Re: procrastinating on horrible task

[Anonymous]

The only thing that gets me through is breaking whatever it is up into pieces and just doing one thing.

For example, all week I’ve had this annoying task I kept putting off, and yet it was SO SIMPLE. All I had to do was print the written pieces (already written and released) that ‘d done for a project late last year and put them into a binder for my boss for future reference.

Basic, right?! Yet it seemed impossible because I didn’t know where all the electronic files were (of course). I kept feeling panicky that I didn’t have everything. (Since it was all issued electronically, I hadn’t thought about having to save it.)

But I had procrastinated all week, and today, I thought, I’m just going to start the ball rolling toward getting it done.

Knowing she was not in a rush for it, I told myself, I would just find 5 of those pieces this morning, then 5 in the afternoon, and then forget about it for this week. Then I’ll do the same next week until it’s done.

As expected, getting to 5 turned out to be a piece of cake once I just got down to it, and once I started doing it, I got hyperfocused, ended up formatting it all consistently, creating a table of contents, and formal headings in word… And my boss got the full document with all of the pieces today, and was so thrilled with how official it looked, she’s going to share it with her boss.

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