One Piece at a Time

I thought I'd never get it done. Then I stopped looking at the whole project.

Back in July, I started cutting fabric for a wedding quilt. My son and his fiancée are getting married in October, and I wanted to make them something they could have for a lifetime. This particular pattern is broken into nine groups, and most of those groups have eight sections. I started working on Group E at a quilting retreat in August. By day three, I'd been sewing from about 9 a.m. until 1 a.m.—with breaks for meals and plenty of chatting, of course—and I remember thinking, I am never going to get this done. Then I counted the pieces and realized each section in Group E had 34 pieces of fabric. With eight sections, that meant 272 pieces in one group—and there are nine groups! (I’m making 2 of the same quilt and did that group for both at the same time, so that brings it up to 544!) Well, no wonder it felt like it was taking forever. I wasn't really working on "one group." I was cutting, arranging, sewing, pressing, and matching hundreds of individual pieces.

Once that group was finally finished, I moved on to another (thankfully, one with fewer pieces!), and something shifted. I could actually see the quilt taking shape. As I write this, I’ve finished D, E, F, H, J, and K, and I’m starting Group C. There's still plenty left to do, but now it looks less like a pile of fabric and more like the quilt I pictured when I started. (I'm just working on the wedding quilt now that I'm home again.) It got me thinking about a client launch I helped with recently. She had a firm deadline and a long list of things that needed to happen: a sales page, shopping cart, confirmation page, email automations with tags and sequences, a membership page, and an entire course. Looking at that whole list at once was a lot—for her and, honestly, for me too. So we tackled it the same way I've been tackling this quilt: one piece at a time.A few things helped us keep moving:

• Finish one piece before worrying about the next. We didn't try to build the sales page, emails, course, and membership area all at once. We worked through them one at a time.

• Small pieces still count as progress. One tag or email might not feel like much, but each completed piece moved the launch closer to being ready.

• You won't always see the finished picture right away. A pile of fabric doesn't look much like a quilt, and the early pieces of a launch don't look much like a finished system. That's okay.

• Keep going even when progress feels slow. When you're staring at everything that's left, it's easy to miss how much you've already accomplished.
  

That's the thing about big projects: sometimes you're making more progress than it feels like you're making. When you're in the middle of it, you see the 272 individual pieces. You see everything that's still left on the list instead of how much you've already accomplished.

Eventually, though, enough pieces come together that you can finally see what you've been working toward. My client's launch went live on time, and I'm going to do my very best to say the same about that wedding quilt on October 3! Neither one happened all at once. They happened one page, one email, one section, and one tiny piece at a time. So if your business—or your to-do list—looks like a pile of cut fabric right now, don't worry about putting the whole thing together today. Just pick the next piece and start there. And if you'd rather work through that next piece with a little company, come join us at the next meetup. Sometimes talking through what you're working on with people who get it is exactly what you need to keep moving.