“Your alarm goes off. You hit snooze.
10 minutes goes by. Your alarm goes off again. You hit snooze. Again.
One hour and several grunts, groans, and snooze smashes later, and you’re beating yourself for being lazy.
You drag your ass out of bed. You look around to see your laundry is in a heap in the corner, your dishes are piling up, your garbage can is overflowing, and your pizza boxes are making an impressive tower in the area around your recycling bin.
Now you’re beginning to feel overwhelmed. Your shoulders are becoming tense, your heart is starting to pound, and you can’t even fathom how you’re going to accomplish all you must do. You might even wish you were dead so you wouldn’t have to deal with it at all.
If this speaks to you on a deep level, you’re probably overthinking (I know I do), and on an overthinking level, I’ll share something I’ve done to not only get some shit done, but in a way that could appeal to our overthinking nature, and help you get really present in your day-to-day tedium (tedium being a nice way to say BS).
In a nutshell, it’s just… baby steps. But because we’re going to lean into thinking too much rather than thinking too little, I’m going to give it a fancy name: Micro-productivity.
We’re going to commit to a task, like cleaning the dishes. You have some energy in you, and the resolve to do something, but very low motivation. You’re going to do it anyway, and you’re going to accept that you already hate the idea of doing it. We’re going to break the task down into a series of simple steps that we accomplish.
- Grab dirty dish
- Soap up sponge
- Scrub dish until clean
- Rinse dish
- Place into dish rack
- Repeat 1-5 until either you run out of dishes, or the dish rack is full.
- If there are still dirty dishes to be cleaned, continue to step 8.
- Grab a clean, but still wet dish from the drying rack.
- Wipe dish with clean dish towel.
- Place dish into the appropriate spot in cupboard.
- Repeat until dish rack is empty again
- If dish rack is now empty, and there are still dishes to be cleaned, return to step 1. If dish rack is empty, and there are no more dishes to clean, congratulate yourself and go on to the next task.
Here’s the part that you may have difficulty with. When your mind starts to wander, and you start to spiral into despair and overwhelm, bring yourself back to focus on the task at hand. If you must, state the steps out loud. If you can’t do that, go have a seat and let your mind wander/race for about 10 minutes and no longer. Let the emotion in, but be responsible about it. Put a timer on, let the emotion dial up to 11, and after 10 minutes, get back to it. Presence is the key here. Be realistic. You can hate the thing you’re doing and still do it because it’s important. Because you have to. If you’re able to stay present during your daily tedium, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how quickly you might be able to get a lot of tasks done that you’ve been putting off, and still have time for yourself. There are 24 hours in a day, 16 hours of consciousness (assuming you sleep 8 hours. LOL). You have plenty of time in the day to get shit done. You can stare at your phone aimlessly when you’ve accomplished enough to feel 10% happier that day.
It’s going to be alright. You can do this. Do your best. Fix what you can, and be patient with yourself as you do.