What are you stressing about?
This is not an article about meditation or managing stress
As a startup founder, I used to pace up and down the corridor every night for hours, thinking about all the problems I had. It took me years to realise why I was doing it.
This is not an article about managing stress (important), or the newest way to write a to-do list (also important). It’s about how to structure your thinking so that you can identify what it is that you’re trying to think about.
How thoughts escalate
There’s a scene from a 2000’s classic called Malcolm in the Middle, where one of the characters Hal notices a lightbulb is broken…
He proceeds to go to the cupboard to get a new bulb…when he notices that the shelf is broken.
So then he goes to a drawer to get a screwdriver to fix the shelf…where he notices that the drawer is rusty and makes a noise.
So then he goes to the garage to get a can of WD40…when he notices that the can is empty
So then he goes to his car so he can go to the store…when he notices that the car is making a strange noise.
The scene ends with his wife Lois coming home and asking “Hal, did you replace that lightbulb in the kitchen?”
And Hal, in the garage fixing his car, yelling back “What does it look like I’m doing??”
There’s nothing wrong with fixing your car. But if your original goal was to fix a lightbulb and you spent a whole day not doing that, then you’ve gotten distracted from what’s really important.
Vague topics of thought are not useful
Let’s say you’re a marketing manager. Your latest campaign didn’t drive great results. You’re driving home from work and thinking about what to do.
You’re thinking about the campaign design, and whether you overlooked anything. You’re thinking about how to explain the result to your client who is visiting tomorrow.
This is not useful
“Think about marketing campaign disaster” is not helpful as a way to focus your mental energy. You could say “think about cows” and you’d be just as productive.
You might notice that there’s no predetermined finish-line to all this thinking.
Without defining when your thought is “successful”, you’re encouraged to think about this until you’re exhausted and give up, or somehow the situation goes away.
I’m thinking about all the reasons why the marketing campaign didn’t go well. Why am I doing that?
All your brain needs is a clear next step
Often, rumination isn’t merely the result of stress or being unable to “let go”. It’s your mind trying to make sense of a situation.
What your brain really needs is to just understand what’s happening, and bring a little order to chaos. It wants to turn a difficult, confusing, or complex situation into something actionable.
Work out the goal of your thought process
Thinking is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. If you’re not clear what the purpose of your original thought is, it’s always easy to find more things that need thinking about.
It’s easy to have a half-baked idea of what you’re trying to achieve, and it’s easy to have a bunch of solutions jump to mind and get caught in refining all those solutions. This burns through your mental energy unproductively.
Are our analytics wrong? I knew we should have upgraded our software. I need to talk to Jack and Sally and then get budget approval, and then….
What you could be doing instead is trying to understanding the intention behind all this thinking in the first place, and focusing on that.
Separate your emotions
I won’t say too much about this here — there’s plenty that’s been written on mindfulness already. It’s just worth reiterating that it’s important to take a moment to observe your feelings.
You want your emotions to be something that is independent of your thoughts, not something that is driving them.
I am feeling anxious. I am worried that my client will be unhappy.
Clarify to yourself, what you are trying to achieve with your thought process
What you want in this context isn’t a to-do list or a plan of action. That should be where you end up, not where you start.
What you really want to figure out is what are you trying to do?
Often, you might find yourself trying to achieve two, conflicting things at once.
Pick one — or you will go in circles.
Once you’ve solved that, you can always pick up the other.
I am trying to figure out how to preserve my relationship with my client.
Decouple your areas of thought and identify what you’re not going to think about
In the course of thinking about one problem, you’ll probably encounter a whole bunch of other ones that you want to solve. You might get caught up in them and before you know it, you’ve added 5 things to your to-do list before even starting on your first.
So, if you’re thinking about why your marketing campaign didn’t go so well, you might get distracted by:
That new shiny analytics software
How this affects your upcoming performance review
Questioning your overall marketing strategy
What you want to do is recognise all the distinct components. You want to recognise which one you actually care about right now and whether you really need to think about the others at the same time.
I have no idea why the campaign failed, and that’s what I’m most concerned about.
Here are three things to keep in mind:
#1 — You don’t need to solve everything in order to solve this thing (infinite scope creep)
Sure, you can think about that new analytics software if you’d like. They’re related. You can even go ahead and buy it right now, and learn it, and set it up, and redo all the analysis.
But is that the most direct path towards your goal? Is that a required step towards your goal?
I could argue that redecorating my office is critical for creating a good working environment which is required before I finish this article. But really, it’s just a form of procrastination.
Do I really need to change my entire analytics suite in order to figure out why the campaign failed?
#2 — This current thing does not affect every other thing (overplanning)
Perhaps you were counting on talking about this campaign in your performance review in 2 months’ time.
Perhaps you were planning to replicate this campaign for a future campaign next month.
And now, all your plans are up in the air and clearly, you need to re-plan all those future things to cater for all the ways this current campaign ends up.
Or…you could just focus on the current problem at hand, and trust that everything coming up will be much easier once you’ve solved this current problem
I’m not going to worry about my performance review — I will revisit that after I’ve resolved this issue.
#3 — You don’t need to immediately redo prior work
If your failed campaign was directly driven by your marketing strategy, it’s true that they’re closely related. It perhaps is also an indicator that you should change your marketing strategy.
But what you probably don’t need to do right this instant, is revisit your entire marketing strategy. This strategy might have taken weeks or months to finalise. It’s a different activity, for a different time.
You don’t need to re-do it to achieve your current goal — all you need is to understand its relationship with your current goal. How did your marketing stategy contribute to the failure of the campaign? And flag that for a more appropriate time when your goal is to change the marketing strategy instead of to figure out what went wrong with your campaign.
I’m not going to re-do the marketing strategy right now. I’ll make some observations on how that contributed, and reflect on them later.
Be intentional with every thought
You probably already know that humans are bad at doing multiple things at once. It’s easy to tell you’re trying to do too many things at once, but it’s much harder to tell when you’re trying to think about too many things at once.
This train of thought basically goes on forever:
Think about marketing campaign disaster
Think about upcoming client meeting which will probably be a disaster
Think about all the things I could possibly do that are related to the above items
This train of thought is structured, has a finish-line and is productive:
Emotion: I feel stressed and worried about my upcoming client meeting
Goal: To maintain my relationship with my client
This will affect my performance review in 2 months, but I will choose not to think through the implications until after I have resolved this situation
This failure may have been caused by our current marketing strategy, but this is a larger problem that I am choosing to tackle at another time
My main problem is that I don’t understand why my specific campaign failed
My next action is to diagnose why the campaign failed
I will choose to do this right now and focus all my thinking on that
OR I will choose to write this down, and start first thing tomorrow morning
Once you know what you’re thinking about, it’s much easier to not overthink.
Bonus question: Are you actually focusing every day on your goals?