Cleaning the Crud
There’s a deep satisfaction that comes with crossing off a task that’s turned into hard crud on a to-do list. For me, that was getting a particular problem with my car fixed.
I developed a relationship with one garage and felt a sunk cost in having found that place and them being partially reliable. It wasn’t easy to even find this place, they took longer than they expected, traffic getting there and back was atrocious, but that was still less than the pain in my mind of having to call up another garage and explain to them everything and start to second guess myself.
However, one morning when I had enough will to overcome this inertia, I looked up a place, checked the reviews, called to ensure they could check the car, and then showed up. Within an hour, a problem that had plagued me for months was gone. The car, which has enough kilometers to circumnavigate the globe multiple times, feels new.
About 15 years ago, I read about David Allen’s mind map technique of dumping out all of the long term projects onto a piece of paper and then building out the tasks on them. Every few years, I remember this advice and it startles me how freeing it can be to clean out the crud.
