I have a job jar that includes slips of paper for things like items that need to be fixed, things that need to be purged, things that need to be sorted, to do list items, undone or unfinished tasks, projects you want to start, etc. PLEASE NOTE: it does NOT contain anything that has a deadline. It is more like those things that you want to do but never find the time to do because everything else gets in the way.
It becomes a game: you make a promise to yourself that you will do whatever you pull out of the jar for 15 minutes. It’s random so it becomes an adventure. You don’t have time to build resistance to it or dread doing it because you have no idea what “it” is. This helps to reinforce the idea of “baby steps” in your mind. We really have no idea how much we can accomplish in 15 minutes, and sometimes we can actually finish the whole task during that period. If not, just put it back in the jar when the 15 minutes are up for the next time you draw that slip of paper < I sometimes make notes on the paper to remind me where I left off if I didn’t finish>. SOMETIMES I even move it totally out of the jar if I know I can finish it up in a few more minutes.
If you want to be really adventurous, you can make a promise to yourself that you will do this 3x a week … that’s less than an hour a week and think about how many little things you can accomplish with this system over the course of a year! Just don’t let your “to do” list overwhelm you anymore.