If you are feeling frustrated on a project, or if you find yourself blogging/reading blogs (or something else) instead of working, you might consider that perhaps you have lost (or never even had to begin with) your direction.

On page 95 in Step 5 of her book “10 Steps to Successfull Project Management”, Lou Russell summarized research by Michael Ayers which detailed a few reasons why people resist work. Aside from the obvious ones like “The project doesn’t interest them”, “The project doesn’t need them” and “The project goes against their values”, there were two reasons that interested me.

These two reasons (in my oppinion) are very closely related:

1. The project seems impossible
2. The person doesn’t know what they are supposed to be doing

If you don’t know what you are supposed to be doing, the project is going to seem impossible.

If you set out to accomplish a task, usually all you have in mind is the end goal. Say for example you decide you are going to make some cookies. You know what you want. You want to savor the sweet gooey goodness of some moist fresh from the oven chocolate chip cookies. But if you don’t know what you are supposed to do to get them, the project will seem impossible.

You may wander around the kitchen for a while, opening the oven door and looking inside hoping they will appear. If you’re like me, you would probably focus on something you know, and get more and more granular with that subject until you have lost complete site of the project you started, and focus entirely on something you do know. You will end up building a replica of the oven, or inventing a new kind of spatula, or perhaps making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before you even realize that you have come no closer to accomplishing your goal.

It’s easier to just ignore what you don’t know and focus on what you do. Your avoidance might just go so far as to lead you out of the kitchen entirely. You could end up watching tv on the couch, or playing ball in the yard, or just going to the store with a vague notion of buying some cookies as a pretense.

Stop. Just stop right there. Sit down, get a piece of paper out, get a cook-book, get the oven manual, make a plan. Don’t spend too much time on it, but spend just enough to get you going. Focus on the parts you don’t know, go large scale on the parts you do. You don’t need to detail exactly how you need to use your thumb and fore-finger to turn clockwise the nob marked “oven” to such and such degrees, just say “turn on oven to such and such degrees”. However to get those cookies really mixed up you may need to detail a tricky wrist flip. But don’t spend three hours on a plan for a project that should take 20 minutes.

In order to make the impossible seem possible, you need to know what you are supposed to be doing. You can’t know what you are supposed to be doing unless you have a plan. A tasks list. So next time you find yourself blogging, or surfing, or gazing out the window, stop and think, “Why am I procrastinating/avoiding?”. It may just be as simple as you don’t have a plan.