“I’d get it one piece at a time…and it wouldn’t cost me a dime..” Oh hey! Didn’t see ya there! I was just singing “One Piece at a Time” by Johnny Cash, a fantastic song. I recommend listening to it if you have never heard it! The song from ‘76 tells of a man who works on a car-manufacturing assembly line who steals tiny pieces of the cars by bringing them home in his lunch box so that after many years he can eventually build his own car using the bits and pieces he has collected. Pretty neat. Now, how does this long introduction relate to productivity, let alone the title of this piece? Lemme explain!

Sometimes when we get overwhelmed and stressed, we put things off like calling our doctor from home, sending Aunt Martha a thank you, or doing our laundry. We let these to-dos (let’s think of them as dirty clothes) accumulate until our list of to-dos (which we can think of it as a hamper) is overflowing and we can’t deny the fact that we have to take care of beeswax, do a little of adulting, get it over with, and DO IT.

But what if we didn’t have to go through this? That sinking feeling of seeing all of those dirty clothes every time we came in our room always weighing on the back of our mind? Here’s where the Johnny Cash song comes in, “One Piece at a Time.” Let us strive to approach these back-burner-to-dos with a positive, one-piece-at-a-time-mindset. If we conquer one application, one email, one assignment, our “hamper” of “dirty laundry” will not only a, begin to shrink but b, become less intimidating the more we work through it.

If we allow our “hamper” to pile up with more and more tasks, not only will it take longer to conquer but it will also start to have a greater emotional toll on us. Knowing that we have “so much do to” will show us down. But if we tackle it “One Piece at a Time,” we can chip away the block slowly but surely to shorten our list of to-dos. Don’t throw the towel in, go git on the laundry grind and clean out that hamper!!

Wish all of y’all a very happy week and a most glorious Gala experience, let’s embrace this spring weather!!

All of my love,

Maru