Small Tasks, Serenedipity and Mermaids

Are you anything like me? You look at a small task and think…

“Ooh, I reckon* could knock that off in fifteen minutes. Yeah… I’ve got plenty of time before I have to start…. insert any urgent, time sensitive task that must be done – like , say, cooking dinner —-> HERE.”

Except that the small task you thought you could ‘knock off’ was not so innocently small. Nohoho… it was bigger than you imagined. It was even bigger than you thought you couldn’t imagine it to be. It was actually a Big Job disguised as a small task that was always going to balloon out to take up two and a half hours of your time and still leave little pieces of undoneness hanging out everywhere to annoy you.

Like cleaning up a small section of book shelf.

Alright … keep the sniggering to yourself please. I know, since when was cleaning a book shelf ever a small task? But I thought, in all honesty, that it was going to be a small task. Simply clean out the folders I had there, sort the items (keep or toss), wipe down the shelf, and bobs your uncle, fresh, workable space for my growing assortment of current paper work.

Except that cleaning out the standing files meant I had to move some books (I want, no, I need my synonym book and my dictionary within easy reach!) from one shelf to another… which meant that those other books had to be moved …. and that meant moving the sewing machine …. and wouldn’t Bronwen’s books be better on that shelf rather than the shelf right behind me?…. and maybe I should move my fashion books up to this shelf instead of down on the bottom shelf especially if I want to think seriously about starting a fashion blog …. and ooooh, look at this coffee table book on Cartier jewellery…..

You get the idea.

And it’s not often that when you undertake such a large amount of work are you tangibly rewarded for your effort. Just a few weeks ago I finished “The Secret Life of Bees” and enjoyed it so much that I felt the urge to go to the book store, plonk some cash down and buy the next book by Sue Monk Kid, “The Mermaid Chair”. Except that with the bus strike that held Ottawa captive for seven weeks, I have been put on temporary hold of sorts on my little job and have no money coming in, which meant that fulfilling the urge to buy a new book could not be satisfied.

And here is where the serendipity part of the title falls in place. Wouldn’t you know it? As I cleaned out the shelf on the music book case (called because it has the music system on it and not because we are musically gifted) to put Bronwen’s books there I came across a copy of “The Mermaid Chair” that I had obviously bought before I went back home to Australia all those years ago; I had totally forgotten about it. But here it sits, shiny and new, just waiting for me to read it (when I find the time to make a pile of peanut butter sandwiches for Bronwen to eat and organise a few bottles of water), and all because I decided to do one small task before I cooked dinner one night.

So here is a new challenge for this blog. Not that this is the only style of challenges will be in the future, (I’m not quite ready to reveal that side of things yet,) but I did want to create a fun challenge! Tell me, what small task have you been putting off because you have a gut feeling it might turn into a Big Job? Can you to do it in the next two weeks? Are you ready to accept the challenge and then come back and tell me about your serendipitous findings?