“When problems overwhelm us, and sadness smothers us, where do we find the will and the courage to continue?
Well, the answer may come in the caring voice of a friend, a chance encounter with a book, or from a personal faith. For Janet help came from her faith, but it also came from a squirrel. Shortly after her divorce, Janet lost her father, then she lost her job. She had mounting money problems.
But Janet not only survived, she worked her way out of despondency and now she says, life is good again. How could this happen?
She told me that late one Autumn day when she was at her lowest she watched a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter, one at a time he would take them to the nest.
And she thought, if that squirrel can take care of himself with the harsh winter coming along, then so can I. Once I broke my problems into small pieces I was able to carry them, just like those acorns, one at a time.”
— “Little Acorns” by The White Stripes
A therapist colleague used a different metaphor.
Patient: "I'm overwhelmed by (task) and can't get going."
Therapist "Do you know how to eat an elephant?"
Patient: "Uh... No?"
Therapist: "One bite at a time."
Like "Open IDE and two terminals and point terminals to correct branch".
First, I enjoy the process - moleskin + favorite pen. Second, my brain started to think about the task. Third, I starting to get into flow state". Usually I jot down like a dozen of those steps or so and I'm pretty deep in the flow by then.
A computer is a great tool for documenting important things that I need to keep, but for scheduling my day I just use a notebook. I can browse through them for a couple of days but most pages will not be needed in a few weeks from now.
The important stuff that comes from this I do digitize with a tool like draw.io. Which I hate to use actually, it's not user-friendly to me, but it's what we use at work.
Really great stuff
For example, get up early every day, get ready and go directly to an area where the only thing you do is work on your tasks and you force yourself to accomplish at least a task while you are there. It's amazing how your point of view changes once you don't have to think about what you will do next and when you will do it.
“Eighty percent of success is showing up,” is absolutely true. Especially, if you don't have to think about it.
It's been a whole new world since then.
This is because our usual ways of procrastinating give us instant gratification with very little effort, so they raise the bar for real work that gets us there with much more effort, often for less tangible gratification.
Video games are particular bad in this regard (and I've played many 1000s of hours).
Surely holds true for me.
That's pure genius!
I came up with a fundamentally "agile" solution: break the problems down into smaller tasks until the first task is too small to offer resistance.
E.g. rather than "write architecture specification", start with "outline the heads for architecture spec" and then maybe "draw rough sketch of architecture on paper" and then maybe "write introduction".
Almost everything in my to do list these days can be executed in under 10 minutes. As a bonus, it gives you the dopamine hit / satisfaction of watching a stead stream of items moving from 'todo' to 'done' state on a daily basis.