Now that you’ve made it past the Brain Dump let’s move onto the next step – how to deal with an invasion of bees.

Before you think I’ve lost my mind, close your eyes and picture a scenario for me…

You’ve dumped your brain out onto paper and you’re kind of exhausted and either overwhelmed or a feeling a little lighter. You’ve done a good job, though, so it’s time to reward yourself! To do just that, you decide to get in your car and head out to the store to grab some ice cream.

Stoked, you show up at the store and decide to indulge by grabbing two pints. Then, you check out and head back to your car. Except… once you get to your car, you find that during the short time you were inside, a massive swarm of 1500 bees has taken over your back seat!

This is, in fact, a real story that happened to someone in New Mexico. And by putting ourselves in their shoes, you can imagine how you’d respond – panic. While nothing’s actually attacking you, your mind would race and you’d think “what the heck am I supposed to do next???”. Plus, your sweet new ice cream is melting!

When feeling overwhelmed and even after completing a brain dump – we can feel the exact same level of overwhelming panic as we’d experience encountering and dealing with a swarm of 1,500 bees in our back seat.

So in this section, we’re going to talk about what to do next with the contents of your Brain Dump – especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed.

At this point, your Brain Dump should be written down.
If it’s not externalized onto a document, paper, or other note taking tool – go back and get that done first. The whole exercise is useless if you don’t have all the information that was in your brain in front of you to play with.

Additionally, you need to have separated the original big list into the things that you’re planning to work on immediately, versus what you’re going to do in the future. Once you’ve got this done, you can move forward.

Laughably Small Tasks are to-do’s that are so small that you’d laugh at the
thought of NOT doing them.
Even at this point with your brain dump completed, you still have things on your list that you’re likely to procrastinate on or don’t want to do. So you need a new tool to get over that hurdle – that tool is “Laughably Small Tasks”.

Alone, Laughably Small Tasks are just to-do’s like any other to-do list that you’d write down. However, they have a much greater power than your existing list due to their small granularity, as you’ll come to see. By the end of this section of the guide, you’re likely to have a decent number of these created out of your “do this immediately” list. Those tasks will look like “open laptop” or “turn on the computer” and “open document” or “open web browser”.

Your Laughably Small Tasks should be so small that it’s likely you’ll feel silly writing them down. You may even thing to yourself “it takes me more time to write this down than it does just to do it” – that’s the point! That’s also a surefire indication that you’ve gotten down to a Laughably Small Task.

Laughably Small Tasks are useful due to their ability maintain your energy
and crush procrastination.
When you’re overwhelmed, you don’t have any momentum or consistency. Usually this is based solely on mental hurdles. You can test this, too – maybe you need to walk the dog or take the trash out, but you find yourself stuck on the couch. It’s likely that you can physically accomplish feats like that, but you just don’t want to or don’t feel like it.

It’s that mental overwhelm we’re looking to solve here. If you’re physically incapable, that’s an entirely different problem to solve.

We can get into this mental rut for a number of reasons – but often we procrastinate and defer things because it’s unclear what exactly needs to happen next. It’s easier to put off work than it is to sit down and face the mental exhaustion that can come with making decisions or trying to gain clarity. And, the longer we avoid the work, the bigger the hurdle in our mind grows of getting back to it.

Therefore, one way around mental exhaustion is to reduce the load on your mind. If you were at the gym lifting weights or even just bringing bags of groceries inside, once you found something you couldn’t physically lift, you’d reduce the weight so you could do the necessary lifting in lighter chunks. If you can’t carry four bags of groceries at once, you’ll make two trips with two bags each time.

The same principle applies here – break up the mentally exhausting tasks to be very light weight, and ‘pick up’ those light weights one at a time.

Accomplishing these tasks, although small, gives us an instant boost of momentum. Once you do a task or two, you’ll have clarity on whether you can continue or if you’re still exhausted and should stop. Either way, you’ll have made forward progress. That progress, no matter how small at the beginning, is crucial for your brain to eventually cross the line and think “yeah, I CAN do this!”

You create Laughably Small Tasks by making sub-tasks, and sub-sub tasks.
The exercise to create these tasks happens in a loop, and is best done with one task at a time.

First, you’ll need to grab your “do these things immediately” list and pick only one item on that list to get started on. It doesn’t matter if that item is a big project, or a somewhat small task itself – either way, the principles remain the same.

Simply put, you will take that task and break it down into sub-tasks that need to get done. From there, you will choose only one sub-task, and break that sub-task down with its own sub-tasks. You can continue doing this until you get down to tasks so small that you can accomplish them without a second thought.

As an example, if our task was “create gunshot redesign” your initial task and sub-tasks could look like this:

• Create gunshot redesign
  • Record source sounds
  • Search sound library for existing samples
  • Edit recorded sounds
  • Grab video capture
  • Create the gunshot
  • Edit to video
  • Ask for feedback

Obviously, that this list not exhaustive – and that’s okay. This is about what comes to your mind, NOT about having the most perfect and immaculate task list.

At this point, you should be able to tell that each of those tasks is still considerably time consuming, so you’ll need to pick one you want to get started on and begin to break it down.

• Search sound library for existing samples
  • Think of keywords that might be good for gun transients
  • Think of keywords that might be good for body thumps
  • Think of keywords that might be good for shot tails
  • Search keywords
  • Pull content into my DAW
  • Name and color tracks

The above example is a little closer – you could just pull up your DAW and start searching instead of writing anything down. But, let’s assume you had no ideas of what to search, or you feel like you’ve already used all of your existing sounds a million times over and it seems impossible to get started. At that point, you need to keep going…

• Think of Keywords that might be good for gun transients
  • Pull out my phone
  • Pull up notes app
  • Think of and write down one keyword that I could search for a good
    transient

And just a few sub-levels deep, you’ve gotten to tasks are absolutely doable. You might groan at the thought of pulling up your notes app though, and if you do – then break it down again!

• Pull up my notes app
  • Turn on my phone screen
  • Enter my password
  • Swipe to the notes app screen
  • Click the notes app button

See how these tasks are absolutely absurd to have written down at this point? But, I bet you can also see yourself pulling out your phone and getting distracted when you could’ve gone to the notes app. Instead, you waste twenty minutes scrolling around and putting off getting to your notes app.

Whenever you feel that mental pressure, it’s a cue to continue to break down what it takes to do the task that causes you pressure.

In the next section, we’ll get into how to actually start working on these tasks in detail. That’s right – don’t just haul off and start working yet!

“So let me get this straight… you think we should do a task breakdown rather than just DOING the trivial thing that is turning on our computer?”
Yes, absolutely. I know I mentioned this before – but it bears repeating because some of you are going to just get to work and ignore the parts about writing down the super small tasks.

This is a mental exercise, and it’s really good practice to write the tasks down when you’re starting this out. Eventually, you’re likely to get to that place where it’s beyond silly to write it all down – but start with the writing practice and abandon it later if need be.

To this day, I still break down tasks and outlines to defeat procrastination and get my work done – even this article was outlined with Laughably Small Tasks!

Okay let’s look at what we covered again:

• After doing a Brain Dump, you need to turn that information into
  Laughably Small Tasks
• Laughably Small Tasks are to-do list items so small that you’d laugh at the thought of NOT doing them
• Laughably Small Tasks are useful as they help us overcome mental exhaustion and overwhelm
• We create Laughably Small Tasks by doing a task breakdown in a loop, as outlined above

Okay, so creating a laughably small task list may not help you overcome a giant bee swarm at your car.
But, Laughably Small Tasks will definitely cure your mental exhaustion and overwhelm – especially if you can get the tasks down so small that they seem absolutely trivial to do.

Now, you may think all that’s left is to knock out all these tasks as fast aspossible, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the next section, we’ll cover why stopping before you’re ready to will nearly guarantee your long term success.

And don’t forget – our first sound effect pack, “Small Sci-Fi Weapons” by James Thatcher will be
available shortly. There will be a limited number of copies available, so be sure to get on the waiting list!