Clearly Not Always
I have been guilty of working hard without knowing where I’m going. I’ve also been guilty of the opposite — sitting still, endlessly circling the same questions in my head, afraid to move until I had the perfect plan. Both feel terrible. One burns you out; the other leaves you stuck.
Over time, I’ve learned that the difference between the two often comes down to a single, slippery thing: clarity.
Without altering it much, one of my friends phrased it beautifully:
What we do very well is put in effort and make progress. Our challenge lies in the direction and figuring out what to do, the biggest breakthroughs are in terms of clarity.
It is hard to define clarity. Dictionaries and thesauruses do not seem to help either. It is (relatively) easier to identify when we lack it.
When I seem to lack clarity, I:
- perpetually question and constantly revisit my set course of actions
- procrastinate and avoid taking meaningful decisions
- feel dull and unenergetic when working towards the set objective
- make no quantifiable progress even after persistent effort
So in that regard, clarity is a state of mind. Clarity is coherence of thought. Clarity removes the constant need to evaluate and second-guess my direction. My objective in writing this article is to establish a precedence of coherency in a world where I don’t see it being talked about often. In other words, I want you to internalise the fact that clarity has potential to catalyse progress.
Additionally, I want to play the devil’s advocate too. I identify scenarios when it is not worth to keep aside time for planning.
I structure the rest of the article in 3 parts. In the first part, I discuss that working is over-valued compared to establishing a well-thought-out direction. In the second part, I ponder over the right dosage of clarity and when it might not make much sense to define a vivid end-state. The final part serves as a conclusion and a tl;dr.
1. Actions: Over-indexed, Clarity: Undermined
I need minimal effort to convince you that actions are what actually change the status quo. Of course you say, thoughts are just electrical impulses within the brain. I argue that these electrical impulses hold the capability to propel you toward divergent courses of action too.
For any sufficiently large objective, all actions become progressive in nature, each contributing a little. However, these actions can start working against each other, resulting in no perceivable progress.
There are many documented cognitive biases around our intuition being deceived around our actions. Few examples include Confirmation Bias and Recency Bias. These biases, I argue, emerge largely because we fail to anchor our impulses with a clear picture of where we truly want to go.
Clarity acts like a stream of river. Yes, there will be rocks along the way, but as long as the stream is being followed, the ocean will be met. Being intentional in the pursuit of my targets eliminates the unnecessary back and forth and helps me operate on a micro-level.
Why then, is clarity so underrated, and why do adverts seldom urge us to seek it before prompting to act? The answer is intuitive really. This article states that since 1940, the number of impulsive purchases roughly lies between 40–80%. That roughly translates to: Of the last 10 things you bought, about 4–8 of them were probably on a whim.
No wonder that in this ad-driven world, clarity is underrated and impulsive behavior is incentivised.
But if clarity is so powerful, the real question becomes — how much is enough before it tips into the territory of overthinking?
2. Boundary between Clarity and Over-thinking
As a chronic over-thinker myself, I sought to search for a clear distinction, but frankly, drawing the line between clarity and over-analysis is surprisingly tricky. Yes I do realise that thinking about over-thinking is over-thinking too, I already introduce myself as a chronic over-thinker, don’t I?
Not all goals in my life seem to be worth developing clarity about. Deciding where to invest, which degree to pursue, what field to make my career in… are all questions that I want to have clarity on. At the same time, deciding the movie to watch or which fruits to buy are clearly not the activities I want to spend much time thinking about. I’ve been a victim of the latter many a times, spending four hours on Netflix deciding which two hour movie to watch and ending up watching. I am not alone here, am I?
After pondering on this for a while and discussing it with people around me, I’ve adopted the following philosophy: the more time-intensive a pursuit is going to be, the more it makes sense to spend time gaining clarity over it.
I spend at least 10% of the total time required to complete the objective on gaining clarity on the topic, and not more than 20%.
I shouldn’t take more than 25 minutes and should take at least 10 minutes while choosing a movie on Netflix. I like to keep 10% as the lower limit and 20% as the upper limit but these bounds are subjective and arbitrary really. An intricate framework with cut-offs like anything below an hour’s commitment should not be thought of and so on and so forth can also be developed here.
This approach helps me avoid analysis-paralysis but at the same time ensures that I am thinking about where and how I am spending my time. Again, heuristics aside, the idea here is to develop a framework for when it makes sense to go that extra mile. After all, we all have limited time and we cannot spend all of it thinking about what to do.
P.S. I intentionally choose to not dwell deep into the total time estimation for an objective in this (already) long article.
3. Closing the Loop
The reason I write this article is to index coherence of thought in my life. It is not intuitive to define it but it is fairly easy to identify the lack of it. At its best, it can single-handedly get the job done. At the minimum, it gives me the very next action to perform. The world doesn’t seem to (and maybe doesn’t want to) acknowledge this as much as I want it to.
But just like in any other complex puzzle, it is but a piece. Try to be thorough in each and every decision you make, and you find yourself making little meaningful progress. The amount of time spent thinking of a pursuit should be proportional to the amount of time it takes in completing the pursuit.
I personally like to keep the lower and upper bound of 10% and 20%, but I wish to develop a thorough framework for this sometime in the near future (ironically). You should come up with a rough framework of your own too!
