Forget the mountain

In his recent New York Times Opinion column titled Stop Multitasking. No, Really — Just Stop It., Oliver Burkeman shares some sage, yet frequently ignored advice:

“…the way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one. ‘This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker in his book ‘The Effective Executive.’ ‘They do only one at a time.’ Making a difference in one domain requires giving yourself permission not to care equally about all the others.’”

At one point or another, we’ve all been tempted by the caricature of someone who effortlessly juggles it all.

This sounds delightful in theory but seldom plays out in our favor in practice.

Conquering the mountain of things on your to-do list requires putting your head down, temporarily disregarding the mountain and whatever grandiose destination you might be striving to get to, and instead focusing the weight of your attention on the next tangible step forward that you can take.

Progress, destinations, and outcomes all follow suit.