Clarity Cures Overwhelm

When you feel overwhelmed, don’t try and work harder.

That’s not even fighting the symptom rather than the underlying disease… It’s feeding the problem and making it worse.

There’s a never-ending stream of tasks that you could do. Ticking some of them off the list only allows even more to drop into the ‘to do’ bucket.

The more you blindly hack away at what’s there, the more impossible it seems to get everything done.

So the trick is to refuse to play that game. Accept that you can’t do everything (or at least not right now). 

The route to success doesn’t depend on scrambling to get lots of things done… But on making the right choice of what thing(s) to do.


When you look at a huge pile of tasks, then it seems impossible. If you only have one thing in front of you then it always seems manageable.

(And if you’re imagining one thing that’s NOT manageable then you need to break it down. What’s the smallest first step? There’s always something where you think “I could do that”)

The problem here is that your brain is sufficiently advanced that it’s able to ‘fight’ reality.

You can only ever do one thing at a time. So seeing a huge pile of things that need doing is essentially compressing a long, drawn-out future into one single present moment.

Because you can imagine it conceptually, you assume that it’s a reasonable picture. But it’s actually capturing something that is completely impossible.

So your brain responds by feeling overwhelmed.

Working with a long list of tasks is helpful when you’re planning. But it’s actively damaging at other times. (Obviously when you’re actually DOING. But also when your brain is meant to be ‘turned off’)

You must work with time rather than fight against it.

Don’t try and collapse the future into the present. Take things one by one.


However…

Simply reaching for the next item on your ‘to do’ list won’t work.

When you pick tasks at random then they come along with a sense of doubt — “Is this really what I should be doing now?”.

So the name of the game is clarity — pure and simple.

If you’re 100% clear on what you need to do next then you can forget everything else and just do that one thing.

There’s nothing more important that you can do right now. So you’re inevitably being as effective as it is possible to be.

Then, once the current thing is done, you get clarity on the next thing. And do that in its turn.

This brings a feeling of peace. The very opposite of overwhelm. Because you only ever have one thing on your plate. And you know it’s the right thing.

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