Re: I just don't know

[Rick Green – Founder of TotallyADD]

Cold Fire 5, that’s quite a story. And not an unusual one! (Which is the good news. Well, sort of good news.)

Great questions ‘distractomom’

I appreciate Cold Fire 5’s dilemma. One of the reasons that nothing seems to help is that your brain isn’t good a structure. So you feel like you can’t get anything accomplished. You probably are getting lots accomplished, just not what you want. Today I was supposed to do a dozen different things. Instead I watched some football, tidied some stuff, did two of the things on my list, sorted dishes, watched a program on the Marine Corps fighting in the Pacific… you get the idea.

(By the way, I’m alone most of today, which is never good. When Ava is here I’m much better at staying on task.)

The stuff that I didn’t get to was partly because I didn’t know where to start, and they seemed huge, overwhelming, beyond me.

One of the lines we use again and again in our video TotallyADD Tips for An Organized Life is the riddle, “How do you eat an entire elephant?” The answer, of course, is “One bit at a time.”

So for years one of my ‘To-Do’s’ had been to take the kids to Europe. And every year it was still there on my list. To do. Someday. Probably never.

When I would daydream of how great the trip would be I’d get sidetracked into wondering about money, booking, insurance, passports, schedules, getting time off, how to travel, where to go… Finally, one year, we received a very nice gift of money from my In-Laws. And Ava said, “This would pay for the trip to Paris.

So I did one small thing. I made a commitment to the kids, “We’re going to Paris.” Then I did the next step, which was to ask them when they could take two weeks off from school and summer jobs. While they were working that out, Ava started looking at airfares. I started a list of sights we should see. Once we had a date the kids were given ‘assignments’ to find out about how to get around Paris, about train fares, and so on. We sent out Emails and Facebook messages asking for suggestions on inexpensive spaces to stay and sure enough someone got us on to a small apartment that would sleep four, for $120 bucks a night. Incredible. And so it went.

When it would become overwhelming, I’d stop and break it down, and figure out what was one step I could take. And if I got stuck, I’d break that down.

So I get stuck when I confuse a single action, one small task, one doable ‘To-Do’ with … a a ‘big job’, a complex project, which has many steps. The trick is to start small. Pick one step in the right direction. And do that.

And if you can’t do that, then it probably means there is something in the way that has to be done first. A small task you need to finish first.

Rick

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