It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally finished it. I started reading Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress‘ in July of this year. It was an interesting choice as I don’t usually read fiction and I’m not a fan of sci-fi particularly. But I’ll have seen some cool character in a film reading it and will have ordered it on Amazon in the blink of an eye. It is, by all accounts, a classic – and I would agree. For all it has taken me a while to read that was more because I needed to read lots of other things while working my way through it. It is indeed a good yarn. It’s a book of revolution.

But what has this to do with self care and productivity I hear you ask? Well, it threw me this line towards the end. “When faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.” Brilliant! We are often confronted with things that are challenging, things we don’t quite get. Tasks that seem too big, that don’t match the skills we have. But there is often a bit of it we can do. Do that bit.

My favourite ‘quote’ about procrastination is that it is the art of ruining your life for no apparent reason. Sometime we put off and put off because the task seems too difficult and we don’t quite get some aspects of it. So, we don’t do any of it! But if we just tiptoed into the bits we do understand and could do, then maybe the difficult bits would seem, well, less difficult. Sometimes I find in making a start and doing something the next step, that I hadn’t spotted, reveals itself. I don’t understand something so I do something with what I do understand and in doing so something falls into place and the next thing seems more understandable or more achievable.

I find this a lot when trying to understand some complex idea or process. It all seems too difficult. But if I, for example, read the first thing I come across – take from it what I can, and the read the second thing. The second thing sometimes makes more sense. And then I move onto a third thing and that makes more sense than the first two things and then eventually I’m all over it. This relies on another favourite idea of mine – small steps, over a period of time, lead to big changes.

What’s stopping you from starting?

Make a start

You never know where you might end up!