My wife asked me last week if I could please clean a shelf in the garage so that she can easily use the electric chargers we have for our various battery powered lawn and garden tools.
I confess that I am not the most organized person when it comes to things that don’t directly interest me. In this case, I had no trouble using the chargers even though they laid disorganized on top of other things that we rarely use.
Yesterday, while cutting the grass, it occurred to me that what my wife had asked was very simple and would not take much time. On other occasions she would ask me to clean up this or that and I would never get around to doing it. So I was wondering why?
I came to the conclusion that because something didn’t interest me it would be a big chore. It would take too much time. And again, it wasn’t a priority for me to do.
To my surprise, and hers, I decided to clean the shelf. It took about 10 minutes. A couple things got thrown out and some tools were hung in different places in the garage. My fascination was in the 10 minutes. It didn’t take that long at all. In fact, this was easy.
How many times do we do this same thing in our day? Being told to do something and spending so much time moping and finding excuses not to do it. The pattern re-occurs with the next reminder. We build up in our minds that there would be so much work in getting the request done. Deciding not to do it seems like a relief, when in reality it isn’t because it continues to re-appear.
My procrastination is habit. Doing something in 10 minutes, with respect to something I have little interest, is not. The surprise, besides how little time it took, was how good I felt that this no longer would haunt me. The shelf was clean and now I can move on.
What I learned is we build up too much resistance to many things that would be easier for us just to do. 10 minutes out of 24 hours is only 0.6% of our day. Get something off your list today. It will take less time than you think if only you try!