Avoid Procrastination and Overthinking By Doing This

Robin Sacks
3 min readMar 13, 2022
Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash

No matter how motivated, excited, or ready you are to do something, the same one question often is the culprit that gets in your way and causes you to either procrastinate, spin your wheels, or over-think it.

That question is, “Where do I start?!?”

Anytime this question is stopping you in your tracks, you can get past it by doing one of these things. Here are three ways to start anything right now:

1 — Start with the cause, not the symptoms.

Stop trying to “fix” something until you understand what’s causing it. If you find the cause, you have often found the “fix.”

Years ago, I had a client who always filled me with stress. I am a relatively calm person who can handle most situations, but I began to realize that every single time I had an interaction with this particular person, my stress level was through the roof, and it took me several hours to come down from it. For a long time, I tried different tactics to make the interactions less stressful to no avail. Eventually, I realized I was trying to “fix” something that was a major personality difference and wasn’t going to change; she was who she was and I was who I was.

No amount of ‘fixing’ was going to change the cause of my stress.

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Robin Sacks

I speak, coach, and write about confidence, self-talk, and stress management. I also live for cozy mysteries and bad (read: good) puns.