When Projects Become Giants

I have a project that I’ve been hoping to find time to work on for months. I’m shocked to even write that word - months. It’s embarrassing to admit to myself that I’ve let it go that long because I’m not much of a procrastinator. There’s nothing I love more than a to-do list with every single item crossed off. 

This project has been sitting in my mind for what seems like a long time. I think about it several times each week, but with summer upon us, it’s easy to spend my free time outside taking care of my tomato plants, watering my flowers, hanging out with our critters, or spending the day golfing with my husband. I just don’t know when I can fit it in right now. 

The thing about it is that this project could turn out to be a fairly big deal for my writing business. I think that might have something to do with my inability to move forward with it. 

Is it just me?

Have you ever had an idea, a chore, or a project that you let sit too long? For me, it seems the longer I stew about it, the bigger the thing becomes. 

This doesn’t only apply to life-changing plans, I can do this with minor things too. For instance, we have glass doors on our shower. After every shower, we either squeegee them to get rid of the water droplets or spray on a cleaning solution. I found the cleaning solution recipe in a magazine, and I really like using it because it’s quick and easy. But the bottle I mix the solution in will sit empty for weeks as I *think* about refilling it. What the heck???

You’d think the solution was a complicated mixture of 16 different items that I have to search for weeks to find. Nope. The recipe calls for FOUR different things, and one of them is water, all of which I have readily available underneath our kitchen sink. Sheesh!

Good podcast alert!

I listen to a podcast by a lady named Marie Pier-Tremblay called Self-Growth Nerds. She writes a wonderful email talking about the different projects she’s working on, and one of her latest podcast episodes caught my eye: The Overwhelm Barrier: What’s Really Stopping You. 

She’s divided this topic into two episodes because she intentionally breaks down what is happening in your brain to paralyze you from moving forward. I recognized myself in so much of it. 

I’m not one to do shoddy work, but I notice that when I dive right in, without hesitation, projects actually get done. 

Remember this?

It’s like when you’re little and you go to the local swimming pool. You’d really like to jump off the high dive, but once you climb up there and take a look around, doubts start to creep in. What if I get to the end of the board and the board snaps in two? What if my body twists as I’m jumping, and I end up doing a belly flop and can’t get over the pain to get back to the surface? What if I jump in so deeply that I run out of air before I can swim back up? 

All totally irrational, but once the thought is there, it’s not leaving anytime soon. 

A couple of years ago, I worked with a financial planner. She would give me assignments between our weekly or bi-weekly Zoom calls, and I would do my best to get them done. One of the things she asked me to do was to use Dave Ramsey’s app EveryDollar. She wanted me to type in every single transaction I had with money. 

At first, it was interesting to do. When you write down every single transaction, you quickly get to the point where, even though you might want to buy yourself a candy bar, your urge to forego it just so you don’t have to write it down later starts to win out. 

I had been putting off keeping track of the transactions and had managed to distract her with other questions and conversations for several weeks. Finally, we had a call where she started with the question, “How are you doing with keeping track of your transactions?” 

I had to come clean. I told her originally I had been doing it once a week. Then it got to be a couple weeks before I would sit down and do it. Then it became this giant monster of a project, and I hadn’t done it in at least a month. 

“If it’s become that big of a deal, let it go. You don’t have to do it.” I was shocked! I had done all I could to avoid talking about it (and doing it), and she was just telling me to LET IT GO? What a relief!

The funny thing was that once she told me I didn’t have to do it, I actually felt it become a much smaller project again, and it seemed perfectly doable. Go figure. 

Back to the point

But back to my current project. Now that I’m admitting I haven’t done anything on it in such a long time, the wheels in my head are slowly moving forward. It wouldn’t be THAT hard to set a timer and just work on it for ten minutes. Ten minutes might even turn into twenty or thirty! 

I could also text one of my friends and ask her to check on my progress every few days. I don’t like disappointing people, so that would be a lot of help. 

Often, the best way for me to get something done, much like climbing up the high dive and jumping off before I even have time for objections to form, is simply to start. Starting is really the hardest thing. 

That also helps me remember that AI is a great way to break projects down into smaller pieces. If you haven’t already, create an account on www.chatgpt.com. Type in: Can you break down staining my deck/planting a rosebush/learning how to play pickleball into several easy, doable steps?  You’ll be amazed how simple the project becomes. But if it still seems like a giant task, ask ChatGPT to break it down into even smaller steps. 

If all else fails, you can always take the advice of Elsa from the movie Frozen, and my financial planner, and just let it go.