Elephant Burgers

October 19, 2007

Elephant Burgers

Q-How do you eat an elephant?
A-One bite at a time!
Q-What if you get bored eating elephant?
A-Make elephant burgers!

One of the discussions on the Fast Track Your Dream forum for people in creative career transition brought up the question of finding time in a busy schedule to take steps towards a goal. One memorable response came from a member who raised the iconic question: How do you eat an elephant?

This led to other questions from people who generally thought they wouldn’t like the taste of elephant or would get tired of eating it. We even heard a response from a vegetarian. Okay, all metaphors have limits! But the key idea is strong.

One of the creative members wrote a post about finding a few minutes here and a half hour there in her busy schedule by keeping focused on the task of finding time. She had her list of items and could do ten minutes of phone calls or fifteen minutes of web research or a half hour organizing thoughts for a project. She referred to these isolated steps taken during recaptured time as elephant burgers. I love the image and have extended it to include the answer to the question of overcoming boredom or the feeling of overwhelm with a big project.

Elephant burgers means using creativity and mindfulness to take a large or ongoing project, break it into individual steps that can be accomplished, and keep yourself motivated and accountable so you move forward. It combines organization and planning with fun and sometimes whimsy.

I’m not a smashing success at this. I use the idea with success, but then fall back into old ways. For example, I used to have large stacks of paper and debit card receipts (personal, not business, because I save those for deductions) piling up around my shredder. I would sit down and take an hour or so to shred it all, especially with un-jamming the shredder and waiting for it to cool down after several minutes of constant use.

Then I decided to shred just ten items per day until they were gone. It worked! The shredder didn’t overheat and the pile went down, although some days I added to it. I had small piles of “confetti” that were fun to recycle instead of bulky bags full of shreds. What a system! It worked for many weeks.

Now I have two small piles slowly building on top of my shredder and recycle basket again. I stopped using my system and went back to old ways. But I have a simple plan that worked before and I can conquer this elephant one burger at a time. Today I shredded my cleared debit card receipts from last month, nearly twenty. Tomorrow I’ll shred ten unsolicited credit card applications. Those are fun! At this rate, the pile should be gone in a week or two.

Posted in Elephant Burgers, Zine 1: October 2007, Zines in 2007