The key to the One Piece a Day philosophy is simple: there are many things in life that just seem too large to take on. Through One Piece, we learn that we can make a difference through small actions, even if solving the whole problem seems daunting (how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time).
This exercise started as a way of addressing my desire to clean up the urban landscape, and my feelings of hopelessness in the face of an endless and insurmountable project. But the approach has broadened and generalized itself in my life. Here are a handful of ways that One Piece has wormed its way successfully into my life.
Go Clean Your Room!
I am the father of a teenage daughter, one who has learned some bad habits from her parents - chiefly that of throwing clothes on the floor where they accumulate. Clean, dirty, who cares - on the floor they go. Add to that the books she has read, is reading, or wants to read. Add to that the growing LEGO collection and other hobbies. Telling her to clean her room forces her to face the accumulation, where she becomes overwhelmed with the sheer volume of things to be done. She has not yet learned how to organize her work, so it looks like a huge bolus of undifferentiated chaos.
It was only recently that it occurred to me to apply the One Piece philosophy to the cleaning problem. Tucking her in one night, I said "before I tuck you in, please pick up and deal with 5 pieces of clothes on the floor." To my surprise, this was accomplished quickly and easily. The next night I asked the same. Soon, the accumulation on the floor started to look more manageable. In a week, the floor was visible. So, I made it a general condition: "whenever you go into your room, try to do one thing to make things better."
Leave it better than you found it
I don't know why it took me so long to provide this advice. This has been part of my SOP for years - whenever I can, I try to do just a little more to leave an area better than I found it. When I mow my yard, I often mow the neighbor's adjacent plot while I'm at it. When I wash my hands in somebody else's bathroom, I wipe the sink and buff the faucet. Picking up a little bit of garbage at the bus stop or on the street is part of the same pattern.
Getting fly
When I mentioned this new pattern to my wife about our daughter and her newfound peace about cleaning her room a little at a time, she reminded me about Flylady. My wife has used flylady for a good portion of the last decade to help guide her housework. The practice is similar to the one Piece practice - choose one small thing to do each day to make the house better. Clean one bathroom, or dust all the shelves, or wash the wall above the stove, or find 15 things to throw away or give to charity. It builds on the same ideas about picking a manageable goal every day in order to accomplish a larger task.
A sprint doesn't have to be a marathon
At work this week, while these thoughts were percolating, a senior software engineer on my team gave a presentation about how he had helped the team to be more productive. He introduced changes to the way the team split up their work. Rather than allowing individual developers to take on complex tasks which required multiple weeks of work, he enforced a rule that limits the complexity of individual tasks - a large and complex task will be broken up into smaller tasks before it is assigned. (for those of you familiar with Scrum, this means that we've enforced that no individual story can be more than 3 story points. For the rest of you, my more general description will suffice). What he found was that the impact of doing small tasks and marking them done caused a feeling of accomplishment for the developers on the team, and this creates a desire to complete more tasks and mark them done. This has resulted in a greater throughput of work, better job satisfaction on the team, and better work life balance (when a task can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, he found, there are fewer developers working late into the night to try to close out tasks that were too big to complete quickly).
On reflection, he realized that this strategy applies some of the principles of gamification to the software development process. Completing a task and being able to mark it as "done" in a place that is visible to the team (on the scrum board) creates a feeling of accomplishment and a desire to revisit that personal success. Making the process public and visible creates a healthy competition between team members.
Begin your journey
In the past, I've encouraged my readers to apply a very specific principle to their lives - every day, find a piece of litter to pick up. However, I realize that the benefits of the One Piece philosophy are much broader and can apply to anyone's life in unique ways. What kinds of insurmountable tasks occupy your life, and how can One Piece help you break those problems into manageable tasks?
