What do you do when you get stuck? How do you unstick yourself?
Here are some sticky situations:
- You are assigned a task and have no idea where to start.
- You have too much work and you don’t know where to begin.
- The sky is falling and everything is spiraling out of control.
- Something stressful has dropped on your lap and it’s now your problem to solve.
I’ve learned some interesting things that may be helpful with preventing wheels from being spun or entering a mental paralysis. From what I’ve experienced in a startup, if you’re solving a new problem, there’s not a clear roadmap for what operational success looks like. You’re responsible for creating that roadmap. If you get stuck, it could mean the business doesn’t survive.
So, next time you’re stuck, throw some Limp Bizkit on and do this:
Don’t think. Just do.
Don’t give yourself time to overthink or get anxious. It’s time to act and get sequential:
1. Open up Word, Notepad, Notes, or go old school and grab a pencil and paper.
Just start writing as soon as you realize you’re stuck. This will focus your attention.
Don’t waste time in abstraction and getting lost in thought. When you’re stuck in your head, there are so many unrealistic paths you can go down. The point of this exercise is to rip the problem out of an ethereal vagueness and to begin defining it.
You can write like you’re venting about the problem. Write about the issues it’s causing you. Write about what life would be like without that problem. Write like you’re explaining it to someone or explaining it to yourself. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Just start writing.
2. When you’re writing out the problems, you’re going to realize that certain things need to take place for this to get resolved.
When you start a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, there’s nothing but chaos and nothing makes sense. But when you start sorting and grouping the pieces, you begin to see patterns. This is what’s happening here.
Things start to register when you’re doing this association game such as:
- You may need to talk to someone about something.
- You may need to find a certain tool.
- You think about that if something were to happen, then X, Y, and Z would need to happen. How could those things happen? If those things were to happen, then…
These are all important pieces to completing your jigsaw puzzle.
Grab a separate paper, doc, spreadsheet, etc., and begin writing down things that need to get done as they begin to surface. Once you put these tasks on paper, they’ll start to change the direction of your story. You’ll notice that you’re getting focused. Re-reading the story from start to finish a couple of times helps. You know how it always seems easier to solve someone else’s problems? This is kind of like that.
3. Now, shift to your new document full of these tasks and start arranging them in the order of things that need to get done.
Once you’ve assembled more than 2 tasks, congratulations! You’ve started building a project.
If you start to use this regularly, it becomes second nature. If you’re in high pressure situations, stalling out because you don’t know what to do isn’t an option.
There is always something to do, and deep down inside, you can extract the answers or at least define where to start looking.
What’s important is that you don’t spend your energy being overwhelmed and thinking about the problem, because that drains your willpower. There’s only so much time in the day, and you don’t want to spend your precious willpower trying to visualize the perfect solution. In “The Power of Habit,” Charles Duhigg explains that:
“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things”
Charles Duhigg, “The Power Of Habit” (p. 137)
Instead of burning that energy, just start doing, and create a system. The goal is to align your brain and think sequentially: define the first thing, then the next. You create momentum once you illuminate the path, and the solution will show itself like a magic 3D image.