I’ve written about procrastination before, like this, yet last weekend I found another cause.
See, I have this old moving box with tons of unsorted documents, including some old stuff from his hospital time before moving on to the afterlife. You know, all that paper shit you have to deal with when parents die.
It’s been 11 years now, and as the recommended “keep that shit for 10 years because you never know” passed, I started to shred it slowly.
During my Sunday session, I got interrupted while I was stumbling upon my shit in that box. Unsure what to do with certain types of documents and, of course, putting that off for another time.
Which turned into a new realization.
We procrastinate because of overwhelm, too.
That can be overwhelm of the thing you wanna do itself because it’s so big and intimidating.
Or it is because of follow-up consequences causing overwhelm.
As a result, our brain protects us and shuts down. And we’re putting that shit off.
Luckily, there are ways to navigate such a situation.
If it’s big and scary, cut it into smaller tasks as tiny as necessary. Once small enough, it’s easier to tackle, and before we realize it, we’re already up half the mountain.
For the other, trying to navigate around the overwhelm-causing consequences. In my case, for example, I quickly looked through a set and shredded everything I deemed shred-worhty and the rest got handed to a “to do later pile”.
That prevented me from stopping directly, but some things will come back later.
But then we can tackle them at a time and place we decided on :-)