People are very, very bad at long range planning. It’s not our fault, it’s built into our DNA. We are, by our natures, stimulus response creatures. If you see a car driving towards you at 75 miles per hour, or you see someone throwing a punch your way, you are wired to react to the immediate stimulation and hold off high level processing until the danger passes.

This is great for life and death situations (or if you find yourself in a lot of fist fights), but it’s terrible when you are trying to accomplish a long term goal because when you start treating every task as a speeding car, you spend a whole lot of time dodging and very little trying to get to your destination.

What’s the solution? When you start losing the forest for the trees, back up a little bit and take it all in.

A lot of the work in the “science” of productivity says that you should spend your time decomposing goals into actionable steps. This way of looking at tasks is fine and dandy for the most part, but the result of all this breaking down is that after a while you completely lose track of why you’re doing things. You’re reacting over and over again to tasks flying from your list without any understanding of what you were trying to accomplish. In a short time the stress of constant reaction starts to wear away motivation.

If you find yourself fighting with your list, put it aside for a while and block out your high level goals. There are a few great pieces of flow charting software that can help you with that (Dia and Personal Brain come to mind). Take some time to look at your projects visually and start to explore the “why” as well as the what. Get your context back.

As weird is it might sound to make block diagrams of your goals, it’s an extraordinarily effective way to keep your motivation. When you can see what you’re trying to accomplish from beginning to end, the individual tasks on your list start to look less daunting and sometimes when you can trace the line from your starting point to your goal, you’ll find ways to make your process more efficient overall.

Unless your dodging cars or punches, sometimes you just need to take a step back. In fact, even if you’re dodging punches — a step back couldn’t hurt.

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