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Writer's pictureMerle Kaplan

Just do ONE thing at a time (not eighty)

Updated: Oct 23, 2020

I dream of having a secretary. I could hire someone, of course, but how would I explain the job to them? "Hi, nice to meet you. Your job is to look around here and figure out what I should work on first. Then wait patiently while I do it. When I've completed that project, give me my next assignment. Got it?"


"So, let me get this straight," my puzzled new employee would say. "You want me to be your boss?."


"That is correct."


I know it sounds idiotic, but I'd pay well for this service. In fact, I can no longer afford not to...


When I write my daily to-do list I start staring into space, considering the spin-off projects that correlate with each item I've just written. In my mind, each simple task gives birth to baby tasks and then those baby tasks have babies. I panic at the thought of the workload looming on the horizon. These rapidly-approaching projects are big and scary, and I have no knowledge or skills to handle them. I will need outside help, but who can I ask? I have gone from writing the words "clean off table" to obsessing about emails, fixing my website, getting the "whole social media thing handled," to "how about those bills?" It's too much. Way too much. I immediately want to take a nap or play a video game.


But then I realized no one's asking me to do all those projects now. All I can do at this moment is ONE thing. Just one little, tiny thing. I can do that. I can get up off this chair and CONQUER the table piled with papers. It's not that bad, actually. If I set a timer to keep me focused, in twenty-five minutes I'll draw a big fat X in the box beside "clean off table" on my to-do list. YEAH!!


And after that, the sky's the limit!! Well...maybe not. The sky's pretty big. But I can move on to the next to-do item: "Scoop cat's litterbox." Then, it's on to "record monthly receipts," and so on. These things I can do. And I'm going to do them!! My brain can only handle doing one thing at a time, and that's fine with me. In fact, it's wonderful.





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