Knocking Off the Ankle-Biters

It takes longer to dread a job than to do it. The dreaded, ankle-biter job for me today was attaching handles to my kitchen cabinets. It meant drilling out some holes and actually using a screwdriver. All in all, it was a short job compared to the weeks of dread ahead of today.

What other dreaded jobs are there?

• Ironing a stack of trousers;

• Bagging up donation items;

• Going through photos to print;

• Changing the light bulb in the the dining room chandelier;

• Gathering tax information;

• Facing the stack of papers from the nightly stack-and-pack routine.

Some of these ankle-biters take less than 10 minutes to do. Why don't I do them and just get the weight off my mind? For the bigger jobs, such as going through the photos on the computer, I could break that up into smaller bits, working for 15 minutes a day until it is finished.

I know what to do. Now the hard part is ignoring the dread, overcoming inertia, and just doing the job.

To tie into that thought, monitoring the use of my time would make sense. Instead of scrolling Facebook for 56 minutes, while eating orange sherbet and summer sausage, I could just do some of these ankle-biters. Yes, I did that, and it was shameful.

Next time, I'm setting a timer on the brainless activities instead of using it as a tool for continued procrastination. In the long run, the satisfaction of dealing with ankle-biters far outweighs the procrastination that usually accompanies dreading a job.