Chunking down

December 4, 2012

by: Staci Stallings

This lesson is a great one for the holidays because let’s face it, we have overcrowded lives already, and then you add this HUGE amount of baking, buying, wrapping, decorating, packing, driving/flying, celebrating, and then cleaning up on top of it. It can get to be WAY too much.

The essence of this lesson is very simple: Don’t try to do a whole task, especially an overwhelming one, all at once.

Chunk it down.

What does that mean?

It means instead of trying to do ALL of the Christmas cards in one sitting, do 10 of them and then go do something else. Rotating through 3 or 4 different tasks, for me, makes things go faster and I don’t get as frazzled.

I do this with my books. Obviously you can’t write or edit a 400-page book in one sitting. So I chunk it down. I set a goal of say five written pages or 10 edited pages. When that amount is done, I then have the option of doing a few more or going to do something else.

I often do this around the house too. Instead of saying, “I’m going to clean the kitchen” when it is an absolute mess. I say, “I’m going to put 25 things into the dishwasher.” Often by the time I get to 25, there are only a few things left, and I can finish it with no trouble. If there are a lot of things left, I do something else for a few minutes and then do 25 more things.”

This one lesson has kept me from going crazy because I don’t look at the overwhelmingness of what I’m doing–I do what I CAN do and come back later to do another little chunk.

So what do you have that is overwhelming? Maybe it’s cleaning out a closet. Do one shelf at a time instead of all of it.

Maybe it’s a school project, chunk it down in to smaller pieces and do one or two small pieces. As you do a few smaller pieces, the whole thing will stop looking so overwhelming until the point when you just say, “I’m going to finish this” or to the point that finishing it looks doable.

Good luck chunking things down! And I hope your holidays are happy and filled with peace and joy!

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