How the Tiny Task List changed my life

I have ADHD.

Before I knew I had ADHD, my partner and I were in a position where we were given both the opportunity and the curse of purchasing a property with ZERO warning. It’s a long and complicated story about why renting was no longer, and very suddenly, not an option for us but we had no money saved, no credit record and we needed a house.

More importantly, we needed (as part of that very long and complicated story) a house with a large yard.

What this meant was that we couldn’t afford to spend very much and we were asking for a lot. Which, in turn and quite obviously, meant that we ended up purchasing a house that needed a lot of work. We are lucky that it was immediately livable but… I have ADHD. Mess, clutter and broken tiles make me very anxious and I have very little patience. All of which make me very ill-suited to large-scale DIY and renovation projects, especially ones I have to do myself. My partner? Well, he also has ADHD although, admittedly, he is less affected by it.

We’ve recently hit the one-year mark for living in this house and I am happy that it has become a home. But we made very little progress in the first eleven months. We painted and unpacked (mostly) but not much more than that. And then, suddenly, everything changed. In two weeks, I got three garden beds dug out and prepared, I planted out one of them, I cleaned out the disaster-zone that was the backyard, I treated my existing plants for the various diseases they had developed and, somehow, managed to continue training my young puppy, kept a (mostly) tidy house and still spent time on art and writing, while also meeting deadlines at work.

What changed? Well, I was diagnosed and given medication, which was a good start, but I also worked out a new system.

I know that the age-old wisdom is to break your To Do list down into small, manageable tasks but I always failed at that. Some things just… aren’t small tasks? Right?

Actually, turns out they are. Just maybe not the way we realized. Enter: the Tiny Task List.

Tiny Tasks are tasks that take less than 5 minutes to do. Which means they’re super easy, super quick and can happen in the “in between moments” where you’re waiting to start doing other things. They’re great.

And the typical way of making Big Jobs into Tiny Tasks is to break it down into it’s smallest component. “Wash the dishes” can be “wash one cup”. I get why this should work and, if I’m honest, it sort-of does but it just feels annoying. And condescending. And like my body is capable of doing as little as my brain is and that makes me frustrated.

So I worked it out slightly differently and developed two types of lists that helped me get things done.

List One is stuck everywhere in my house. In the kitchen, bathroom, office, bedroom and in my planner. I started out by timing how long it took me to do the standard household chores — dishes, laundry, sweeping, all those things.

And, to my genuine surprise, most of them took less than 5 minutes. As a basic statement, that already fundamentally changed my attitude towards household chores. Which is a lesson in why accurate data is important.

Then I made a list of Tiny Tasks in the “Household Chores” category. Whenever I have a break, or am waiting for the kettle to boil or I’m waiting for someone to answer the phone and I’m just listening to it ring, I knock off one of the tasks and, somehow, the house stays clean.

I wrote this article backwards because I actually started with List Two and, after seeing how well it worked, figured List One would be a good way to go.

List Two has to do with the Big Jobs that simply can’t get done in 5 minutes. “Clean the backyard” is a Big Job. If I break it down and go “Clean the palm fronds from the backyard”, it’s still a Big Job.

But what about “Spend 5 minutes cleaning the palm fronds from the back yard”? Well, that’s a Tiny Task. Sure, the task doesn’t get finished in 5 minutes but I can definitely DO 5 minutes of work. What made the difference, though, was how quickly those bouts of 5 minutes added up: for 3 days, I moved palm fronds and a task that we’d been struggling to motivate ourselves to do was finished before the weekend. Sure, we could have worked for a few hours straight on a Saturday and gotten it done, but now it was done before Saturday and required a lot less motivation. (An added benefit was that, on Saturday, I could spend my time doing fun things that I enjoyed instead.)

Those flower beds that I prepared? Those were done in 2 days of 5 minute intervals: first, dig up what’s there for as many 5 minute slots as it takes to get it done. Then add one bag of compost at a time (which actually only took 1 minute and 48 seconds). Then water. Then repeat. Two days later, I had a 18 square meter bed ready for planting.

The lesson here was to be specific and plan ahead: I now look at the job and turn it into things that I can do for 5 minutes at a time. Next on that list is cutting old wood into firewood-sized pieces (cutting one long piece takes 2 minutes and 5 seconds — data is important). Then it’ll be moving those to the fireplace. After that, who knows. But when I start nearing the end of one task, I’ll start thinking of the next one and just try to get to each thing at least a few times a day. It is, after all, only 5 minutes.

This way of designing and thinking about tasks and jobs has made a huge impact on what gets done in our home and how our home stays clean. Which is great. But if you’ll forgive me waxing poetic for a moment, my favorite part of it all is how it showed me the power of small steps forward. 5 minutes never felt like enough time to get anything meaningful done. But changing my goals to completing multiple slots of 5 minutes helped us finish more in a few weeks than 11 months of trying to find the time and motivation to get big things done in shorter time frames.

In short: it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get a thing done, it only matters that it gets there. And getting there might be a whole lot easier, if a little slower, when you do just a tiny bit a few times a day.

Enjoy your Sunday evening, folks, I’m going to go cut some wood while I wait for the kettle to boil.

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