Procrastination and Clarity

25 Mar, 2025

Lack of clarity is the biggest reason we procrastinate doing work that we want to do. When we don’t have a clear next step, our brain resists. It doesn’t like that ambiguity. It will do anything to escape that uncomfortable, uncertain space. It reaches for something easier and mentally occupying, something that fills the gap. — like doom scrolling.

Generally, there’s two kinds of work that we avoid:

1. Irrelevant or boring work → You skip it because it doesn’t feel valuable or urgent. There's no real cost to putting it off (until it’s too late).

2. Work you want to do but still don’t → This is trickier. You care about it. You want to do it. But you still stall it for months

   Usually because:

   • You don’t know how to start.
   • You have a vision for your work but you are scared you won't reach there.
   • You’re simply overwhelmed by the chaos and ambiguity together.

But if you knew exactly what to do, step by step, you would be far more likely to start. Clarity will reduce the cognitive load and shrink the resistance.

A simple rule of thumb:

If you’re procrastinating something you care about, try defining the first 2–3 steps in painful detail.

Let’s say I am going to write a newsletter for my business. I want to do it. I know it’s important. But every time I sit down, I…

• open the doc
• stare at the screen
• maybe type a few words
• and somehow end up binging YouTube.

So what’s going on?

My brain sees “write a newsletter” and thinks: too big, too fuzzy, too many unknowns.

Now let’s try to inject painfully clear steps.

“Write this week’s newsletter on how great writers use contradiction to hook the reader.”

Here’s how clarity might look in the first few steps:

1. Open my Substack draft page.

2. Paste the note I jotted in Notion last night about the Orwell quote.

3. Add this line as the opener:

   “The best writing says two opposite things and makes them both true.”

4. Add bullet points underneath:

   • George Orwell’s doublethink
   • Zadie Smith’s essays
   • Marketing copy that plays with paradox (“Less is more”)

5. Free-write for 10 minutes on how this ties to my writing philosophy.

Boom. I am in.

Mind you, the newsletter hasn’t been written yet. But I am locked in. I have the momentum to keep going on. I know what to do, I have some clarity on what to write.

No willpower, motivation, magic pill, or abracadabra is needed once I have clarity of the next few steps.