I’ve been wanting to organize the office I share with my mother-in-law for a while. It’s a big, old house, several generations have lived here, and the room is full of stuff no one needs anymore.
When I asked her to do it with me, she said: “Oh, can we do it in two weeks? Or next month?”
I told her: my plan is not to do it all at once. We do just 30 minutes, one little drawer, one little cupboard at a time. She agreed.
I set an alarm for 25 minutes and we sorted one cupboard. What to throw away, what to donate, what to keep. When it rang, I set another for 5 minutes so we’d finish what we started and not leave it open and cluttered.
She said “next month” because she wanted to do it properly. Properly never came.
The task wasn’t too big. She made it big.