When the project seems too big, just take it piece by piece
By Greg Waldock, Staff Writer
If you’re like me, cleaning is a chore. Nothing is more daunting than that messy floor, but it keeps growing because it’s just too much of a challenge.
Actually picking up the mess feels like an impossible task; the more you clean, the more mess you find. It feels like walking down an up escalator. Fortunately, there’s a big trick to help people like us, and it doesn’t just apply to cleaning a room—it can help with homework, hobbies, and anything else that requires time and focus. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
If you do have these problems like I do, then you’re probably trying to solve too many problems at once. You don’t eat an elephant by swallowing it whole, you make it edible first. Instead of cleaning your entire room, take out a bag of trash. Nothing else. Just the trash. The laundry might come after, but focus on the trash. One thing at a time. For writing a paper, don’t worry about formatting and citations and all that nonsense. It’ll come in time. Just write down a few sentences on what you know about a single, specific topic. Everything else will happen later. This idea is obviously so much easier said than done, but starting somewhere is all you need to do.
A lot of extremely messy or disorganized people see themselves as messy and disorganized to their core, but this isn’t really true; it’s often just a management problem. It’s not that “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it’s that Rome needs to be built house by house. You CAN solve all your problems, write all your papers, clean all your messes. You just have to do it one small piece of elephant meat at a time.
