More often than not I have an item lingering on my punch list that I just can’t seem to find the mental fortitude to tackle.
It’s typically not even something monumental, but my inaction makes it feel several orders of magnitude larger than it really is.
It’s often something that falls into one of the following buckets:
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Administrative or clerical work such as paying bills or filing some sort of paperwork.
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Queuing up social media content or email newsletters.
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Organizing and documenting recurring tasks.
Stack up several of these items up over the course of a few days or week and the overwhelm begins to creep in, shortly followed by low level anxiety and varying degrees of self doubt.
“Why can’t I ever seem to get anything done?”
“Maybe I need a new project management tool?”
“Once I get past ABC, everything will be perfect and I’ll finally have time to dedicate to XYZ.”
After some period of time externalizing my problems and fantasizing about future scenarios where I have infinite bandwidth for my infinite punch list, I close my email, put my phone in silent mode and just do the damn thing.
Somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes later, dopamine fueled elation hits as I proudly cross that item off my list.
I am free.
Liberation gives way to reflection and I realize how toxic letting small things pile up are to my psyche.
I quietly commit to do better next time but the reality is that I’ll probably continue to rinse and repeat.
I open up my text editor and quickly document my revelation along with an SOP, while it’s fresh.
Maybe I’ll even add an action item to Asana.
I make a mental note of who on my team can help me with this moving forward.
Or at least I do in theory.