Good morning, and happy Friday! I hope your day is off to a great start.
It’s the weekend again, and for most of us that means a couple of days to relax and rejuvenate before we have to get up and face next week. For others, it’s the two busiest days of the week, working to take care of all of us who don’t feel like cooking, want to be entertained, or need to go shopping.
And for some of us, it means tackling that big project we’ve been putting off, simply because there’s never enough time during the week. I know people who actually take vacation just to stay home and work. That doesn’t sound like much of a vacation to me. And it can make the weekend feel like it didn’t even happen. Seems to me there has to be an easier way.
But more often than not, we get to the end of these big projects and realize they weren’t quite as big as they seemed. Sometimes, it’s just the thought of it that was so daunting. Once we get started, things move along a little more quickly than we’d thought, and before long we’re finished with time to spare. Right. “And they all lived happily ever after.”
With me, projects always seem bigger than they were supposed to be. A simple faucet change on the sink turns into a major plumbing renovation because things that haven’t been touched in years are now being … well, touched. Throw in a little rust and corrosion, and things start to break. Big things. The ones that take five times as long to fix as the original repair and cost ten times as much.
Thankfully, I don’t have to mess with plumbing that often. And most other jobs around the house are pretty straightforward. If putting in a flower bed is the project of the week, you can pretty much plan the entire project and it’ll unfold as you’d imagined. Dig, pull weeds, dig again, plant flowers, dig again, pull more weeds, plant more flowers, lather, rinse, and repeat.
More often than not, our biggest hurdle is just getting started. And let me tell you, when that time comes, I get busier than I’ve ever been – doing anything BUT what I was supposed to be doing. I get up and make breakfast. For everybody. Then I wash dishes. Then I go to the store and lay out all the stuff I’ll need. Then I go back to the store for something I forgot. Then I make lunch. And on and on it goes.
Does that sound like anybody you know? I think most of us do that to some degree. By the time we get started, our brain is saying, “It’s too late – you’ll never get this done. You should have started earlier. Now you’ll just have to wait and do it next weekend.” It’s a rational solution to the fact that we just didn’t do what we knew we needed to do when we needed to do it. It’s an excuse.
And really, all we needed to do was just get started. Get all the materials ahead of time and have them ready to go. Get up early and have a light breakfast. Then put on your work clothes, roll up your sleeves, and dig in. Odds are you’ll get it done sooner than you think, and now you can sit back and enjoy not only a little rest, but the satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve truly earned it.
All too often, we let things slide that we could just as easily get done. We make them out to be bigger than they really are. We come up with a dozen other things we have to do first. And, more often than not, these are not things we need to do on the job. They’re things we need to do for ourselves. They’re the things that stand between us and whatever goals we’re trying to accomplish.
The loftier the goal and the longer it’ll take to reach it, the easier it becomes to put things off. But the longer we put things off, the greater the chance we’ll never get started in the first place. And five years from now, we’ll be left with the reality that, if we’d started five years ago, we’d be enjoying whatever it is we wanted in the first place.
If there’s something you want to do, something that’ll bring you closer to your own goals, just do it. Set aside the time and dig in. You’ll probably find that it was a lot easier than you’d thought and, armed with that small success, you’ll be ready to take on the next one. Then simply lather, rinse, and repeat. That goal is closer than you think.
That’s all for now. Have an awesome day!
© 2019 Dave Glardon – All rights reserved
Dave Glardon 