Can You Really Think Too Much? Why, Yes…Yes You Can

I’ve always been a planner. Even before I had kids it was my way of coping with uncertainty and fear. Anytime I was confused about something or didn’t know how to get a certain task done, I’d write down ways to get more information and plan out my approach to getting it done. I generally think that lists are great but, the problem is that they can also sometimes be endless. Over the years I have come across old notepads or calendars where the same entry appears several times throughout the pages – not because it was a recurring event but because I kept failing to get the task done.

There is no question that plans sometimes have to change, but if the underlying purpose of your list is to have something to hide behind, then the plans won’t get updated in a way that supports your mental, spiritual and emotional growth.

Your plans must change and grow along with you as a person or else you’ll become static and bored…or worse yet, you’ll just walk around in circles without any clue that you keep heading for the same unsatisfying place.

So, how do you check-in with yourself and finally drop the “list mask”?

Doing is Easy, Thinking is hard

When you think about it, all of us multi-task today in a way that we would have thought impossible just 15 – 20 years ago. There was no Facetime, Skype, cell phones, iPads, Google, online shopping, etc. 

By the way we now jockey between those things with the greatest of ease, it’s clear that, as a culture, we can “DO” stuff like nobody’s business! 

But you’d never know this if you listen to the way some people talk about the act of doing. “Oh, I really want to start exercising, but it’s so hard to get started!” or “I really want to quit my job, but there’s no way I can make it without this salary.”

It seems that we set ourselves up for things to be difficult when we decide to make changes in our lives. We “run the numbers” or plan things out in our head and by the time we’re finished mulling it over, we’re exhausted and defeated from the effort – and we haven’t even done anything yet!

Leo Babauta’s Frictionless Blogging Method

While browsing through the modules of the latest A-List Blogging Club Bootcamp workshop, I came across a terrific video by Leo Babauta that described his process for writing blog posts quickly. As I listened to the video, I wrote down each of the steps that Leo shared, eager to learn how to cut down on the time it takes me to get my posts done for the week. Everything was going swimmingly until I came across one of the last steps, which was to immediately press “publish” after writing a first draft of your post. No editing, no links, no pictures…just – boom – right out into the far reaches of the internet. The idea behind doing this, of course, is that you will not let the post sit for hours or days in wait of a “fix up” and the desire to get it all pretty before too many people see it. Well, I’m all for lighting a fire under myself for motivation, but this method seemed a bit too….raw for me – at first.

After putting the finishing touches on this very post – a week after I started it – I realized that perhaps the urgency of the “publish” button was not such a bad idea after all.

Plans Get Changed, DOING Changes Things

Getting back to the aforementioned repeat offenders on my never-ending “to do” list, one of the reasons that events and tasks kept rolling over was that, as should be expected, life intruded and required me to change things up a bit. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but leaving myself at the mercy of the list, always kept me spinning my wheels and playing catch-up. Sometimes we don’t realize that the list serves as a safe haven – as long as we have “the thing” written down, we know it’s there, so it becomes less urgent and we don’t actually have to do the thing.

What’s much more effective than an ongoing list is an Action List with a short time-frame of small action steps to cross off everyday. In this way we can figure out quickly what works and what we need to change, instead of waiting for circumstances to do it for us.

What’s Been Sitting on YOUR Back-burner?

I no longer have a random running to do list. Each task is broken up into small steps that lead up to the completion of the task. Some things may still take me a while to get done, but at least when the task is broken down and I have to do something on behalf of the end goal everyday, it takes the thinking, planning, worrying and organizing out of my head and gets me moving in the direction I want to go.

Your Turn

So...what goals or tasks have you been putting off by way of “thinking about it” or “planning it out”? Do you have a workable system to combat procrastination?

I look forward to hearing about your challenges and solutions for taking action via one of the social media sites listed below!