“It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones. Attack them bit by bit. Big tasks need to be translated into smaller ones that show up on your daily task list. The only way to walk “It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones. Attack them bit by bit. Big tasks need to be translated into smaller ones that show up on your daily task list. The only way to walk a journey of a thousand miles is to take one step at a time.”
Barbara Oakley
"Procrastination can be like taking tiny amounts of poison. It may not seem harmful at the time, but the long-term effects can be very damaging."
Barbara Oakley
This past year I have thought of doing many things. Some of those things I've done, lots of them I haven't. I'm discovering things now that make me want to challenge all the assumptions I ever made about how hard things can be to do. Seriously, we can learn and do almost ANYTHING! I know I am repeating my message with many of the quotes I have been sharing this past year. It is because all this stuff about learning and making things happen is exciting!! The older I get the more I am thinking about time and how precious it is. I am (trying) to focus on what I want to do and learn and experience and to use my time to do these things and the results are crazy!! The opposite of what I thought would happen is happening... time is opening for things I want to do, and it is becoming easier to stay present with what I'm doing rather than go in circles over the news and what's happening, how much I want different things to happen.
And thinking of procrastination as a slow poisoning makes me look back on my life and see all the things I wanted to do but didn't make time for, all the friends I lost touch with cause I got distracted in temporary life shit while time eroded connections I had taken for granted, all the opportunities I missed because I was afraid to seem bold, didn't want to risk, feared failure or feared what success would mean... This hindsight is literally a gift, handed to me as it comes now before I die! In the pause of pace this pandemic has created I'm realizing there just isn't time for procrastination, we are not stuck in time and if it doesn't bring what I wish for I can make use of it to learn and try new things, which paradoxically takes off the limits to those wishes I wished for before.
To make myself feel like I'm doing something about all this I've been reading and listening and watching anything I can find about learning how to learn, how the brain works and tools I can find to train myself (and trick) myself out of procrastinating.
I started a new MOOK, I didn't know there was a name for the courses I've been taking, but this is super cool available learning to anyone with a suitable electronic device and internet access (Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available for anyone to enroll..) The current one (link below) I'm taking is where I heard about Barbara Oakley and is my evening entertainment until I need a break to process or I get tired of focusing or fall asleep. This week also I'm reading Jann Arden's book "If I knew Then" which reminds me that I'm not alone in aging and learning and loving the messiness of life, that freedom can be learned and earned and is always to be respected, that remembering people in our past with compassion, curiousity and gratitude can lead to forgiveness, that we can challenge any assumptions we've carried and it doesn't matter how ridiculous we come across we are going to be ridiculous anyways, which I really like!!
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