Overcoming project paralysis with small tasks
Hey, good morning friends. I'm sitting here at my desk this morning, it's later than normal. I've already started working a little bit, but I've stopped at the moment because I am experiencing project paralysis. I don't know if that's an official term, it's what I'm calling it. I also call it being overwhelmed. I suppose that's a less technical term for it. I have several large projects that I need to work on. My workshop, I have a detached garage workshop and it's a total mess. I keep telling myself I'm going to clean it up. It's not messy like I've left things laying out, it's messy like there are boxes on the floor, you can barely walk from one side to the other. It's really out of control.
I have a book that I was hoping to push through and finish this week, writing a book about making podcasts for money, but I haven't worked on that yet. I also have a YouTube video that I really need to do, but the problem is the thought of doing it is so overwhelming from start to finish that I won't start it. I haven't started it. I can't seem to start it. I'm sitting here this morning with all these things I need to do and I'm not doing any of them. That's the problem.
I'll tell you a story from many years ago in my life. I used to collect arcade cabinets, the big 80s arcade games. I had Centipede, I had Ms. Pac-Man, I had RoboCop. In a period of about 10 years, I bought and sold around 100 different machines and I had enough space in my house to have about 30 at a time on display. The thing was these machines were really inexpensive to purchase. I was buying them at auctions. When I say inexpensive, I bought many working games for less than $100. I bought some for less than $50. There's an old classic arcade game called Zaxxon. It's really highly desirable today and I bought a completely working and restored Zaxxon machine for $50. Now, today, a Zaxxon machine would probably sell for $1,000, but it was a time when the bottom had kind of dropped out of the market. Machines weren't very desirable because they weren't making money. Once people bought Playstations, they didn't want to go to arcades anymore, unfortunately.
But anyway, I had all these machines and of course it was like a ragtag collection of machines in various stages of working. Most of them weren't what I bought them, but things would go wrong. Some machines weren't intended to last forever and they would break. Sometimes they would break in ways that I could fix and sometimes they would break in ways that were beyond my ability to fix. Over time, at any given time, I would have 30 machines and probably one-third of them, about 10, would be broken. They wouldn't turn on or things wouldn't work right. The monitors wouldn't work. It became so overwhelming because when you go out and half your collection is broken, where do you start? Which one do you work on?
I had an online friend who knew how to work on games. He volunteered to come over and give me a hand. He said, let's come. So when I came over, or when he came over, I started trying to explain the problems with all the machines and he said, let's start with one. Let's start with the very first one. What's wrong with this machine? And I said, well, this one doesn't turn on. So we pulled it out and he looked and he said, well, it's a power supply. And he said, actually, it looks like it's a fuse on the power supply. We changed the fuse and we got it up and running and it worked. And then he said, what's next? And so that's what we did. Now, we did not fix every game that day, but what we did was we went through each one, one at a time. We broke it down. So the problem wasn't that I had a bunch of broken games. The problem was this particular game is broken. Let's troubleshoot it and see where the problem is.
So that's really the way to get through big tasks and big problems when you're not moving forward is to break it down into small, achievable tasks. So that's what I'm going to try to do today. I have my normal job stuff that I need to do and I'm doing that. But on the side here... I've got a little notebook. Sometimes I write on the computer, but sometimes I write on paper. I find that is easier sometimes. But I'm writing down a list. I'm going to write down a list of all the projects I have and then what are the ways to break that up into tasks, smaller chunks. And then this afternoon when my work is done and I clock out, I'm going to just start checking those tasks off one by one and try to get through as many of them as I can. That's my goal for today.
So I guess I would say if you have a big project like that and you're not moving forward on it, break it down into some small chunks, something that you can finish, you know, quickly in a day or maybe in an hour, something like that. Maybe that'll get your project jump-started too.