The sink is full of dirty dishes. I've put it on a list of things I have to do. I can't procrastinate any longer, there's no clean dishes left for me to eat off of.
Now typically when I have things on a list I try to break the list up into managable sized chunks. In the instance of the dishes I made a little sublist that looks like this:
- Do Dishes
- Clean sink
- Run Water
- Brush teeth
- Go to the office and Cross off above items from list
- Add dishsoap
- Turn on Radio and listen for contest on CBC 2
- Check Email
- Turn off water
- Arrange dishes beside counter
- Go back and add things to list that I probably forgot
- Cross off above items from list
- Check Email
- Wipe off counter
- Wash dishes
But that probably wasn't very efficient because the dishes are still there and it's been 3 days.
So I'm going to try a different technique that has served me well in the past. I'm going to make a mental map of things I need to do to get the dishes done. Now to share this with you I've done it in PhotoSoftware, which isn't nearly as glamourous as when I do it on a big piece of cardboard. When it's on cardboard it's much more colorful and I draw pictures and use things like crayons, gilded macaroni and toothpaste to illustrate my ideas. But I can't post a piece of cardboard with toothpaste and cardboard on the internet so I'm just gonna post a simplified rough outline of what my mental map to get the dishes done looks like.
Now I can see that I don't really have to do the dishes. I thought I had to do them but I have choices. I could buy a lottery ticket and go to Yemen. Or maybe I could have a banana. After I won the lottery, of course. Maybe it's all an illusion and there aren't really any dishes there after all. And the mice - always the damned mice, what would they eat if I did the dishes?
This of course proves that mental mapping is much superior to lists. I was never a very good linear thinker anyways.