By Leo Babauta

When we have clarity, we can be incredibly motivated and purposeful. When we don’t have clarity, we get stuck, demotivated, overwhelmed.

For example: if you knew the most important thing to work on right now, with absolute certainty, and you were clear how crucial it is to what you care about — you’d probably give it your all!

Clarity is powerful — but it’s not always easy.

There are three things I’ve found that get in the way of clarity:

  1. Overcommitment: If you have too many commitments (that’s most of us), it can be hard to get clarity on what to work on.

  2. Unprocessed emotion: If you feel anxiety, fear, resentment, grief about something, and pushed it to the background … it can cloud your judgment, drain you, make you pick things to avoid those feelings. This leads to cloudiness and confusion.

  3. Decision fatigue: Most of us are making decisions all the livelong day. By the time we get to decisions that actually matter … we are running on fumes. That’s why we often make bad choices or feel too overwhelmed, later in the day.

Any of these feel familiar? Let’s figure out what we can do about them, to bring more clarity and calm to our days.

Enemy #1: Overcommitment & Saying Yes to All of It

We say yes to more than we can actually follow through with — our calendars and tasks lists feel so full that everything feels urgent.

This is usually from FOMO (fear of missing out), fear of disappointing people, or just being too optimistic.

So what can we do?

  1. One priority practice: Every morning, choose one most important thing to give your focus to.

  2. Monthly commitment audit: Go through everything you’ve said yes to, and ask if it belongs in your life. You’ll see when you’re overcommitted when you look at this level.

  3. Strategic choosing: Catch yourself when you’re about to say yes to something … and ask, “What would I say no to, so that I can say yes to this?” If it’s important enough, you’ll trade.

If you practice these, you’ll overcome the old habit of overcommitting. Life will start to become right-sized, and you’ll have more clarity.

Enemy #2: Unprocessed Emotion

We often feel too busy, or lacking in capacity, to process emotions like anger, resentment, frustration, grief, fear. So it just gets pushed into the background, where it clouds our clarity.

If you often feel confused, cloudly, frozen, or indecisive, this might be what’s going on for you.

Some ways to process all of this:

  • Therapy: we all need it!

  • Journaling: Don’t just write about what happened, but process the emotions of what happened as you’re writing. What are you avoiding, what are you afraid of, what do you not want to feel? Just to feel it, not to solve anything.

  • Check in before starting: Before you get start with work, or a major meeting or project, pause to check in with yourself — what am I feeling? Just name it, no judgment — just start to clear the noise from the signal.

Sometimes, the feeling itself is a signal — it’s telling you something. It can be hard to distinguish between a valuable signal like this, and just the usual noise of unprocessed emotion … if you get into this processing as a regular thing, it gets easier.

But most often, the emotions just need to be released!

Enemy #3: Decision Fatigue

We’re making so many decisions every day, all day long — our brains get tired. This makes it hard to get clarity with the things that actually matter, because we just shut down.

Some ways to deal with this:

  • Keep decision-making time sacred: Make your most important choices early in the day, before you’re depleted. This is a good time to take on your harder focus tasks as well.

  • Reduce trivial decisions: Get some routines going, like what you wear, what you do when you wake up, what you eat, how you take care of your life. The more of these that are decided, and you don’t have to think about, the more you’ll have mental energy for the things that matter.

  • Don’t overthink the little things: If something can be easily recovered from, just make a simple, easy decision and move on. Don’t waste a bunch of brain cycles stuck in indecision about these things. Save that for things that have bigger consequences. Batch these little decisions together as well, so you’re not constantly switching between things.

Despite me calling these “enemies”, these three things don’t really need to be vilified. They’re just a part of living in this modern world.

But they do have something in common: they take up the space of clarity in our minds.

Overcommitment fills up our time, unprocessed emotions crowd our inner space, and decision fatigue crowds our mental bandwidth.

Clarity is something we uncover when we make room for it.