When you’re sitting there, confused, overwhelmed, and overthinking what your next steps are.
When you’re not quite sure what you should do in that moment.
What should you do?
Do something. Do anything. So long as it’s useful and move you forwards, not backwards.
Selecting your one thing, prioritizing your list and finding the right things to work on are all required to be effective.
But during those times when you’re really struggling to get clear, you have genuinely no idea what to work on and you’ve spent the last 43 minutes trying to find the right thing to get started on, you could’ve already finished a critical task on your to-do list and been half way through the next one.
Instead of investing an abundance of time trying to find the “perfect” thing to work on, sometimes you’d be far better off making a list of things that you could potentially work on, and then just picking something.
Whether it’s something that’s eating at you, that you want to do or is sticking out to you for some reason (known or unknown) — just picking something to get started on and giving your all to it without giving much of a second thought to it, can be a net score positive.
Because then before you know it, you’ve built momentum by getting started fast and you’re gliding through a list of things that need to be done.
And even though you weren’t 100% sure what you should have worked on, you didn’t avoid the work and instead chose to be useful with your time and moved forward towards your goals, in imperfect ways.
And maybe, just maybe, as you progress through your list, you’re given the clarity of what’s essential to work on next, and you can attack that with full force.