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Last night, I got my inbox down to just 9 items. Well, okay, I got ONE of my inboxes down to just 9 items. Each item left is something I have to action – 4 interviews to answer, plus a few other things to rustle up.

And oh my gosh, it feels good! To not have that gigantic, messy list of e-mails staring at me constantly. I’ve cut through the clutter, I can see what really needs to be done.

I will admit – my usual way of dealing with clutter and disorganisation tends to somewhat align with the lady in the picture, ahem.

When it comes to my business and work, I’m pretty good at staying on top of things… not perfect, but pretty good… but in my everyday life, I am definitely a messy gal. In fact, one of my nicknames is Messy. Rhymes with Jessie, get it? Yes. But please don’t call me Jessie, I hate that with a passion.

But back to the topic at hand. I think that the reason I tend to shy away from cleaning up clutter in all its forms is that when I look at it, the task just seems WAY too overwhelming. So I just throw up my hands and add it to the ‘too hard’ basket… at least until Nick cracks and begs me to deal with it!

But when I sat down to deal with my inbox, with a fresh cup of tea, I just kinda fooled myself. I pulled a little trick on my procrastination monster.

I promised myself that I’d just deal with as many e-mails as I could in the time it took me to drink my tea. Because gosh, that would at least make a dent in it. And then I could get up and walk away, satisfied.

I dealt with as many e-mails as I could, until I experienced an ‘out of tea error’. But then I just kept going, because you know what?

It really wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.

And isn’t that usually true? We build some task up into a big hulking elephant in our heads… but when we actually get around to it, we realise it was really just a little mouse with a really big shadow.

Does this happen to you? Are you wise enough to see past the shadow to the mouse, or does the elephant still scare you off?

Image via Pinterest. Can’t find the original source, so if you know, please tell!

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