Have you ever had trouble getting started on something? A task so big that you really are just so completely overwhelmed that you don’t have a clue how to begin? You know it has to be done and some how the urgency of the task just makes the difficulty worse. Yup. I think we have all been there.

My Mother used to use the phrase “month of Sundays” and I pondered that often. I took it to mean 30 days where you have more control over your time. (I used to say nothing to do but I never have a day with nothing to do anymore). I get this. Not in a month of Sundays means that even with 30 days dedicated to nothing but this task, and I still wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting it done.

<insert heavy sigh here>

I have been getting more successful at dealing with this by breaking things down into chunks and working on the smaller pieces but this time I feel like I am faced by Mt. Everest and I have no idea where to begin. All this week I have been doing anything but get started. ANYTHING. I even cleaned my house. That should tell you how bad it is. I am hoping that by writing this blog post I can put enough awareness into my situation that I can wrest some kind of control and at least get started. I know if I just DO SOMETHING I can get some movement going.

I am realizing it doesn’t even really matter what I do first. This isn’t about doing the right thing first, it’s about doing anything first. It’s the words on the blank page. I did learn a long time ago when writing that if I don’t know where to start, start in the middle and go back and write the beginning later. I’m a rather structured person, so I tend to think that there is a prescribed order to things. “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start”. Yea. As my programming career grew, I moved from structured languages where you wrote everything in the order it was to happen, to languages where you wrote snippets that could be called any time. My head exploded in a class when my instructor told me it didn’t matter what order those were presented in, it would all still work.

As I get older, I’m starting to see that there can be a lot of value in this approach. You don’t have to start at the beginning, you don’t have to do things in order unless there is a dependency. So I really need to step outside my comfort zone on this one. I don’t have a complete list and I am overwhelmed but I am going to do something to break the log jam. Of course somebody could point out that writing this post is just another form of avoidance on my part, but it’s more like the pep talk in the locker room before the big game (just how many different metaphors can I stuff in this post?). I’m talking myself up so I can run out on the field and start.

Ask me in a week if I started.