Why you are struggling with your tasks?

Note: TL;DR is found in the end of this post.

Sometimes a task, whatever it may be, feels really hard and you just don’t know why. Here is a small, simple recipe to try out next time you struggle with your task.

Many times a task feel hard because you are lacking a piece of important information to complete your task.

There are two types of information that you might be missing:

1. Information you have to acquire
2. Information you have to learn

1. Information you have to acquire

Luckily, most of the times when you are struggling in your work or in your day to day life you are missing a piece of key information that you need to acquire from someone or from somewhere. Usually this type of information cannot be acquired by studying or trying harder and you simply need to acquire this information to complete your task.

For an example, if your task is to build a stone wall there are pieces of information you need to acquire before you start. For example:

• What are the dimensions of the wall?
• Where the wall will be placed?
• Where to get the stones?
• Where are the tools?

There is no way to complete your task without this information, so you have to acquire this information before you can successfully complete the task.

2. Information you have to learn

The other type of information you usually need is something that you have to learn. This is the type of information you learn in school or by practicing your profession. Usually this information will be acquired during a long period of time, but because nowadays all information is available in the internet, sometimes this information can be acquired rather quickly by watching a YouTube video or by reading a blog.

Once again, if your task is to build a stone wall you have to have to first learn:

• How to lay stones
• How to mix cement

If you don’t have this information, the task is impossible to complete successfully.

Luckily this part of information can be learned, and doing so will improve your skill set and by learning the skill you are making yourself slightly more valuable in similar tasks.

How to manage when the information is not available?

There are also situations in which some information that you need to acquire is not available.

For example the task could be to build a stone wall that blocks the sounds of the passing street. This task is more complicated because first you have to know how to build such a wall.

In this case you have to first split the task into two tasks:

• Define what kind of a wall to build
• Build the wall

In the first task you have to learn acoustics, how sound waves behave when hitting a stone wall, are the sound waves bouncing off from some other structures and so on. After you have learned these pieces of information, you are able to define the information for the next task:

• What are the dimensions of the wall?
• Where the wall will be placed?
• What material the wall needs to be?

Final words

Many times when you are struggling with your daily tasks you have forgotten to ask a piece of acquirable key information, such as “where to get the stones”, from your boss or your client and you are trying to solve the problem by yourself. Obviously this is impossible and in a worst case scenario you make wrong assumptions and end up completing the task incorrectly.

So always think what information you need to complete the task and check that you have that information before you begin. Never ever be ashamed of asking this information, even if it takes multiple discussions to get everything you need.

If you find that you are missing a piece of key information in the middle of your task, gather the information before you continue.

TL;DR
Always think what information you need to complete the task and check that you have that information before you begin. This information can be either acquired from someone/somewhere or learned.
END TL;DR