The Little Stuff or the Big stuff?

We all feel overwhelmed by lots of little stuff we feel we have to do, and we have these big things that we’d like to do. But to do them, it feels like you need long stretches of focus when all the other little stuff is out of the way—it feels like it would be selling the project short to try beginning to write your novel in 20 minutes on a subway commute, for example. So instead, you decide to go through your email and deal with other outstanding things—but for the reasons we’ve discussed, the time never comes when you clear all that [out of the way].  

The only way to get around to the important things is: Instead of trying to eradicate all the other stuff, [make progress] on the important stuff first. You just have to let the other chips fall where they will.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic