The Dangerous Pit of Task Inertia

I confess that I am not a very faithful blogger, though it is regularly on my “To Do” list.  Speaking of that list, which I have mentioned in several previous blogs, I have come to realize that for all my internal need to feel organized, it has become a form of tyranny in my life.  We’ve probably all heard the expression “the tyranny of the urgent.”  What that expression is intended to convey is that many times the “urgent” in our lives pushes aside the “important.”  I have found this to be so true for me over and over.  I put far too many things on my list – things I need to do; things I want to do; things I wish I could do; things that I wish I could say that I had done, etc. – and they obviously don’t all get done today, or tomorrow, or the next day.  By that time they have become “urgent” for me emotionally and I tend to develop a bad case of "task inertia" – the inability to do anything for want to do everything.  My daughter, Jennifer, understands this much better than I and named her blog “Doing the Next Thing.”  I feel guilty every time I click on her blog (my fault, not her’s).

This morning I ran across this quote by St. Francis de Sales from his book Introduction to the Devout Life.  It really rang true for me as I was thinking about todays “To Do” list.

“Flies harass us more by their number than by their sting.  Similarly, great matters disturb us less than a multitude of small affairs.  Accept the duties which are entrusted to you quietly, and try to fulfill them methodically, one after another.  If you attempt to do everything at once, or with confusion, you will burden yourself with your exertions, and by entangling your mind, you will probably be overwhelmed and accomplish nothing.

In all your affairs rely on God’s Providence, through which alone your plans can succeed.  Meanwhile, on your part, work on in quiet cooperation with God, and then rest satisfied that if you have entrusted your work entirely with Him, you will always obtain the measure of success which is best for you, whether it seems so or not in your own judgment.

Imitate a little child who holds tight with one hand to his father’s, while with the other gathers blackberries from the wayside hedge.  Even so, while you gather and use the world’s goods with one hand, always let the other be secure in your Heavenly Father’s hand, and look around from time to time to make sure that He is satisfied with what you are doing, at home or abroad.  When your ordinary work or business is not particularly engrossing, let your heart be fixed more on God than on it; and, if the work be such as to require your undivided attention, then pause from time to time and look to God, even as navigators do who set their course from the harbor by looking to the heavens rather than down to the depths of the see.  Doing this, you will see that God will work with you, in you, and for you, and your work will be blessed.”