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Truth be told, Emily isn't two quite yet ... she's about 40 days shy of that glorious age. Often, even as I type, I've got at LEAST 7 various windows open each with multiple tabs and even a few with a blinking cursor in the URL because, well, I meant to go somewhere on the world-wide web a few minutes ago and hold on ... my Blackberry just flashed.
I have a feeling I'm not alone right now ... I've been struggling on getting THE task at hand done lately. Why? Not because the task is difficult, but because while accomplishing the task I set out to do, I have SEVERAL ideas that I think are great and worth exploring and I'm afraid I'm going to forget them, so I start a portion of the new task, open a new window, start a new Google search, send a text to a friend about this brazen new idea ... then, once I'm 1/3rd the way done with that task, I say ... what was I doing before, then literally filter through my 7 parallel windows until I go ... "Oh yeah ... " and finish what I had started 15, 25, even an hour ago.
I work from home, I love it. I went upstairs earlier to grab some water and my little daughter Emily was just hopping onto our couch as she began reaching for our fluffy bright red pillows. I knew what was coming, it was indeed the beginnings of a "Pillow Pile Party!" ... Over the next 80 seconds or so, I watched this little girl who is not quite 2 years old crawl from couch to couch, each time picking up one pillow and laying it ever so perfectly on top of the next in the pillow pile. A few times her placement was off, she would start go get the next pillow, turn around, and fix the placement so it was perfect, THEN on to the next task (in this case the next pillow). She moved remotes, she pushed an ottoman, she even handed me her cup of water so she could crawl over the ottoman to the last 2 pillows in the corner of the room. All in all, some 80 seconds later, she was done. No loose ends, she didn't have 1/3rd of the pile completed ... she was finished with that task there and then ... Next, obviously like any pre-2 year old would ... she jumped in the pile and laughed ... Naturally, like any 31 year old father would do next ... I jumped in with her ...
When I got back downstairs to my office opened up a word doc, jotted down the 10 or so things I was truly working on and proceeded to open ONE window at a time until that task was complete. Along the way, I had new ideas pop into my head, and I simply added them to this open word doc but RESISTED the temptation to begin that deed that VERY moment. I also turned my phone to silent and one by one I dominated that list, it was the most productive hour I've had this week ... so much so, I wrote a blog about it ... you can read it here.
Yours Truly,
Learning From Almost 2 Year Olds
