We investigate the relationship between ideal membership of an operator and its pieces relative to several canonical types of partitions of the entries of its matrix representation with respect to a given orthonormal basis. Our main theorems establish that if $T$ lies in an ideal $\mathcal{I}$, then $\sum P_n T P_n$ (or more generally $\sum Q_n T P_n$) lies in the arithmetic mean closure of $\mathcal{I}$ whenever ${P_n}$ (and also ${Q_n}$) is a sequence of mutually orthogonal projections; and in any basis for which $T$ is a block band matrix, in particular, when in Patnaik–Petrovic–Weiss universal block tridiagonal form, then all the sub/super/main-block diagonals of $T$ are in $\mathcal{I}$. And in particular, the principal ideal generated by this $T$ is the finite sum of the principal ideals generated by each sub/super/main-block diagonals.