Start Again.

In the last two days I’ve had to take my kitchen cupboards off the wall (to access the boiler, if you were wondering) and write a 5000 word dissertation. Both have frankly been a pain in the arse. But that’s beside my point in this case. So, you ask, what is my point?

In both cases I have had the opportunity to try and short circuit what I’m doing. I’ve drafted and re-drafted the dissertation about three times. The cupboards are all attached to one another and I could have hammered them to pieces or got the boiler engineer to come round another day to give me more time to sort it out. The temptation to keep tweaking the essay until it was sort of okay and destroy the cupboards was strong. What did I do instead? I started again.

Both tasks were big, annoying, time consuming, and looking at them from the bottom, they looked insurmountable. The short circuit sounded great. Just shave off the corners and call it a round peg. Bosh. Done. But both out of pride and, in the long run, time saving, I started at the bottom and just got on with it. I restarted the dissertation entirely and it is now much better than it was. I looked at the cupboards and figured out that a huge chunk of them all had to come down so got on and did it. Both took a surprisingly small amount of time in the end and the objective in both cases has been achieved.

So, start again, and again, and again if you have to. Put one foot in front of the other and just get it done. Easier saying than doing, as always, but if you can, do.