Just Do It

Apart from the subtitle sounding like a Nike advert, never a truer word was spoken.

We’re all faced with a pile of stuff from time to time (or all the time) that we just don’t want to face up to. Our back-burners have buckled under the weight of ‘to do’.

Trouble is, it can literally weigh us down (I know this sounds bizarre but as I clear out my sh*t, the more weight drops off) as well as figuratively — causing a weight on our shoulders.

I’m quite a neat person (although my husband would protest) and apart from being one of those anal Virgo’s, I’m also slightly OCD. However, I’m just as guilty as the rest in putting things off.

The other day I really noticed it in myself (the inner sloth). I was watering my garden and every flower bed I hit I found my inner dialogue repeating, ‘I must pull that weed out sometime‘ or ‘I must put that back, the wind blew it over‘ or ‘I need to re-pot that poor, dying plant‘.

This scenario may not seem like the end of the world to most but it’s representational of many little things that stack up to form avalanching mountains in our minds.

Back to the Garden Revelation

So, as I was clocking up a list of ‘to do’s’ in the garden I stopped. The inner voice said, ‘why don’t you do it now?’

What a novel idea!

There was another voice in my head that protested that I didn’t have the time now (that voice crops up a lot). I thought about it for a sec and then just bent down and pulled out a half a meter weed (one of those little ones that I kept on telling myself to pull that grew into a small tree).

And there is my ‘ta-daa’ revelation.

Just do it. Don’t think about it. Just DOOOOO it.

Other Applications

I started trying this ‘just do it‘ approach to many other things and was actually quite startled at how LITTLE time it truly takes. I’ve been putting things ‘straight’ as I see them now and — for goodness sake — why have I not done this before?

It really doesn’t take a lot of time to do smaller chores around the house, garden or office and when you act in the moment you save yourself a lot of time, bother and burden.

Maybe you do this already and I’m just a slow learner — kudos to you. But if you are a procrastinator that always delegates odd jobs to another time — I challenge you to the ‘just do it‘ system, see how it works for you.

The great benefit of this is it’s addictive — the more you ‘clear up’ and see how nice it looks, the more you want to achieve. It also clears space (headspace and clutter) so you can make room for more awesomeness to enter your life.

Go on, just do it!

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