Generally by the time you are working on a truly giant project, you are using project management software to coordinate all the minor todos of each individual (and you have already gone through the process of breaking the larger tasks down into bite-sized pieces). This post was more a reflection of how I tackle initial, seemingly insurmountable problems at the individual level.

In order to manage this personally, I use Workflowy (http://workflowy.com), which is a good semantic representation of nested to-do lists, which is essentially what you are creating for this process. Yes, my Workflowy contains hundreds of small tasks. They aren't necessarily executed in order.