Today I spent 30 minutes breaking down cardboard. I’ve developed a cardboard mountain near my front door, which has been building steadily as I grow uneasy looking at it every time I leave the house.
Tackling cardboard is one of my least favorite activities. You have to break it down, rip it up into pieces to fit it into the recycling bin. It’s a physical, exhausting task. Alternately, you can fit a ton of it into a big trunk, and haul it to the recycling center, but now you have to make an appointment in advance – which is a second layer of ordeal.
I’m sure there are people who are just effortlessly able to do these kinds of nagging tasks that require a few different steps in order to complete the task. I am not one of them. Here are a few of the ways I deal with this and other things like it.
- Keep a running list of nagging tasks.
- Schedule in a time of week where I complete the first step of a nagging task.
- Hold a weekly *Do the Thing hour on Wednesday where folks often complete these things together. (I’m looking at you phone calls to insurance, switching licenses, and doing PT exercises!)
- Ask a friend to hold me accountable to my task (shout out to Courtney who texted me reminders)
- Break down the task into a small action. What can I do to get started in 10 or 30 minutes?
- Pair the task with a positive thing: in this case, I put in an audio book, pulled out the boxes outside into the driveway in the sun and got to work.
- Reinforced positive feedback loop by literally writing a tweet giving myself a gold star, and then writing this blog post patting myself on the back. (You need to get your dopamine somewhere.)
What’s on your list? Please let me encourage you (and give you a gold sticker!)
