Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Be the Tortoise
Everyone knows the fable of the tortoise and the hare, and its accompanying moral that slow and steady wins the race.Let’s be fair. The speedy hare would have won the race if she had just a bit more discipline. And in the Perfect Daughter’s line of work, I run into an awful lot of people in the hare category who are busy, scattered and trying to do far too much. Now, it is great to be a hare when you are on deadline, just like it is great to be a butterfly when you are thinking creatively. But the tortoise will always win in the long run because she finishes what she starts. Simple.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a hare. After all, I was a New Yorker living in the Midwest, so I cultivated my high-speed, high-stress personae. I thought of myself as fast, efficient and so, so busy. But I had my tortoise moments, too.
Back then, I my employer, a well-dressed lady who used to order a lot of clothes from mail order catalogs, we are talking pre-internet here. Naturally, she had a lot of returns, which weren’t Zappos-easy back then. They involved 12-digit item numbers and miniscule, detailed instructions printed on the back of the form you were trying to fill out. To cap it off, you had to either call UPS or schedule a pick-up or head out to the actual post office. How I dreaded this task! The reading and re-reading of the convoluted instructions, writing each letter into the tiny box, stuffing the clothes back into their original packaging.
After a while, though, it became no big deal. I just did it, one step at a time, methodically. I built a muscle, a skill callus, if you will. Persnickety tasks no longer daunted me because I had discovered that if I just followed a routine, I could bring them home. Small successes added up to bigger ones. The task I once abhored was now rather comforting because I had mastered it.
Sending holiday cards are another bellwether task that separates the tortoises from the hares. As a former hare, I would stay up all night working on cards to mail them out the next day. Sure I got it done, but not well and I always vowed to do it better next year. The all-night card session worked for me for a long time, but alas, it proved to be unsustainable. If you have to stay up all night to do your holiday cards then you probably haven’t planned it very well. Things worth doing are worth doing well and deserve to have real time budgeted to them.
The ‘hare’ operating system works great in a crunch. Hares go, go, go and get the big stuff done, but once the crisis is over, the hare doesn’t take care of all the little daily things that need to get done. And further, maybe it wasn’t a crisis situation. Maybe the hare made it into a crisis to find the impetus to get it done. The tortoise, however, unruffled and plodding, just sees the task as the next thing on the list to be methodically accomplished and crossed off.
I know, I know, you’re a New Yorker, you have a big job, a big family, you can’t help but be the speedy, busy, obsessive person you are. Me either.
All I am saying is find a way to cultivate your Inner Tortoise. Find your least favorite task, such as unloading the dishwasher or sorting mail, and just get it done. You’ll be calmer as you steadily conquer your To Do list, one tiny, inconsequential item at a time.