Have you had items like the following on your ToDo lists for a while?
- clean house
- organize tax info
- organize bookshelves by author
- clean Mac files and folders
- write year-end employee reviews
- clean WIndows files and folders
- clean garage
Although these are simple tasks (except maybe for the employee reviews), they can still take hours and are therefore easy to put off.
But the FlyLady has great advice that helps us get stuff like this done: do them in 5-minute bursts. For example, to accomplish the “Clean House” task put an item on your calendar that says “5-minute room rescue.” Then, spend the 5 minutes on the room you most dread cleaning. Do it again the next day. Or once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Spread it out as needed.
Of course, at some point, your mind realizes “hey, this isn’t really that bad,” and you just go ahead and do it all.
A couple of ebooks that emphasize this message well, along with other important change-making principles, are
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
- One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way
After you try this out, I suspect you’ll want to tell others about it, just like I did.