The phrase, “How to eat an elephant” was made famous by Bill Hogan in his excellent book titled How Do You Eat An Elephant?: One Bite at a Time.  Mr. Hogan’s work is an excellent reference when looking for fundamental principles that apply to leading and managing people.  For me, eating an elephant has less to do with managing and leading people, or generating ideas, but more with how to start and then finish a project.

The past month and a half have been challenging for me work wise.  The month of July saw me out of the office working six days a week on a high priority project.  Unfortunately, while working through this high priority project, I could not put the rest of my work life on hold.  People still needed to get in touch with me, minor projects still needed completion, my bosses still needed questions answered, and the master’s degree I am working on still required papers to be turned in.

Now that I am back in the office I find myself not only playing catch up on the last months worth of regular work, but also having to prepare for an upcoming extensive travel season.  Needless to say, when I planned out my week, and set my weekly priorities, I felt a little overwhelmed with all of the work that must be done.

However, the work did get done and I did not feel overly stressed in completing my priorities – Mainly because I chose to eat the elephant one bite at a time.  Elephants for me, are the large, seemingly impossible tasks that must be completed within a tight timeline.  And, in order to eat my elephants, I pull out my fork and start with one bite – here is what I mean:

1. Determine what your priorities are. Your priorities could be a school project, a work project, a goal of running a half marathon, or simply finishing a book while juggling the needs of a toddler.
2. Determine when your priorities need to be completed. Pull out whatever calendar device you use to highlight the timeframe you are committing to finish your project.  For example, in my case, one of the projects with a tight deadline was a paper due for the Masters Program I am enrolled in.  I prefer using Google Calendar for my planning and so I added a “project” to the dates I intended on dedicating to working on the paper.  So now, when I look at my Google Calendar, I see a banner at the top covering the dates I have dedicated to finishing my paper.
3. Work backwards from your target.  This is where you begin to eat the elephant one bite at a time.  For example, in my case, I needed to write 1500 words by Friday evening.  Broken over five days, this meant that I needed to write 300 words per day in order to meet my goal of 1500 by Friday evening.  Of course, I need time to proofread, so I set a goal of 500 words per day in order to build in the excess I believed I needed.

This rule applies to anything we do.  If our goal is to finish a book in two weeks, divide the number of pages by fourteen days and set aside the time to read those pages per day.  If your goal is to write a book, set aside twenty minutes per day and write – those twenty minutes add up over the course of a year.  Just three days of writing per week, for twenty minutes per day, equates to fifty-two hours of writing!  Now, that is eating an elephant one bite at a time!

Don’t have twenty minutes per day?  I would advise you to critically look at your time management.  How much time do you spend on your Facebook feed?  What do you do while the toddler is napping?  How much time did you spend on Netflix this past week?  Not that any of those things are bad in and of themselves, but. . . imagine what goals you could accomplish by breaking that elephant down into small, bite size chunks!

So – good luck with eating your own elephants!  I know you have them, and that you may even be intimidated by them.  So, if you eat that sucker, let me know how it goes!