OME of you might know that I save correspondence -- the snailmail letters and postcards that I receive from family and friends. (Not ALL of them, mind you, but the ones I hold dear for one reason or another.) And several years back I got the brilliant idea to organize all that correspondence into a few binders -- one for letters and cards, one for postcards, one for the Wish I Were Here project. And it was a great idea and worked beautifully and everything was nice and neat.
For a while, anyway.
But, as with so many of the projects I begin with the best of intentions, I neglected it. And the correspondence went into a pile -- because I'd sort it out eventually, right? -- and the pile grew, and grew, and grew, and GREW as I continued to ignore it because I just knew it would be a Task of Eternity and I didn't want to devote loads of time to doing it.
Well, today I finally decided to take the bull by the horns and sort through the mighty pile. We're preparing to move and I knew I couldn't afford to wait many more days before it had to be done. I blocked off the entire day to accomplish this task, hoisted the pile onto the table, found the binders and started sorting.
It took an hour.
The task that has been hanging over my head for nearly a decade. Took. One. HOUR.
This is a prime example of ADD's tendency to play tricks with mental time estimates. I often assume that some "quick" task will take five minutes when it's really going to be more like half an hour, and I tend to avoid other tasks for long stretches because they seem like they'll be arduous and take all day, when in reality ONE FREAKING HOUR.
Welp.
On to the next task. Cleaning the bathroom. Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes tops, right?
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