All or nothing!

Have you ever found yourself deferring a task until you had enough time to do it from start to finish? As if it somehow reflects badly on us to do something in stages. Now I love a 'killable' to do as much as the person, but I've come to realize this heroic approach to productivity might not be the best solution in all situations.

Take weeding the garden. 15 minutes per day would be sufficient effort to keep a small suburban courtyard garden and associated gravel paths pristine.

I recently caught myself thinking, 'the weeds will be easier to see if they're bigger'. True enough. A couple of days of dry weather and I decided to wait for the next rainfall, when the clay soil is more friable and weeding is a breeze. True enough. Less than a fortnight later (look, work was busy, ok?), I caught myself thinking, 'I won't weed today because the weeds are so established it will take all day. I don't want to spend my whole entire Saturday weeding.'

The heroic approach is the antithesis of 'a stitch in time saves nine' or in my case, a weed in time. The heroic approach is a form of perfectionism, an insidious delusion that tells us unless all the circumstances and results are PERFECT then there's no point. Perfectionism runs even more rampant than weeds, and can keep you locked in stasis for hours, days, weeks, months, years.

A friend recently told me a out her moving meditation: each day she had to go out to the garden and fill a plastic bag with weeds. That was all. No special instructions about thoughts etc. This helped her become less stressed, more centered. And her garden looks great too. Neither all nor nothing.

This is post 88 of 100 posts in 100 posts.
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