I recently faced a daunting task. I had five stacks of books that I had removed from the shelves of my home office and taken downstairs to put on the shelves of my home library.

Now, you might think, well, what's so hard about that? Just stick them on the shelves.

But I like to arrange my books by subject and the history books by time

period so I can find them easily. So the challenge was to figure out where each book in those

five stacks should go and to shift the existing books down on the shelves in order to make

room for them.

It seemed pretty daunting.

I set aside a Saturday to tackle the project, but then on Thursday I got an idea.

Why don't you just sort the stacks into subjects this morning?

It will take only a few minutes minutes and then you can see how much

room you will need in the various locations on the shelves. So I sorted the stacks. I put

all of the geography books in one stack and all of the ancient history books in another

and the Middle Ages books in a third. You get the idea. It took only about ten minutes, and I felt like I had a better handle on where I was headed.

On Friday, I got another idea.

Today, why don't you just shift the existing history books down one shelf to prepare for

this influx of new books. That shouldn't

take long. So I spent maybe 10 minutes moving books to the next shelf down and getting some good

strength training on my arms. Now the project didn't seem so daunting. In fact, with those two steps already done, it would only take maybe ten minutes to tuck

all of those stacks of books where they belonged.

And who can resist finishing a task ahead of schedule when it would be so easy to do?

So of course, I finished on Friday, and I'm very happy with the results.

The point is, big changes don't look so scary when you approach them step by step.

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