I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.
Today’s tip is to make progress on a project or task you’ve been avoiding.
I have a lot of projects. Work, home, hobbies, and more. I rarely have a day when I don’t feel there is something I should be doing.
I am also good at avoiding some projects. For various reasons, I will delay certain things over and over. During the lockdown, I was a bit better at tackling some long overdue projects, but not all of them.
This year, I’d been putting off cutting the grass in the fields at the ranch. I regularly cut the green grass by the house, but the larger pastures need mowing once a year to knock down yucca plants and clean out some of the weeds that grow. When I do this once a year, we end up with healthier grasses the following year.
However, this is a project. It’s about 30-40 hours of mowing on the tractor. I kept delaying it, mostly because the tractor is behind two gates, and it’s a pain to get out. It also has to go back every day or two because it’s used to load hay into wagons. As a result, my plan to get the pasture mowed this fall was getting delayed. Finally I started just before my trip to Europe. I got the tractor out, attached the mower, and starting cutting. I had timed this so I had an afternoon and the next morning before the tractor was needed for hay. I spent about 5-6 hours across two days getting going on this project.
I got back from Europe and decided this was a relatively easy project to work on this past Sunday. 3 more hours, and things are looking better.
Now I need to just keep going across the next few weeks, doing an hour or two a few days a week and hope to get done before October ends.