One step at a time.
Stress, overwhelm, and fractal to-do lists
I’m in the middle of moving houses, running two businesses, writing a memoir, and planning to set off on a roadtrip down the coast to see friends, sunsets, and sunrise on Alcatraz.
With each item I cross off of my to-do list, another three appear. Life feels like an overflowing bucket. And when I find my mind always thinking about the next thing I need to do, rather than focusing on the task that is in front of me, I repeat these words.
One step at a time.
I write it on my little whiteboard and the back of my hand and, like Bart Simpson, over and over in my notebook.
One step at a time.
One step at a time.
One step at a time.
Multitasking is a myth, after all. We can only ever actually do one thing at a time. It’s the reason why awe is the antidote to fear—your brain cannot hold both emotions in tandem.
And so I make checklists and to-do lists and write my plan for the day before I go to sleep and re-write my plan for the day when I wake up and each day I start with step one.
And if I find myself in the mess of a task “clean the house”, for example, I’ll write a new list. Fractals of to-do’s. Dust, wipe, sweep, mop. Still overwhelmed? I’ll break it into further fractals: room by room, surface by surface.
I’ve realized recently that the stress comes from trying to fix all the challenges all at once and what I really need to do is to prioritize. So when I feel incapacitated by the challenges of work, family tensions, mold in my house, my dog being sick, etc.. I need to figure out the most important one, focus on getting that sorted, before I can move on to the next.
Again, one step at a time.
In a recent podcast, Mel Robbins said that the difference between stress and overwhelm is that stress is what comes about when we have a lot to do—within our control—whereas overwhelm arises when the challenges we are presented with are outside of our control.
For the things that overwhelm, it’s helpful for me to name them as such. For example, I can’t control the mold in my house and it feels overwhelming. But I can control looking for a new rental, viewing those properties, booking a u-haul, packing, and moving.
Again, one step at a time.
I meditate on this banal but potent mantra each time I sit down to work on my memoir, too. As 55,000 words lay printed out in front of me, covered in my scribbles, arrows, and notes all the things that I must do with it come to mind. Restructuring, developing characters, mapping out the timeline, adding detail to descriptions and more.
Buut when I start seeing the entire book as a single impossible task, I return to the tiniest doorway I know: one chapter, one paragraph, one sentence, and one moment. And then another. And then another.