Split Focus or a Complete Disaster?

I have always been a minor perfectionist, and by that I mean I have to make sure that when I consider something complete it has to be perfect, or at least in my mind. I know a lot of people always strive for this, but what happens when things build up and there are too many things to focus on, and completing everything to your own level of perfection becomes an ever growing and daunting prospect.

This has happened to me a lot, and it’s an easy trap to fall into. With me I end up losing complete motivation in tasks that are half finished due to having to move onto the next. Which just ends up building into a mess of incomplete tasks with more and more tasks being added to the list.

It’s a difficult thing to spot and I find it can be even harder to admit, both to yourself and others around you. However it makes me think back to the course I did on my own mental health journey. When you look at it the advise seems obvious and I know I had a complete face palm moment when I first heard it, but it works better than you think.

This advice is to take each task and break it down into minute long activities, then choose an activity on a task that you’ve lost your mojo on. You only have to do this for a minute, and at the end of the minute if you don’t feel you want to continue, stop. You can either move on to another activity in the list or to something else, but I find most of the time if the activity is small enough that I get my mojo back and end up completing the task.

It just takes that first step of breaking the mess down, and with time the list starts to shrink down so you can return to a manageable list.