Maybe you can relate to this scenario:

You’re ready to start on a rather tedious job, such as sanding the trim around a patio door. This trim had to be added on the spot by the installer because the door ended up being the wrong size and he had to fill in the sides with whatever wood was at hand, which was some extremely rough and knotty stuff. It’s not that big of a job, and you know in your heart of hearts that you just need to do it. So you start.It’s messy and slow, and it becomes clear that the grain isn’t getting completely smooth with the 100-grit sanding block you bought. Hmmm, you think, I wonder if there’s some kind of grain filler I could buy? You spend about 45 minutes on YouTube, watching people get cabinet doors and table tops glassy smooth with a product called “Aqua Coat.” Even though your project bears little resemblance to the ones online (for one thing, your surface is vertical; for another, it’s outdoors), you decide that’s the way to go. And what about finding a little electric sander so you don’t have to do all that horrible manual labor? So you go into the garage and waste some time gazing around without seeing anything suitable, and it doesn’t seem worthwhile to buy a piece of equipment just for this small job. You trek over to Lowe’s and to Home Depot. Neither one carries the Aqua Coat product. So you end up doing what you should have done in the first place: you buy some coarser-grit sandpaper and get going. Guess what? The wood grain smooths out. Within about 30 minutes it’s clear that this is the way to go.

Does the above sound at all familiar? As I thought about that sequence of events I was reminded of other times when I’ve found the actual task to be boring or difficult and so I’ve gone off on a tangent, trying to find an easier or better way to do the job. For instance (stop me if you’ve heard this before) when I got interested in playing the piano for the services at our little church in Virginia, all I really needed to do was sit at the piano and practice the four hymns we were actually going to sing, with perhaps a nice arrangement for the offertory. But that was so boring. Playing the same four songs over and over until I could really play them with confidence—what a pain! So I ordered books on hymnplaying. I tried to figure out what really good hymnplayers were doing. (Not a bad idea, but the old “walk before you can run” adage applies here.) And I signed up for piano lessons, which turned out to be a great experience but didn’t really help me play “Like a River Glorious.” Well, I’ve told this story many times. What I didn’t realize was that I’m still doing the same type of thing, as evidenced by the patio door pickle. I don’t want to just do the job; I want to figure out an easier, faster, more interesting way to do the job but often spend way more time than I would have if I’d just done the job in the first place.

All of this is not to say that one shouldn’t take some time to determine whether or not there’s a better way to do something. If Jim and our friend Rob had tried to dig the trench by hand for the new French drain instead of renting a machine, they’d still be out there. Often, though, there’s no magic bullet to be found, and the search for such a thing just causes a major distraction from the task at hand. Tomorrow I’ll still have to finish up the painting job when it could have been done over the weekend. (I was reminded right now of the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, one of her books I feel sorta comfortable recommending, I guess. It’s a book about the writing life, and the title comes from a situation that arose when Lamott was a child and her ten-year-old brother had one of those horrible grade-school projects, this one about birds, that he’d put off until the last minute. There he sat, surrounded by bird books, paper and pencils, close to tears, and his father put his arm around him and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”)

Well, I’ve made some progress on the whole “bird by bird” philosophy. I’ve kept on doing at least a little bit on the outside jobs, including the Big Dig. (And in case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t get the elephant completely eaten on that project—nowhere close. But I did get a chunk of it done while Jim was gone, and I’ve worked on it since he got back, and I’ll work on it more tomorrow . . .) I keep reminding myself that if you keep working on a project, and it’s not something that gets added onto, you absolutely will finish it someday. (Just to be clear: if you keep doing a little laundry, but in the meantime dirty clothes are being added to the pile at a faster rate than you are washing them, of course you’ll never get to the end of the job, at least not until you run completely out of clean clothes and have to catch up. But something with a clear endpoint–all of the clay dug out and replaced along a 5-foot-or-so-wide stretch bed in front of the patio—has to end someday if you keep nibbling at it, just by the laws of physics or something.)

Perhaps I’m doing what I’ve just criticized myself for doing and I should end this post and get on to the business at hand. How about you? Any elephants in your life that you could start eating?

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