Gettin' Stuff Done

If they'd taught procrastination in school, I would've earned an A+. I'm great at not doing anything I "should" do. In fact, I'm so talented at resisting the shoulds of life that I can go for days without doing anything at all in that realm. I've transitioned from a youthful drive to do everything I believed was required of me, all for appearances sake, to a middle-aged devotion to choice.

I worship at the altar of the future when any task that tastes even slightly of requirement appears on my plate. I embody the Scarlett O'Hara motto, "I'll think about that tomorrow."  Thus, the mundane tasks that keep life moving -- dishes, laundry, grocery shopping, bill paying, housecleaning, daily exercise -- can loll comfortably on the sidelines of my life, free of fear that I will attack them.

I feel compelled to assure you that my home is not a moldering, infested heap. I do have standards and sufficient financial resources to enable this benign neglect: a dishwasher in which to hide dirty dishes, and an income that allows me to outsource housecleaning, for example. Still, what is simple and almost automatic for others -- gettin' stuff done -- is one of my life challenges. Unfortunately, this challenge affects really important goals, too.


At age five or so, we all had a window of opportunity to develop the Childhood Treasure of Vision. At that age, we enjoyed a nascent drive to plan, to create road maps for gettin' stuff done. Of course, back then the stuff was more fun than housework. I planned how to build an igloo fort in the snow, or how to "play school" with my sisters. It's when the planning is fun that we most benefit from nurture and support. At five, the adults who love us can give us the tools we need to develop this emerging drive to plan into a lifelong capacity to both plan and do. Having a vision is great but, unless I can achieve it, it's just a pretty picture in my mind.


Alas, the adults who loved me either did not have the tools themselves or were too distracted by their own dramas to notice that I needed them. So, I became an adult who is great at the planning. Period. Doing? I've got it nailed at work. At home, not so much. When I had the youthful whip of low self-esteem, I could flagellate myself into getting things done so that you would think well of me. I dropped that whip a while ago and don't miss it a bit.

Still, there must be a way to get stuff done without beating myself up. My currently preferred tools are: sneak attacks, a personal log, and daisy chains. The sneak attack consists of simply jumping into doing something without thinking about it first. I don't give my mind a chance to resist the plan. This approach could also be called the Nike tool: I just do it. The personal log consists of noticing self-satisfying outcomes and keeping an internal record of them. I can then remind myself how happy I was, how good I felt, the last time I achieved this goal. Then I link this valued outcome to another predictable and desired result, creating a daisy chain that connects one achievement to another.

I'll let you know how it's going...maybe tomorrow.