only in chunks, please.

‘You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six’
Yogi Berra

The way a task is presented affects people's willingness to take it on and complete it (or not!) Something presented as one long task will be less likely to engage people than something that is efficiently 'chunked up' into bite-sized’ mini tasks. Used frequently in  behavioural economics, and cognitive psychlogy, ‘chunking’ involves grouping smaller, disparate elements into a sequence or categorizing a process into sections or ‘types’  to make it easier for people to comprehend, retain information, or make a sustained change in behaviour. 

An oft cited example,  by many practionioners, is one that involves applying this concept of ‘chunking’  to help people complete the course of medication  precribed to them. There  is a huge risk incurred, for example, when people fail to complete courses of antibiotics. Instead of giving people, the entire course of antibiotics and asking them to take, say 22 tablets, twice daily,it might be better to ‘chunk’ this down. Giving them, say, 10 white pills and 12 blue ones and telling them to take the white pills first followed by the blue ones, the likelihood of people completing the entire course increases significanlty. 

In FMCG, the Skin Care category has leveraged this understanding remarkably well, to help simplify an incredibly complex multi step skin care regimen by ‘chunking’ products into cleansing–toning–moistirizing–whitening–anti ageing or day and night routines, helping people make sense of an unimaginable & impossible range of products and routines to use & follow in the quest for what they deem to be great skin.

In retail, IKEA is one of the players that does a brillaint job of helping consumers navigate their almost impossible  product range by ‘chunking’  them into rooms, & themed spaces that make browzing manageable and the dwell time engaging, both online and in-store, often resulting in people leaving IKEA with more than what they had intended to purchase ! 

Chunking has also been extensivey used in the context of not just learning & communication, but also when dealing with complex goals like qutting smoking, adopting healthier meals, better financial planning , better everyday hygiene etc, by helping break a larger goal into simpler, more platable, doable, organizable & trackable smaller steps.  

In a TED video about the 'Art of Choosing'  psycho-economist Sheena Iyengar describes the ‘deer-in-headlights’ paralysis that people experience when faced with an overwhelming choice  and/or information overload. If those same choices & that same  information is organized well, and presented in a manner that people can effectively process and ‘consume’ , it leads to smoother  & more satisfying decision making.  In the midst of the Coronavirus crisis and the economic fallout, for example, some trading platforms did a tremendous job of  ‘chunking’ the various stocks contextually as ‘stay at home services stock’,‘work from home services stock’, ‘online learning stocks’ to help people make sense of the chaos and guide their decision making process efficiently. 

Brands are constantly striving to be more relevant and meaningful in the lives of people they want to engage with. In this endeavor they often end up overstuffing their audiences's, media & screen environment that is already bulging at its seams. If they truly want to matter to their audiences, it might be important for them to classify, organize, categorize, collate, and chunk all that content & solutions into manageable, palatable, portions that uniquely & culturally make sense to people they are serving it all to.  
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A book with its thoughts clearly organized into chapters is, after all, easier to make sense of,  than all the discrete 61000000 words that go into making it .