Problem- combining steps
The other day I was in a hurry to get out the door to work. the shoes were strewn everywhere and I needed to pick out my boots from the clutter, and quick! Or so I thought. My brain had combined the steps of finding the boots, putting the boots on, tying the boots with their long cumbersome laces and putting on my jacket. Typically I wouldn't have noticed, but recently I have been putting a lot of attention towards analyzing my causes of stress. So when I started to feel internal stress, I stopped to analyze. There it was, the culprit..it was combining the steps instead of separating them. I saw all the steps in my head and put them into one movement, when in reality the only step that needed true attention was the locating the boots.
My mind was in worry of time management, efficiency, and the future. It thinks that if I don't have the next move ready I will lose time. While this is actually true in its own right, it fails to realize something very important, the efficiency that step one suffers of locating the boots. I may drop the boots or scramble unfocused for the other, thereby losing any time I would have gained by knowing the next step anyway. Therefore paying full attention to each action is more efficient because each step is completed properly without having to re-do anything. The
old adage of “do one thing at a time, may seem like a no brainer, but next time think of it as the “problem with combining steps” and you may remember it more easily.