Every Monday morning I understand what it must be like to be my child when I tell them, “Go clean up the toy room.”
Basically, their heads explode with the enormity of their task. Sure, they made the mess, but they feel that this Herculean labor is beyond the reach of mortals. And that’s how I feel about making breakfast on Monday morning, much less tackling the actual responsibilities of my day. So I like to go back to those fundamentals of productivity that everyone has heard and yet still yield results. Here’s a quick reminder:
Clean up your workspace.
A cluttered mind has a hard time focusing in a cluttered work space. As I entered into another phase (sheet rock) of a remodel project, I took the time to remove all the tools and left-over materials from previous phases (framing, electrical, insulation, etc…) . Suddenly the sheet rock phase didn’t seem so overwhelming and my frustrations waned when I wasn’t tripping over random tools. Clean up your work space.
Make a list.
Generally, start with the most important things to to do and work your way down. But on Monday, I start with a gimme. I start with something I am good at that can be completed in a reasonable amount of time. I want the satisfaction of having completed something to fill my sails so that other tasks seem manageable.
Divide large jobs into manageable chunks.
Some days you don’t cut down the tree, but you hit it enough times with an axe that you make some progress. Cleaning up the entire toy room is too much for my 4 year old. So I have to break it down into manage tasks like “put all the stuffed animals in the right bin” and so on. Back to my remodel project…it was really starting to stress me out with how much needed to be done and how little time I have to work on it. So I would give myself manageable goals, such as “remove the old nails/screws in the lumber”. After several days of tackling smaller, manageable tasks the project has taken a considerable leap forward.
Do Good
Last week, as I was feeling a little overwhelmed by a slew of responsibilities, I came across Psalm 11:7, For the righteous LORD loveth righteousness. What a lovely and peaceful thought to know that God is more pleased by my righteousness than by my productivity. I love setting and achieving goals and I know that managing my life yields blessings. But the primary objective of life is to please the Lord, and what pleases Him is living in a righteous way. So whatever you do or do not accomplish today, determine to live your life in a way that the Lord God Almighty loves.
What a lovely and peaceful thought to know that God is more pleased by my righteousness than by my productivity.
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Nathan Writes 