I am an organizer of things. I combine orders and inventory into packages. I sort piles of dirty laundry into piles of neatly folded clean clothes. I take an unending task list and make of it a schedule which has a chance of allowing the tasks to get done. I turn jumbled piles of papers into neat files. I transform masses of weeds into flower beds. I tally invoices and checks into accounts and tax forms. I take a room in which everything is topsy turvey and turn it into a livable space. I even organize stray thoughts into blog entries. All of this is as natural to me as breathing, but sometimes I am forced to face the fact that the tasks themselves are not easy. They are actually complex processes that I have performed so often that they have become routine to me.
My primary confrontation with the complexity of these tasks is when I attempt to teach one of them to my children. When faced with a messy room, my kids will start to pick over the mess at random. They’ll pick up a few things, but if they don’t know where the things go, they shove them on shelves until the shelves are ready to topple. It is not enough for me to say “clean your room.” I must couple that command with teaching them how to go about sorting and organizing a room. I have to teach them about picking up large things first so you can see the small ones. I have to teach about scraping the mess out of the corners and into the middle. I have to teach that small things need to be put in containers, not shoved on shelves. Each of these things is a separate piece of knowledge all of which combine into knowing how to organize a room.
This weekend Kiki was feeling buried under things to do. For a week or more I’d been telling her to prioritize and do the most important things first. She kept ending up in a stalled panic rather like the rabbit staring frozen at the headlights of an oncoming car. I finally realized that while she knew the meaning of the word “prioritize” she did not actually have a clue how to go about doing it. So I gave her a piece of paper and made her write down every single To Do item in her head. I told her not to fret over the size of the list because we knew it would be far more things than she could accomplish in a single day. The idea was to pull all these fretful things out of her head and pin them to a page where she could see them. Then I took a second piece of paper and used the Franklin Covey square to help her sort her list. Suddenly she could really see what she needed to focus her time on and which things she had been stressing over that were neither important nor urgent. Using the paper helped her see what I meant by prioritize. Kiki still has a lot to learn about organizing her time, but this gives her a method to start learning.
A friend of mine is getting ready to start using Quickbooks for her small business. My first reaction was to tell her not to worry because it is easy. But then I remembered how scary it was to get started all those years ago. I remembered driving to Salt Lake for an 8 hour seminar on small business accounting. Accounting is not easy, but it can become easy with practice. I find this very encouraging because there are things in my life that are not easy, things that frighten me. I would really love to pull together a book and have it published by a large house. This task feels like an impossible pipe dream, but I’ve begun to see where to start and if I can just keep going the things that feel daunting will get easier. I will only stay daunted if I stand still. Practice makes difficult things become easy and that is a good thing to know.