A recent client of mine (I’ll call her Donna) struggled mightily with getting her clean laundry put away rather than strewing it across the living room couch. As we worked to understand the causes of her challenge, we discovered that she didn’t view putting the laundry away as being at all related to other steps in the laundry process. Instead, she viewed each step (sort clothes, load washer, run washer, empty washer, load dryer, empty dryer, fold clothes, put clothes away) as separate from and unrelated to any other step in the process. In her view, sorting and washing the clothes without having time to do any of the subsequent steps was better than having a mile high stack of dirty clothes. However, operating in this fashion sometimes (ok, often) caused Donna to have to rewash wrinkled clothes that sat in the dryer for several day, or even moldy clothes that sat wet in the washer for a few days.
Donna struggled with several identified learning disabilities, and as we worked together we discovered another one: challenges with sequencing. She knew darn well what the individual steps in the laundry process were, but didn’t see that they were all connected in a way that required all to be completed before she could consider the job of laundry to be done (although we both sadly acknowledged that laundry is never done!).
Many things that come up in our life are similar to the laundry process in that they involve several steps. For example, eating dinner involves meal planning (even if it’s just staring into an open refrigerator), cooking, setting the table, eating, clearing the table, doing dishes, cleaning the pots and pans, etc. – you get the idea. If we do some of the steps in the process (let’s say, up to the point of eating) but don’t finish the remaining steps, we’ve created more work for ourselves in the long run. In this example, the next time we want to cook dinner we’ll have to first clean the pots and pans from the prior meal, effectively having to start today’s work by finishing yesterday’s tasks. If instead we’d finished each such job through to completion we’d make life a lot easier for ourselves.
I’d love to hear what challenges you face in finishing things through to completion, and how it impacts your life.
Wishing you simplicity, harmony and freedom,
My issue with completion of work related tasks is not feeling confident I know all of the steps and the people who are trying to teach me do not understand my learning style.
I am FAR FROM a “muscle memory” learner!
Maybe you don’t need to know all the steps – sometimes just knowing the very next one is enough. Good luck!
My issue in completion is paper…..way too much saved when these days I can look up just about anything on the web. I’m in the process of purging files from my college days….and it finally feels good to get the baggage out of the way. Soon I’ll be working on how to handle paper when it comes in. I’m working from both ends…new and old….with any junk mail coming in immediately going into the shredder. Soon I’ll meet in the middle and be so happy. Thank you, Sue, for your inspiration! Anonymous
You’re welcome, Joan. It sounds like you have a great plan to get on top if things. Good luck!