The importance of doing

Think right now about how many things you have ‘to do’. Is it a long list? What about the things not on the list that you ‘always mean to get to’… that’s getting quite a list isn’t it now? Just like tomorrow never comes and kettles never boil when watched, the only way to approach things should be ‘what can I do now’ not ‘when can I do it’.

Little bit often

If you saw the world as a whole or even the universe it would seem you were so small that you didn’t count. A task is like this. It can seem something will take so long there is no point in dealing with it now. What about breaking it down into manageable chunks – that becomes less daunting. You can easily fit in 10 minutes or smaller chunks to combat the task. An hour long task broken into 10 minutes is just 6 small times you have to deal with. Got to sort through 100gb of images… just break down into 1gb a time and there you go task done.

The Dung Beetle approach to time management

There used to be this advert for Kit Kat (a chocolate bar) which featured a little dung beetle pushing along a large ball and then taking a break from it to have a ‘kit kat’. Some dung beetles roll their name sake into large balls to store for food. They move this balls by slowly progressing along able to move sizes far larger than their size. They take their time and they progress, they get worn out they take a break and start again. Taking this approach to achieving something is a great method of chipping away at a large task. The phrase ‘a little bit often’ really does apply to good project bashing.

How many of us have tried the day a week or half day where we have to focus on things. I know for me this never has worked. The simple fact is you need to be regimented about breaking things down and dealing with it in manageable slices. You eat bite by bite and take that approach with tasks.

Squirreling time

Breaking things down into small pieces means you can dip in and out and before you know it have it done just like the dung beetle. Perhaps though to go with this we should look at another animal and Squirrel away some time. Think of your day and I’m fairly sure you can find at least 30 minutes in any day you’ve wasted. By taking those 30 minutes and committing them to a task you could roll that ball quite a long way.

The thought of starting is stopping

Sometimes just by the thought of starting you instantly enter into the internal dialogue that results in stopping. Why bother? You don’t have time now? Isn’t this dialogue though a problem? Isn’t it taking longer to have that then it would be to achieve a small chunk of the task? We find so many ways of distracting ourselves from just doing.

Out of site is out of mind

If you put it in a list no matter how great that funky all dancing application is you are filing it away and allowing the excuse of ‘out of sight out of mind’ to creep in. To do lists are fine but they are easy to hide away in a really nice shiny application or notebook. One thing I like to do is use the Apple Stickies application. Each time I open my desktop there facing me are the things I have to deal with. I keep stickies specifically for my ‘always mean to’ tasks rather than my daily tasks. Nothing like booting up your computer to see them staring in your face to get you to do something.

Make 2010 the year of the dung beetle

Personally, 2010 is going to be the year I finally put those niggling conversations that stop doing to the side and ‘just act’. It’s more a case of building habits at the start but just like anything the more you do it the more natural it becomes. Time management need not take time and achieving your goals need not take the same amount of planning as a military campaign. Sometimes taking the simplest approach and just acting in the moment is the best one.