Baby Steps

Nobody does anything without taking one step at a time. That’s why it is overwhelming to think of five steps at once—you can’t do it all. And knowing you can’t do it, you shut down and take no steps whatsoever.

Some people don’t have this problem. Maybe they aren’t sensitive or maybe their projects are small or maybe they have a team to support them. Or maybe they just don’t care enough about the task to get overwhelmed by it.

But it doesn’t matter why they don’t have the problem. I do have it. I do get overwhelmed imagining all the thousand tasks I have to accomplish to make a movie. The only way forward is one step at a time.

As Peter Jackson said while making three Lord of the Rings movies simultaneously: “One job at a time, each job a success.”

And here’s Neil Gaiman on the subject: “You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It's that easy, and that hard.”

And of course Anne Lamont wrote a whole book about this, Bird By Bird.

Now, why are all these people harping on this point? Because it’s so easy to forget. Friends and family try to rush me. I try to rush myself. I fool myself into thinking I can get ten things done at once.

I can’t. There is no such thing as multitasking. There are only baby steps.

Further evidence:

https://hbr.org/2010/12/you-cant-multi-task-so-stop-tr

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/science-clear-multitasking-doesnt-work/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201103/technology-myth-multitasking