Now or Not Now?
We can't do it all at once.
The day after my wife and I confirmed that our baby daughter was on the way, we made a list. Because, of course we did. 🙃
I can’t deny my nature as a Project Management Guy™. This was going to be the greatest project of our lives with an 8-month immovable deadline!
One of life’s most exciting moments brought instant anxiety. The first featured loop on life’s rollercoaster of parenthood. We’re having a baby!!?! What now??!?
Step 1: Identify All The Things
Armed with a blank canvas and virtual sticky notes, we wrote down everything we could think of.
Every task. Every idea. Every fear. Every concern. Every anxiety. Every decision.
No editing. No judgement. No de-duplication. No assignment. No sizing. No prioritization. No categorization.
We filled the board. It took us mere minutes to produce a hundred disparate thoughts.
Step 2: Decide What’s First
Of all these things, what should actually be done within a month? No more than ten items were grouped to the left.
Of those, what should be done within a week? There were three.
Close the laptop. Great work! We’ll think about the other 97 things next week.
Eight months of pregnancy and a potential lifetime of parenthood reduced to three simple, unassuming first steps. Three things for now, the rest for not now.
This sorting exercise would become a weekly ritual for us — adding new ideas as we discovered them, and refocusing on the few things we could actually do now. This is one of the few practices that have carried us through our daughter’s arrival.
When faced with an overwhelming challenge, take a moment. Reset. Sequence the concerns. Identify all the things, then decide: What is for now and what is not now?
We can do anything, just not everything, and not all at once.