The next time you find yourself stuck procrastinating on a big project, it might be worth scheduling half an hour to simply work through why you’re not taking action.

You probably run into these holdups all the time on projects that you ostensibly care deeply about, projects that hold the potential to help you take things to the next level in your businesses and life. No doubt, the sooner you take action on them the better things will be for you overall.

So why the delay?

While you might initially think that it’s the scope of the action required to move the project forward, my experience, time and again has taught me that more often than not there’s an unresolved decision that needs to be made about the project that is the real culprit.

It might be a question about the very nature, scope or purpose of the project, or a tactical decision about the specific part of the project you’re currently working on that needs to be answered. Either way, any doubt or uncertainty about any part of the project has the potential to derail it in its entirety until it’s resolved.

Without clarity, we can be reluctant to put any work in toward advancing the project, as we worry it will be wasted effort if we end up changing our mind about some foundational element in the future.

Make a List

When mapping out a new project, or returning to diagnose a holdup on an existing project, I like to add two sub-sections under each heading or module of my project planning document to help me clearly understand what the issues are that have the potential to sideline the project.

1. Decisions to Be Made

In this section, I write down all of the questions about that module or the project as a whole that don’t require research, but do require a decision to be made that, until made will make it difficult or impossible to make progress.

This list might include questions like:

• Which sections of my online course will be video and which will be text?
• Will my supporting documents be PDFs or webpages?
• Will I host my course on Platform A or Platform B?
• Do I want the tone of the course to be lighthearted and informal or discerning and authoritative?
• Where will I record the video segments of the course?

Once I have the list of questions, I find that I’m often able to, over the course of an hour or so, answer each of them to the level that I can at least begin work on the project.

Of course, not every question can or should be answered immediately. Some questions are actually best left until you have something to work with, and have something invested in the project.

Technical or strategic questions and decisions, like where the online course from the example above will be hosted, or what the entire marketing plan for the course will be once it’s completed can and probably should be left until you actually have a course on your hands to put up somewhere and market.

2. Research

The second section I’ll create is related to the research I need to do in order to finish off a segment of the project or the project as a whole.

For the podcast marketing course I’m currently working on, for example, I wanted to learn about PR methods for pitching media outlets to contribute an on-air segment or article as well as the psychology behind why people share content online and how to encourage more of it.

These questions are often less about the nature of the project as a whole, but when undefined, can still result in procrastination.

I’ve found that the more amorphous the project is in my brain, the less likely I am to even want to approach it. If feels too unwieldy to chip away at piece by piece when I can’t even tell what the pieces are.

Clarity Leads to Action

Since adding these two simple lists to every big project I take on, I’ve found myself moving much more quickly when it comes to getting started and taking action on moving the projects forward.

When revisiting old stalled projects and applying these lists, I’ve found that most often, the thing that was really truly causing me to procrastinate was not the time or effort required to make meaningful progress, but a simple decision that I didn’t realize was unresolved in the back of my mind.

Once the right question has been asked, the decisions can often be made instantly, or with five minutes consideration and the work can then move forward.

Train yourself to get clear on decisions that need to be made and watch your speed of implementation increase rapidly.

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Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/not-coming-up-new-good-ideas-c4e09fa31e74https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/not-coming-up-new-good-ideas-c4e09fa31e74