Tasks you’re avoiding never leave your consciousness for long. They hang there like clouds, some distance away, watching you.
They’re big and looming, but they don’t move very quickly, so you can always just move a bit further away. You still feel their presence though, and it feels bad.
In many cases, you can keep avoiding a cloud for weeks or months or years. It is content just to continue looming nearby.
Of course, in the meantime, more clouds appear. Things get gloomy. Even when you look away, you feel them.
Of course you should just deal with them. You already know that. You should pick one, block off an afternoon, and tackle it.
You don’t though, because whenever you get close to a cloud, you see -– or feel – exactly why you’ve been avoiding it. There are so many things that could go wrong. So many cans of worms you’re not ready to have sitting open.
And how are you supposed to get a handle on a cloud, exactly? It’s too billowy and amorphous to deal with it bit by bit like people say. You’re not sure quite how to get started, so you retreat to a comfortable distance again. You can deal it Sunday. If you have time.
If instead of backing off to regroup, something had possessed you to move into the cloud anyway – a deadline perhaps, or a rare surge of courage – you might have noticed something unexpected.
Inside the cloud is something small and firm. Something like a brick, or a stone tablet. It has some weight to it, but at least it has hard edges and a finite size. It doesn’t loom or billow.
This is the Task itself. It sits quietly at the center of the Cloud, and can only be seen when you get right inside the Cloud’s damp, misty air.
The Task is surprisingly small, because it contains only the tangible experiences that comprise the job. There’s nothing hypothetical here. Just brushes and paint cans. Fonts, headers, and paragraphs. Lines of code. Phone conversations. The stuff work is made of when you’re doing it.
The Cloud is not the Task, but from a distance it appears to be. The Task is what you have to do. The Cloud is all the immaterial, psychological stuff that condenses around a Task when you’re thinking about it without doing it. It’s a byproduct, made of intolerable, insoluble problems that aren’t really about the task, like self-doubt and the pain of past mistakes.
Tasks look like Clouds, but feel like Tasks
Because it’s so much bigger than the Task, the Cloud is all you can see when you ponder a Task you’re not currently doing. This illusion makes any job seem like it’s much bigger than it really is, entailing much more difficult questions –- “How do I make sure I’m liked and admired by my colleagues?” rather than, “How do I make my Excel table look like the ones Terry makes?”
The good news is you don’t have to deal with the Cloud, or solve its existential riddles – not once you get your hands on the solid surface of the Task.
Once you get your fingers into the material of Task itself – the spreadsheet, the light fixture, the command line, whatever it is – something shifts. The Cloud doesn’t feel very relevant anymore, because your concerns have become practical rather than hypothetical, and specific rather than general. You don’t need to do something huge, like solve your confidence issues, you need to choose a font, or unscrew this bracket, or look up the Offset command in AutoCAD.
Do the Task, not the Cloud
We avoid the Cloud because it’s huge and impossible to deal with. But the Task is what needs doing, and unlike the Cloud, it’s limited in scope and made of pieces we can handle.
Once you start handling those pieces, they become what’s important. The Cloud becomes easy to ignore, like a billboard that’s too close to read.
The trick is not to get psyched out by the Cloud on your way to the Task. You begin to break the spell the moment you get your hands on the materials. As quickly as possible, make physical contact with the tangible components of the Task itself: the sketches, the file folders, the gloves and pliers, and start doing.
This isn’t the same advice as “just get started.” Getting started is a nebulous concept. Often we “get started” on a task by doing even more thinking about it, trying to resolve all of our doubts so that we can really start. That’s all still Cloud.
Don’t deal with the Cloud. Get your hands on the Task. The Cloud doesn’t know what to do about that. It’s just vapor.
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Photo by C Dustin. Drawings by David Cain
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