When you are stuck and cannot proceed, it is better to perform a restart

So, what do you do when your computer or phone is just not responding to your touch and clicks and clacks? Yes, you obviously go for the power button, switch it off and on again and voila it has miraculously come back to life after restarting it. Similarly, in life, work or study projects quite often we just get stuck with things and have no idea how to proceed from there. Whether that is due to the scope of the whole thing, it is overwhelming or you are just generally tired of it and cannot make sense of it. The best way to break that impasse is to just perform a restart.

It's not just the fact that you are stuck on it, but it's also about its side effects on your psyche in general, where you start feeling distracted and unmotivated about doing things, or generally depressed about things and have a feeling of having less worth. So, it becomes extremely important that we manage to come out it this rut, and quickly.

When I say we need to restart, it does not mean that we throw away all the progress that we have made up until that point, in fact it is imperative that we use all the knowledge and experience we have gained from our previous attempt and make sure that our effort which has been spent on it does not go to waste.

To restart on it you will need to bring in a little bit of organisation of the work by using a planner of some sort. But what are you going to put into the planner when you do not know what to proceed with? So, for that you will need to break-up your task into a bunch of crazily small milestones and when I say small, I mean something that you can do in a few minutes or in a couple of hours. The smaller the breakdown, the better it is. It the simple old philosophy of “Divide and conquer”, but it works.

To motivate yourself, bind a small treat with achieving or completing that small milestone. Now when I say a treat, don’t think of something like an expensive gift or a calorie bomb, its just something small but that you like, like a chocolate, candy or watching an episode of your favourite TV series or a short video on YouTube, etc. etc. (you get the gist).

Try to bind your ultimate goal with some higher purpose or the good that it’s going to bring to the person or organisation that you are doing this for (even if it is for yourself) and how this effort is going to change a life or make it easier for someone.

Make sure to take short breaks between those short milestones to freshen up your brain a bit. And when in your break, do not think about the tasks at all and try to have a good disconnect. Maybe go and look out of the window, at the trees, the people or cars or birds or any of the subtle movements you can find in nature.

Try to do some meditation, even a quick and small 5 minute one, where you just sit down in a relaxing posture with eyes closed, in complete silence and focusing on your breath going in and out. Silence is the most powerful tool and can be the ultimate steroid for your brain for motivation once you start getting comfortable with it and mastering it.

While doing your tasks, you might see that there are skills and knowledge that you probably are still not a master of and would like to deepen your knowledge in them. Do put in a plan to keep updating your skill set and knowledge even if they are on a tangent to the tasks that you are performing and not directly related to your work.

So, go on and press that restart button and come back with more power and clarity and conquer your obstacles.