Break it down, and set deadlines
How to tackle an enormous challenge
As I mentioned in my previous post from a few days ago, I recently watched Touching the Void, a documentary film that chronicled the miraculous story of survival of two young friends who attempted to climb Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. One of the climbers, Joe Simpson, broke his leg while descending the mountain, and later fell into a deep crevasse. His friend, Simon Yates, left him for dead, and Joe was faced with the prospect of getting out of a crevasse and making his way down the mountain by himself.
After deciding to lower himself deeper into the crevasse, Joe discovered a sloping path which he followed out of the crevasse. Following his initial relief and jubilation from getting out of the crevasse, Joe quickly realized the enormity of his situation. In Joe’s own words:
“I was coming at this from having done the most serious climb of my life. If you come down safe from a climb like that, you would be just exhausted for days. You would just eat and drink and sleep… I’d just come out of that, I’d broken a leg, I was highly dehydrated, I had no food. There was no way you were physically going to do that.”
He had to go more than 5 miles down a mountain, navigating a maze of crevasses, climbing down over rocks and boulders, in minus 60 degree wind chill, dehydrated and with no food — and with a broken leg. The only way for him to get down would be to crawl and hop on his good leg. On top of it all, he had limited time. He needed to get down to base camp before Simon and a third climber left and returned to civilization.
Instead of being paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of the task in front of him, Joe focused on breaking it down into smaller, achievable tasks. Again, in Joe’s own words:
“And then it occurred to me, that I should set definite targets. I started to look at things and say, ‘Right, if I can get to that crevasse over there in 20 minutes, that’s what I’m going to do’… If I got there in 18 minutes, I was hysterically happy, and if I got there in 22 minutes, I was upset to the point of tears. It became almost obsessive.”
“I’d look at a rock, and go, ‘Right, I’ll get there in 20 minutes.’ Once I decided to go that distance in 20 minutes, I bloody well was going to do it. And it would help me, because I’d get halfway through the distance and I’d be in such pain, I couldn’t bear the thought of getting up and falling on it again. But I’d look at the time and think, ‘I’ve got to get there.’ I’d want to just lay there, and I’d think, ‘No, you’ve got to keep going, you’ve only got 10 minutes left.’”
There are a few things that I took away from hearing Joe talk about how he thought about his enormous challenge. First, he stopped focusing too much on the big picture and letting it daunt him. Instead, he set definite, achievable tasks for himself. And crucially, he set a time limit for himself to achieve the task. There was a great post from Ev Williams about what he has learned building Medium so far. One of the great quotes from the post was:
“Nothing clarifies focus like a date. (Or: If you don’t have a tough constraint, make one up.)… As soon as we picked the date and a minimal feature set, we got rid of loads of other features we were playing with… And we got more done in less time than I’d ever seen any team do. It was magical and fun. Before we had the date, frankly, we were drifting.”
Joe didn’t have the time (or luxury) to drift when he was out on Siula Grande fighting for his life. He needed the intense clarity of focus on achieving his next immediate goal, whether it was reaching the next crevasse or the next rock. And to give him that clarity of focus, he gave himself a clear deadline each time. Otherwise, he could have easily just drifted or become daunted, and he could have spent hours moving the distance he was capable of covering in 20 minutes.
In addition to clarity of focus, the other benefit of setting targets with deadlines was that it provided Joe with the motivation to keep pushing himself. He fixed the deadline for each smaller task and refused to move it, and then held himself accountable each time. When he was halfway through one of the smaller tasks and felt like taking a break, he used the deadline as a way to push himself to keep moving to achieve his goal. When he met his goal, he celebrated the smaller victory to himself, which gave him the confidence to set his next goal. And when he failed to reach his deadline, he gave himself a kick in the ass to motivate himself to do better next time.
Each of us has faced an enormous challenge that we may initially think is near-impossible. If we can learn from Joe Simpson’s experience, we will be better prepared to face those difficult tasks. The lessons for me as I reflect on Joe’s story are:
- Break down the difficult challenge into a series of smaller, achievable tasks.
- Set deadlines for yourself for each of the tasks.
- Don’t move the deadline. Instead, use it as a way to push yourself to complete each task on time.
- Celebrate the small wins, and hold yourself accountable (including lighting a fire under yourself) if you fail to meet a deadline.
After completing the series of smaller tasks, you can look back on what you achieved and realize that the seemingly impossible challenge was, in fact, actually possible.
How did it end for Joe? After three days of being stuck in the inhuman cold, without food or water and with a broken leg, Joe managed to crawl down five miles to base camp and was discovered by Simon Yates just hours before Simon planned to return to civilization. Joe accomplished the impossible—and survived—because he broke the impossible task into smaller targets with deadlines for himself.
