Friday, April 20, 2012

Do Double by Doing Half

Picture by Richard North
My tasks these days have become a little less glamorous than they used to be, but I still have chores and things I want to accomplish each day. The only problem is that I don't always have the energy to do it all at once anymore.
Rather than not doing anything at all, or delegating to my dearest husband (who would do anything I ask him, but how unfair would that be?), I split up tasks to make them more manageable.
I start by just doing half of what I have to do. And then I cut whatever's left in half again.
Say you have to finish a report, write a blog post, do a load of ironing. Tell yourself that for now it will suffice to just do half the report/blog post/load of wrinklies. After that you deserve a break (grab a cup of coffee or practice corpse pose for a couple of minutes). When you come back to the second half of the task, do the same thing. Cut it in half again, and take another break. Keep doing this until whatever's left of the task is so small that you would just rather finish it right away. 
So which task did I have to use this on? I almost feel embarrassed to tell you, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I'll do it anyways: I had to slice 4 loaves of bread by hand yesterday, and it just seemed like too much to do at once. I sliced two, took a break, than one, rested for a bit, then the other. I still got the job done quite quickly since the break times took no more than 5-10 minutes, but I didn't feel stressed and rushed because I took care of my myself in the process.

What do you think? Wanna give it a try? Let me know how it went!

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