You Can't Focus Without Clarity

What if the most common cause of our procrastination isn’t so much about what we don’t want to do, but more about what we don’t know?

Have you ever found yourself at the end of a work or school day only to feel like you’ve done nothing of value all day? Maybe you rotated from one task to another so often you couldn’t make much meaningful progress on anything, or perhaps you just frittered away the time between answering a few emails or reading a few pages with scrolling on your phone. I’ve certainly spent a few more days than I’d like to admit doing those very things. Up until recently, I blamed such days on my short attention span or lack of motivation. Now, I’m starting to dig a little deeper. 

A couple summers ago, I had a really neat internship where I was tasked with advancing a couple projects for an ag finance company in their sustainability department. When I first accepted the job, all I knew is that I was supposed to lead a project on some type of soil health tool. “Sounds exciting!” I thought, not worrying about the fact that I had no idea what exactly that tool was supposed to be. Once my summer started, I began to set timelines for myself for each project, and that’s when I should have noticed something was off. You see, I didn’t have any deadline for the soil health tool other than “finished” by the end of the summer. But I had no idea how to get it finished. So, I did what most of us do when we don’t know what we’re doing: I procrastinated. I had a second project where I knew what the objectives were and how to achieve them, so I spent the lion’s share of my time on the project that was clear. 

Did you catch what happened there? I had clarity on the second project, so it was much easier to focus on it. I had no clarity on the first, so it was pretty much impossible to focus on it. How can you put time into something when you don’t know what to do with the time? Here’s the deal: sometimes our lack of focus is a symptom of our short attention spans and human propensity to avoid hard things; more often, it’s a symptom of our lack of clarity. 

Now, this doesn’t mean it’s never our fault or our responsibility when we struggle to focus; in fact, when we find ourselves failing to focus, our first action should be to figure out what the heck we’re supposed to be doing, not dilly dally until someone notices we’re struggling. That’s what I did that summer until about halfway through, when my manager started asking for progress on the soil health project, and I finally realized it was my job to get some more clarity in order to make progress. Sitting around waiting for something to happen was a pretty bad way to expect a project to get finished. 

So, where do we go to get the clarity we need? Well, it depends on what’s ahead of you: is it a work project? A personal goal? A homework assignment? From my still-minimal work experience, the best way to get clarity on a project from your manager is to ask so many questions you start to wonder if you look dumb; believe it or not, your boss will probably think you’re even smarter because you’re aware of your own lack of knowledge (look up the Dunning-Kruger effect). If you have a personal goal to gain a skill or achieve a milestone (publish a book, run a marathon, whatever strikes your fancy), a quick Google search may be all you need to get started, or maybe you can find someone in your life who has done the thing you want to do, and you could ask them how they got started. For homework projects, sometimes we need more clarity from the instructor. Other times, we gain clarity by simply getting started, even if it’s as simple as opening a blank document and writing our name. The one thing that will not bring clarity, in any scenario, is putting off the task that is unclear. 

This past summer, I started my full-time job with a similar scenario: one of my projects was unclear to me at the beginning, and I was tempted to just put it on the back burner. But, having learned from my internship, I started down the path towards more clarity. I talked to my boss about it, who had me call another person, who had me call yet another person. Each call required me to make the choice to continue pursuing clarity, and I won’t pretend it was easy. In fact, it was pretty overwhelming at times. Yet, when I finally gained the clarity on exactly what it was I was supposed to do to drive the project forward, I enjoyed my job a lot more. Instead of bumbling around trying to figure it out on my own, I began to lean on my colleagues. That project is finished now, but the habit has stuck. 

This habit of calling someone older and wiser every time I run into something that’s unclear has become, single-handedly, the most critical deciding factor of how meaningful and productive my workday will be. It took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit, but for much of the first six months of my working life after college, I tried to figure things out on my own. I’d find myself staring at an Excel spreadsheet at the end of the afternoon, scrolling through columns and columns of terms I didn’t understand and numbers I didn’t know the meaning of. I told myself I wasn’t smart enough for the job if I couldn’t figure it out myself. As a result, I wasted hours of time, unsure where to focus, simply because I lacked the humility to ask for some clarity. I still struggle to ask for help some days, but it’s becoming more second-nature to pick up the phone now when I run into a spreadsheet that doesn’t make sense or when I look at the week ahead and don’t know what to talk with customers about. In case no one has ever told you, let me be the first: work (and life) is more fun when you have some clarity on what to do next. 

You don’t need to know how to finish the project; you just need to know how to start. You don’t need to know what your year will look like at the end; you just need to know what habits you want to build now. You don’t need to know who or where you’ll be in ten years; you just need to know what you want to achieve while you are where you are now. Clarity doesn’t mean we’ll know what every step down the road will look like, but then again, isn’t the next step the only one we need to take right now?

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The other day, my pastor preached on the need for clarity in order to focus, and next time you drop in I’ll share more of what that might look like in the overall scheme of our lives, not just in a task or job right in front of us. 

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Journal Prompt of the Week

Where do you lack clarity right now? Who is the first person you’ll ask for help?