Baby Stepping

Every summer at the beach, our friends and family gather around the television after dinner on the first night and watch “What About Bob?” — a comedy starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss. We laugh and laugh and then spend the rest of the week quoting lines from the movie and asking if our corn was “hand shucked.”

If you haven’t seen “What About Bob?”, Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) is a man who is convinced he suffers from numerous psychological ailments — he thinks he has Tourrette’s Syndrome, he is a hypochondriac and a recluse. He slowly drives his psychiatrist crazy and is referred to Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss). Dr. Marvin listens to Bob tell him he is afraid his heart will stop beating or his bladder will explode, prescribes Bob to read his latest book “Baby Steps” and come back in a month when Dr. Marvin returns from vacationing with his family. Bob follows, and hilarity ensues.

Giving you the plot of one of my favorite movies is not the point here. The point is baby steps. Dr. Marvin encourages his patients to break down the big picture into small, manageable steps. If your end goal is to find an internship or your first job, you don’t set out to become president. It is, of course, important to have an end goal in mind, but you have to pace yourself. You break it down into steps, make a list of all your accomplishments, write out your webs and charts, and write your resume, and so on and so on.

This may seem intuitive; perhaps you are better than me at breaking down your tasks into more manageable steps. I use a little trick I picked up from some book or another when I try to meet my deadlines. I put the end date at the top, with the final task. So, for example, my task this week was to fill in a database with information. Then, I break that down further — by Monday, I will finish through the letter D, by Wednesday, by R and by Friday, I’ll be done. You can assign these arbitrarily, or perhaps if you are feeling ambitious, you might finish those Wednesday and Friday tasks early, but then you have some cushion time. For the most part, when I break things down, I get done a little early. I am hardly perfect though, and sometimes I forget a deadline or two (usually when I misplace the list), but I am finding that breaking down all of my to-dos, from organizing my closet to finding sponsors for Come Recommended are a lot easier to manage when I baby step my way through them.

The next time you are faced with a daunting task, whether it is running a marathon, writing a paper or a new project at work, just think baby steps and break it all down. Perhaps, like me, you will find that baby stepping makes it just a little bit easier.