece. Instead, it’s easy to get mired in the minutia of daily life, and not step back, think it through and attack the problem more strategically.
Engineers break it down
