How to Chunk Your Projects

Chunking Your Projects Down: Start at the Weekly Dashboard

In Momentum Planning, we know that you get Big Goals done by breaking them into smaller, doable parts. That's called a project chunk. When you start planning, start with a weekly project. From there, to create project chunks for a project, move to the Weekly Dashboard.

There you can create project chunks for every day of the week. This is how you set up your projects for success, and make them easy to move forward.

One single project chunk = a 90-minute to two-hour block. That block or chunk can be devoted to different kinds of activity. Admin blocks, social blocks, focus blocks, and recovery blocks are options to start out with for time blocking and project chunks. 

A focus block means making a two-hour period of time for devoting yourself to one aspect of a project. (Examples below.) Each day of the week, in your Weekly Dashboard, strive to have no more than five tasks, chunks or scheduled tasks. 

If you have more than five items (either project chunks or scheduled events) on any given day: you have too much going on, which can negatively impact your projects. This means it's time to cut down. 🤓

How to Create Project Chunks

You create project chunks on the Weekly Planner Dashboard (on mobile, the right-hand toggle of the weekly view). See below: 

All you have to do is click “+ Add a Project Chunk” and enter a name (verb+noun) for that chunk. 😇

‍This article offers more examples of how to chunk larger projects into doable parts. 

How to Link Chunks to Projects 

Daily project chunks live in the Weekly Dashboard and can be linked to your overarching projects (project chunks > weekly projects > monthly projects > quarterly projects).

If you see a 🔗 next to the project chunk’s title / description, it’s already associated with a particular project. 

1. Link your ‘Daily Project Chunks’ to your ‘Weekly Projects’. If there is no link, to create one select “...”. From the menu, select Edit, which opens the data entry field. Here, you have the option to choose a project.  (Since you thought about overall project priorities for the week when you added your projects, it won’t be too difficult to link those chunks to their projects.)

2. Add a deadline if you wish. If you know something is due on a particular day this week, you can add a deadline if it’s helpful for you.

3. Link your project and chunks visually with color. If it’s helpful for you to see at a glance how your project chunks and projects connect, you can choose a color for them when you create them (or add one later, via the edit function).

The project chunking structure offered by Momentum will help you:

• See at a glance which days are scheduled well, and which are too heavily scheduled.
• See what was missed in initial planning (weekly or daily) to improve planning for next week.
• Make sure weekly projects move forward. If the project chunks don't happen, the weekly projects won’t get done.

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