Trying to stay on top of a mountain of information and tasks is daunting. In a high-tech, information-driven world, most of us are carrying more than we can hold in our heads at once.
How many productivity apps and systems have you downloaded or tried to help you eat your elephant?
And how long did those last, before you found yourself having to manage the very apps and systems on top of all the tasks you were already trying to manage?
I ask because I've done it more times than I'd like to admit. Earlier this year I built myself a dashboard specifically to keep on top of my weekly tasks. I spent days on it. I have not opened it since.
So, I've stopped assuming the answer is another tool.
Where I think it actually starts for me is with a single idea:
Master the Moment.
There's a line from Marcus Aurelius I keep coming back to. "Do not distress yourself by thinking of the whole of your life."
He wasn't writing about productivity, obviously, but the instruction holds. Drop the weight of what happened last week and what might happen next month and give your attention to the next sixty seconds.
What you're doing there is mentally stepping back from the whole problem, then narrowing it down to one action that sits completely within your control.
The elephant isn't too big.
In most cases the bite is.
Sizing the bite
Here's where I think most of us go wrong, myself included. We size the task for the version of ourselves who sat down and made the plan. That version had energy, an hour, and a clear head. He isn't the one who must do the work on a wet Tuesday afternoon.
So, the test I now use is a simple one: could I do this on a bad day?
Not an average day. A genuinely bad one, when I'm tired and behind and everything has gone wrong. If the honest answer is no, the bite is still too big, and I cut it in half and ask again.
Some examples from my own week:
"Sort out the shipping schedule" is an elephant. "Open the spreadsheet and read last week's figures" is a bite.
"Write the article" is an elephant. "Write the first paragraph badly" is a bite.
Neither of those bites requires me to be motivated, and that's the point. Consistency stops being something I must summon when the next step is small enough, that summoning isn't required.
What I'd suggest trying
Take the one thing you've been avoiding longest. Write down the next physical action it needs from you, the one you could do on a bad day in under five minutes. Then go and do that, and nothing else.
Tomorrow, do the same again.
In my experience, what you notice fairly quickly is that avoiding the task had less to do with the task than with the size of the thing you were picturing when you thought about it.
What's coming next
Mindset gets you started. But mindset on its own, won't keep you going. There's a practical side to this that I'll get to later this week: the one-page brain dump, which is the only system that has survived every app I've abandoned. It's a single sheet of paper, and I'll go through how I use it and what keeps it from turning into one more thing that needs maintaining.
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One article, most weeks.
Filed under · mindset · getting started · overwhelm · habits
