If You Can't Do Everything, Just Do Something

I just came back from my family vacation. We went to Big Sky Montana and Yellowstone National Park--both amazingly beautiful and super relaxing.

Then I came home.

Reality was right inside the front door, coiled up and waiting to strike like the snake that it sometimes is.  I'm a total optimist, and a very positive person in general. I'm up for just about any challenge. But, somehow whenever I come back from a week's worth of vacation I get a bit overwhelmed by everything that got backed up in my absence. Looking around at the mountains of unopened mail, still not completed school forms, and and realizing that I hadn't bought a single back to school supply or ordered any uniforms, made me feel anxious and, well, just plain inadequate. I went about the business of unburying myself from all of this and after a couple of days of working at it, the piles were smaller and the to do list was shorter, but the anxiety was still fairly high.

Sometimes when I feel like I'm never going to get it all done I just commit to getting one thing done. Something small, that can be accomplished quickly, that I will feel good about and enjoy the benefit of having done it. Think of something you look at every day--whether it be your entry table, your car, your silverware drawer. For me it was the drawer in my bathroom where I keep my skin care stuff. It had become kind of a jumbled mess (not unlike all my other bathroom drawers!) and every time I opened it--there it was--that feeling of inadequacy. I realize I could invest a lot of time in therapy countering that, but it's really much faster to just organize the drawer.

So I did.

BEFORE

AFTER

Something about knowing that I could in fact, accomplish something from start to finish, renewed my energy to continue with the things that most likely I'll be working on for the rest of the week.