I’ve discovered an easy way to tackle projects. I wish I knew this secret a long time ago; it would have helped me to get moving on school assignments and generally anything I wanted or needed to do.
This year, in early spring, I decided there were a few things I wanted to do around our cottage over the summer months. There were five projects in all.
Five projects seemed like a lot when we got up on vacation and I hesitated getting started on any of them. But finally I decided to start with the one project I wanted to do most.
Deciding which project to start on seemed to be the key to get me going from doing nothing to doing something. … And that’s the kickstart you need to get a project completed.
When you are facing something big, like five projects, it can seem like there’s too much to do, or you don’t know where to start. You can talk yourself right out of doing them.
It doesn’t have to be many projects either. It could be one large project or just a complicated one. When you think of all that it takes to get from start to finish, it can be overwhelming.
… And that thinking or feeling can stop you in your tracks from making progress.
The secret is to not think of the whole, but to think of only the first thing. Another way to look at it is to ask, “What’s the one thing I need to do first?”
That one thing can be as simple as deciding which of the five projects you want to complete the most. For me, that one thing was not that hard and it didn’t even take much time.
It only took me about ten minutes to decide which project I wanted to do first. Then what followed was just as important: I decided what I needed to do next.
That seems to be the key to keep yourself from stepping back and looking at the whole project start to finish, and in the process getting overwhelmed again. You just decide what the next thing you have to do is.
What I’ve found is that there are usually several small, easy steps I can do at the beginning, before I need to spend a lot of time on the project.
And those beginning easy steps serve to get me going. By the time I’ve completed them, I want to keep going and I’m mentally ready to invest more time and energy on the project.
In other words, I’ve slowly got myself to fully commit to and embrace the project to completion.
I completed the first project, moved on to the second and, in the process of completing that, realized I didn’t need to do two of the projects. … That leaves me with one left.
And today I will do something very small to kick-start the work on that. All it entails is to take off some duct tape, open an access door and survey my hot water tank. That shouldn’t take more than five minutes.
Here’s the thing: When you feel you need to discover more about Christ, draw closer to Him, or sense your relationship with God needs to move to the next level, just decide on one thing you need to do to kick-start that process. Maybe that one thing is deciding on a time, a book, a method. Start there and don’t forget to determine what the next step will be as well.
That’s Life!
Paul
Question: What project have you been procrastinating with that needs a kick-start? Leave your comment below.
