Enumerate the challenge

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? When the project you're attempting is a large one, it can feel overwhelming. This can force you to retreat or just focus on the easy parts of the project, dawdling there instead of getting more done.

[00:00:33] Folks, this is the dragon, the productivity dragon. It is large, looming and breathing fire, and our challenge is to conquer or subdue the dragon. However, you cannot conquer what you do not see. If you saw only the toe of the dragon, you wouldn't be able to even begin to understand how to subdue the beast. No.

[00:01:01] In order to conquer the dragon, you must see it in its full glory. One of my favorite stories from the show, Grey's Anatomy, is about a neurosurgeon,Amelia Shepherd, she's tasked with removing a tumor numerous other people have deemed impossible to remove, and at the beginning of the surgery, once she's gotten to the plane where she'll begin her real work, she injects the tumor with this neon green dye and turns all the lights off so the tumor can glow.

[00:01:36] When she probed a student as to why she was going to do that, the student who understood said something like, "Because you wanna see it all at once and appreciate the big picture," I'm paraphrasing here, of course. She wanted to consider and face this tumor in its entirety, this overwhelming, intense thing that so many others had refused to even touch that was gonna kill her patient in a matter of months.

[00:02:06] I remember watching that and feeling only admiration. Now, obviously most of our projects are not nearly as intense or emergent as saving a patient from a declared-impossible tumor, but still, we cannot slay the productivity dragon if we do not see the full picture. So no matter how overwhelming or scary your project is, enumerate it.

[00:02:34] Which is really just a fancy way of saying make a task list and outline. Write out exactly what needs to happen to get you from the start to the finish line, exactly what it will take to conquer the dragon. Once you've done that, only then can you start to focus on smaller sections and break it down into smaller, manageable pieces that you can easily keep in your head.

[00:02:59] And so that is what I did today. I wrote down every single thing I could think of that I need to get done this month in order to launch my little course. And believe me, it's a lot of things. It's a lot of things because I wanna do it well and I wanna do it right. And there was definitely a moment when I looked at the whole list, this long scrolling list, and I was afraid.

[00:03:23] I was afraid I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was afraid that there was no way I could actually get this done, but seeing it all was also really helpful. I was able to identify patterns and logical ways to break up the tasks, and because I did the enumeration in Notion, basically doing it digitally, I was able to easily move things around and adjust it until it felt better.

[00:03:46] And sitting with it really did help me get over this fear of conquering the dragon, and then I broke it up into week by week sections. You know, making a task list is great and important. But then we also have to take that list, right? And create a plan to tackle it. So for your next project, or I don't know, even for a project you're working on right now, I would say, make sure you have enumerated it.

[00:04:20] Write up that list of things that it will take to take on the challenge and appreciate it. Look at the big picture, let it sink in. And then of course we get to work, because now that we've appreciated the dragon, it is time to take it down. So that is what I'm gonna do, next. Wish me luck. Thanks for listening.

[00:04:47] Talk to you tomorrow.