(Laura’s note: A version of this essay originally ran at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter. To get a free or paid subscription, please go here.)
We all have little annoying things in our lives. For instance, a non-urgent warning light just came on in my car. Also, every time I pull out of the driveway, I look up and notice that I haven’t changed the time on the dashboard yet (I have an old car; this has to be done manually) but I’m, you know, driving, so I can’t do it right then. This morning I looked in my cupboard and realized that not only are we short on everyday plates, one of the ones that is still in rotation is chipped.
Maybe you’ve got a box of donations that has been sitting in your trunk for the last month. Or you’ve got a form related to a small bill that needs to be resubmitted to your insurance company.
None of these annoyances are exactly crises. You would deal with a large bill quickly. A small bill? Eh.
But the problem is that when we keep feeling these little metaphorical pebbles in our shoes, over and over, we can feel drained and generally annoyed with life. Who wants to live with that long term?
Instead, here’s an idea: set a goal of having no lingering pebbles by a few weeks into the new year. You will decide, at some point in the next two months or so, to deal with your currently outstanding little issues and dispatch them from your mental universe.
Take an inventory
The process is simple enough. These are all little things, right? So make a list of the pebbles. Go through your house, your car, your calendar, your computer set up, your phone, or whatever you deal with frequently. Note anything that needs to be fixed.
You can separate the list into items that can be dealt with immediately, and those that might need an additional step or two. You can drive the box of donations to the center right now. You might need to order new lightbulbs, though, and wait a few days for delivery. So choose at least two windows for batching all these tasks. Maybe the first is a Saturday afternoon when everybody else is out of the house. The second is a mostly free evening a week later.
Of course, some of the pebbles might be lingering as pebbles because you don’t know how to deal with them. If that’s the case, set aside 10 minutes of your first window for researching the question. In 10 minutes you can probably figure out if it’s simple and all you’ll need to do is watch a YouTube tutorial, or if the problem is more complicated, and calling the plumber or handyman or a tech guru can go on the list.
Create a sense of urgency
Another possibility is that the pebble is so annoying that you just keep putting it off. If that’s the case, one idea is to ask for the pebble to be dealt with as a gift. I once asked my husband to put air in my car tires as a present to me. He drove my car over to the gas station and dealt with it. I know of a person who got frames for a stack of photos as a present for his partner, and put all the photos in there. Very romantic if you think about it. Seriously. I’m not kidding. If there’s a friend or family member who you know will not find a task nearly as annoying as you will, this holiday gift request could be a reasonable option.
In any case, if you are strategic, you can probably knock almost all these pebbles off the list in the next few weeks. Sometimes life delivers obvious deadlines for these things. Maybe you’re moving in the next few months and you need to deal with that chip in the shower soap holder.
But if you’re not moving, you need to make your own deadline. So how about around the new year? You can start fresh, and enjoy at least a little respite until new pebbles appear. But when they do, you’ll know there’s a method for dealing with them. And so eventually you will — so you can devote your energy to more important things.