Every few months I experience this feeling of not knowing what to do next. I’ve had this feeling pop up when doing home improvement, digital marketing for clients, and sometimes even when I’m just relaxing.
Not knowing what to do used to be an extremely frustrating experience, both mentally and emotionally. However, after experiencing this many times – I’ve grown to appreciate the feeling of not knowing what to do as a warning sign.
So, in this post, I’m going to talk about what you should do when you don’t know what to do and feeling overwhelmed.
Table of Contents
Figure out what you want
The first thing you should do when you don’t know what to do is figure out what you want to accomplish.
Any time I feel lost and unsure of what to do, I find that I’ve either lost sight of my end goal or that I need to break down my end goal into more achievable milestones. For me, the more complicated a goal is – the more likely I am to have self-doubt after working on it for a while.
Once you’re 100% sure of what you’re trying to achieve, you can move to the next step.
Figure out why you want it
The second thing you should do is figure out why you want what you want.
Knowing what you want is good but it’s not enough to prevent you from feeling lost and unsure of what to do next. You absolutely need to know why you want what you want.
Honestly, your “why” is more important than your “what”.
For example, when I was 18 – I wanted a Bentley and a mansion on top of a hill. That was one of my initial motivators for trying to improve my life. But I can guarantee you that if I was able to get that Bentley and mansion, I wouldn’t have been happy.
See, I didn’t really care about the Bentley or mansion at all. I cared about the freedom I thought would come with owning a Bentley and a mansion. Every person I’d ever seen on TV and the internet that had a Bentley and a mansion also looked like they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted.
Eventually, I reached a point in my life where I could purchase a used Bentley and a mansion – but I didn’t. Those things no longer symbolized freedom for me.
However, had I not looked into why I wanted those things – I may have purchased them and found myself unfulfilled and unsure of what to do next.
Recommended Reading: Enough Is All We Need To Be Happy
Do nothing for a couple of a days
This is one of my secrets for building motivation and verifying that my “why” is strong. After thinking about what I want and why I want it, I take no action toward achieving it.
I spend a few days living my normal, everyday life. For me, this includes working my day job, coming home to eat and spend time with my wife, exercising, and then I fill any additional time with things unrelated to my end goal (cleaning, organizing, being bored, etc..).
For me, this does 2 things:
- Gives me additional time to think about what I want and why I want it. This causes my motivation to increase and build up while I purposely avoid doing anything toward reaching that end goal.
- I’m able to take a step back and see how my life is when I’m just living. This allows me to be grateful for what I have while allowing me to be realistic about how much time additional I can commit toward my end goal. For example, If I’m super busy when I’m not working toward any goals, how am I going to add more to a “cup that’s already full”? I can’t. So I’d have to make a conscious decision to sacrifice something and accept the consequences of that sacrifice in order to work toward my end goal.
Plan your milestones
After you do nothing for a couple of days, it’s time to get to work and breakdown your end goal into milestones.
Now, the word milestones sounds more formal than it actually is. I prefer to look at them as celebration moments.
These celebration moments (or milestones) are micro-goals that, if achieved, will keep me on the correct path for hitting my end goal. I like to choose milestones that are small enough to be achievable but big enough that I can celebrate with a nice dinner or event once achieving them.
So, for example, if your end goal was finacially free (like me) – here are a few milestones:
- Enough passive income to pay for netflix
- Enough passive income to pay your phone bill
- Enough passive income to pay for one month of dining out
- etc..
In the above examples, passive income refers to investments (real estate, stocks, royalties, etc..). It’s basically money that you make that’s not directly tied to your time. That doesn’t mean you won’t have to invest time into it occassionally (for example, when house hacking and being a landlord, I still had to repair things and talk to tenants).
But, overall, by breaking down your goal into milestones – you can clearly see what you need to do.
Take action
Now it’s time to start doing things based on the milestones you’re trying to achieve. That’s it.
Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be. Focus on achieving one milestone at a time and then, once you achieve it, celebrate. Rinse and repeat.
And, should you start feeling uncertain and become unsure of what to do next, repeat the process listed in this post.
We’re human and I don’t expect you to read this post and instantly become perfect. I mean, I know my milestones, end goal, and why I want it – but that doesn’t stop me from feeling unsure at times. Life throws curveballs at us all the time and it’s our job to adapt.
So keep things simple and keep moving forward. Now that you have an idea of what to do when you don’t know what to do – you should be able to recover from feeling lost much sooner than before.
However, this method isn’t the only way. The more you repeat this process, the more likely you are to modify and change this process to fit your unique way of thinking (which is perfectly fine).
Just remember, at the end of the day, you’re responsible for achieving your goals. All of the tips and tricks on the internet are just tools to help you. Don’t be afraid to change tools if it’s not working and if a tool is working fine for you, don’t look to change or “optimize” it unless absolutely necessary (unless your end goal is to optimize tools).
Recommended Reading: Willingly Struggle or Be Forced To
