Not everything in life is a class A emergency requiring immediate attention or any attention at all. It’s something I’ve struggled to remember all my life; I’m prone to snowballing insignificant events into national security matters.

This morning, I spent two hours wrestling with my Genetics and Health blog. First, it jammed and I couldn’t load the site nor post or edit entries. I tried all the usual remedies: clearing the cache and cookies, rebooting my computer, accessing via both FireFox and IE. No go. Finally, I e-mailed Duncan for help.

To my great relief, he didn’t reflexively blame me or my computer for being the cause of the problem. And even better, he encountered the same thing. Within minutes, he’d identified a solution and the site was running again.

My sunk costs climbed even higher when an insignificant problem I had with a malfunctioning blog gadget turned into a time drain. I’d already decided the gadget was something that didn’t add significantly to the worth of the blog. But because someone kindly offered to help me look into it, I got sucked back in. What I should have done was to thank him and move on.

All the time I spent doing these things could have been spent writing. Eventually, the site would have started running again or I could have written something for any of my other five blogs. Getting the gadget to work wouldn’t have generated newer or better content.

Whenever anything goes wrong, my instincts are to jump in because I want it fixed RIGHT NOW. But when does that ever happen? Usually, I end up wasting my time and energy on things that don’t matter while the things that do are pushed aside in the frenzy.

Every single situation warrants triaging. Honing that skill could add years to my life.

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