零敲碎打

1. • to do things in bits and pieces (idiom) piecemeal work

Character by character

• 零(líng)zero
• 敲(qiāo)hit
• 碎(suì)shatter
• 打(dǎ)a semantically light, transitive verb that is combined with various grammatical objects to form compound verbs and verb-object phrases with a diverse range of meanings