BIG EYES & BLINDERS

July 30th, 2022

An optimal challenge is not too difficult, but not too easy. Each day there’s the challenge of what we each do - how much of it we’re going to tackle. How many things are on the back burner isn’t as important as how many of those things we allow ourselves to consider during a single given day.

Trying to tackle every chore, project and obligation in a single day is a recipe for failure. But even thinking about doing that is a recipe for failure. There’s a paralysis that comes with zooming out too far and thinking about everything that needs to be done. We can suffer from having eyes that are bigger than our days; as the saying often goes with stomachs and biting off more than we can chew. 

There’s a mental equivalent, and the warning might go like this: don’t consider more than you can actually get done. A wasted day due to paralysis can quickly become a second day wasted by the same paralysis, and before long, inactivity becomes it’s own bad habit.

We need something like a mental set of blinders. Something to block off the line of projects the back-burner so that we have left waiting in front for the day is a manageable task that can be knocked off the list. Big eyes need to be narrowed if there’s to be any hope of chewing through the backlog, because work is so much slower than imagination.

If anything it’s the imagination that causes that paralysis, and the mental blinders are really a kind of gurdel for the imagination.