One Snowflake At a Time

Snow really piles up.

I’m sure that’s the understatement of the year. But hear me out. Your driveway was clear just a few hours ago, and now you’ll have to spend many minutes and calories scooping the stuff off to clear the way for your car. How did it get that way? One snowflake at a time. Yes, perhaps millions of them fell at the same time, but my point is, they are individual snowflakes that joined together.

There are so many things I want to do that I get overwhelmed and don’t do any of them. Of course, I want an immaculate house, but I often spend time scrolling on my phone instead, because cleaning the house will take forever. I want to have books written by me on my shelf, but the thought of sixty-thousand words is paralyzing, and there are so many interesting things on the internet that are just easier to read instead. Basically I can see the end, but how to get there seems just too hard.

Enter our friends, the snowflakes. Remember how they covered your driveway? One at a time.

When it comes to my house, I’m embracing micro-tasks. I may not have the time, energy, or motivation to clean my whole house in one fell swoop, but doing one task for five minutes each day means that at the end of the week, I will have spent thirty-five minutes cleaning. This is way better than not cleaning at all.

When I write, I write one word at a time. I haven’t figured out how to do more than that yet. But those words add up. If I write one hundred words a day, that means I’ll have seven hundred by the end of the week. It may take a few months, but eventually there will be a completed story. It all adds up.

There are more elegant ways to say this. My favorite is progress over perfection. But my point is, every tiny thing you do will add up. You don’t need to wait until you have all the time and motivation in the world. Just do one thing. Then later, do another.

It’ll add up. I promise.