Sometimes, We Sweat the Wrong Details
Maybe You’re Not Stuck, Just Fixated
Sometimes, when we feel stuck, it’s not because the little decisions are particularly difficult; it’s just that we’re working on the wrong level. We spend time and energy on details that don’t matter. This involves making purely cosmetic decisions that serve to soothe our own ego. Seneca, in his essay titled “On the Shortness of Life,” says “the life we are given isn’t short but we make it so; we’re not ill provided but we are wasteful of life.”
Life is given to us in generous amounts yet we squander it in trivialities. Some of us would benefit from questioning if certain uses of our time are really moving us toward the outcome we want or simply numbing the discomfort of not being there.
It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. -Seneca
The Illusion of Progress
Consider job hunting. You might verify your LinkedIn and download the app. These are great steps, but writing these down as critical tasks risks cluttering your mental bandwidth. Checking them off a list might feel satisfying but that cheap hit of dopamine may leave you aiming lower than what you’re capable of. This is just another form of overthinking disguised as productivity. It’s emotional regulation masquerading as progress.
I’ve found that it’s sometimes better to step a level higher to “bypass” the myriad of lower-level, relatively insignificant decisions. It’s easy to obsess over what note-taking tool is the best, or what font your newsletter should use, but still feel like you’re not making progress for all the time you’re spending. It’s not as though those details don’t matter at all, they just become traps without a clear big picture.
For example, I would go back and forth over how I’d capture ideas and notes for my blog posts. Should I use Notion? Evernote? Roam? Apple Notes? What tagging system is the best? Then I had a simple, clarifying insight: I need a newsletter. The one thing–the real win–isn’t in note capture but in completing posts. So I picked whatever felt the easiest and stopped agonizing. This was enormous. I could finally give myself permission to “just figure out” and move on, putting my effort towards getting a post done.
The Small Task Tax
I also used to think along the lines of I need to reply to 10 people today and read through this many articles, etc. But I realized that by focusing on the core responsibilities and deliverables, the granular things just got done. Fast. And getting them done quickly was much better than overthinking and losing momentum. It gave me more brain power for the cognitively demanding work I wanted to do.
When you know what you’re concretely working towards and keep that as the central focus, the small decisions stop feeling so paralyzing. Your rate of decision-making speeds up, creating a feedback loop. You move quicker, learn faster, and adjust with momentum. You have to pick the right battle with the right scope. When that becomes your guiding principle, the smaller pieces fall into place.
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win” -Sun Tzu
The next time you find yourself creating a spreadsheet or making a to-do list or agonizing over a decision, take a step back from it all for a second. Ask yourself, are you sweating the right detail? If you’re not sure, think a level higher than your current problems. Clarity at the top makes speed at the bottom level inevitable. The minute hand on a clock takes one step forward for every 60 taken by the second hand. High level progress is made by resolving countless tiny moments. When you’re clear on what you want to achieve, you become ruthlessly efficient at cutting through the minutiae.
So if you find that you spend a lot of time on projects without much to show for it, try aiming for function with a bias for decisive action. Adjustments and patch notes can come later. This is what it means to optimize for the win-condition.
Be intentional with your energy. The rest will follow.
Cheers,
Eashan