One Small Step Simplifies Project Completion

What has been sitting on (or under) your desk for weeks? You know, to remind you to complete it.  A client tells me the following tip helped her.

She had a box of ambiguously labelled CD's sitting under her desk for over a month. She didn't want to toss them until she was sure she had transferred their contents to her computer, but the mini-project kept being bypassed. I simply asked her to estimate the time it would take to determine what was on each CD, and check if the files were on her computer. She estimated 10 minutes. Multiply that by 19, the number of CD's in the box, and the total is 190 minutes, or 3 hours and 10 minutes. She wrote the time estimate on a sticky note, and placed it on the box. Of course, the project does not need to be completed all at once; anytime she has ten minutes, she can whittle away one CD. Just that one step, estimating the time involved, removed a huge unseen obstacle for her. She immediately made time estimates for a few other mini-projects that had been sitting on her desk, and used a sticky note reminder on each one.

Other solutions to consider:

• This particular project would be easy to delegate.
• Is it worth the time spent? Could you just let the CD's go?
• What would prevent this extra work in the future? Perhaps a simple "transferred" written on the label.