Chipping Away....

My To Do List is shrinking and has been shrinking quickly over the past few days....though it is still way to ginormous!! I never thought that I would actually be making progress on this horrible nightmare of ever growing tasks.


In the past few days I have started cleaning different sections of my apartment, finished grading 48 pages of accounting work, ordered Christmas presents for our nephew, made significant progress in sorting through our Santorini pictures, almost finished up my wrapping course, started organizing my new planner, caught up on reading some of that baby book stuff, and put up our Christmas decorations! Whew.


How have I motivated myself to get this done? Very, very simple.


First, I try to keep this quote in mind every day. "Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task" ~ William James. This is so true. It is quite stressful to look at a long list of things to do and have to think about where to start and how you will finish it all. So, I try to keep this in mind when the list feels overwhelming and just start chipping away at it.


Next, Ten actually gave me some good advice on time management. We were talking about how useful it is to make lists. However, you should only put half of what you think you can get done on the list. This has helped me tons!! I can't say how much this has helped me. Each day I write down one big task that I want to finish up along with the small ones that I need to finish up. This has really kept me on track. Before I would write down enough to keep me busy for a month and try to squeeze it into a single day in my planner....bad, bad idea...haha.


This may be the first time that I am able to whittle this thing down for good!!