Feeling lost is part of it

Actual image of me trying to come up with a plan. (National Library of Medicine)

You know those beautiful blown-out photographs of some well-groomed person sitting at an attractive desk with attractive lighting in an attractive home or office?

And then there are those inviting flat-lay shots of work surfaces that always seem to include some kind of vegetation, a beverage, and very feminine office supplies.

My work never looks or feels like the comically idealized images you might see in an ad for online banking or web hosting. Most of the time, even if it’s just me and a laptop and a cup of tea, it still feels messy and confusing and out of control. Even as I write this, the table I’m sitting at is cluttered, I haven’t brushed my hair yet today, and I have about 4,853 tabs open on my browser.

I could change these things, but what’s more important is getting the work done. And a sprig of artfully arranged dried eucalyptus or lavender isn’t going to make the difference. What I need is focus, persistence, and a tolerance for frustration and discomfort.

The percentage of time I spend sitting at my computer typing away with perfect posture and a beatific expression on my face is fairly low. There’s a lot of sighing, staring off into space, restless movement, and snacking.

The fact is, sitting down to work often means confronting something we don’t know how to do or trying to answer a question we don’t know the answer to. The work is not just what we do when we have already figured it out. Part of the work is the figuring out. And that part can be downright painful, because there are no visible results and no confirmation that we’re on the right track. We’ve gone out of our way to work on our own thing, setting aside the urgent for the important, and now we’ve wasted an hour.

This can be so demoralizing that we might eschew this nebulous work in favor of the well-defined work given to us by our clients, employer, or family. At least when we do the dishes, we end up with clean pots and pans.

I’m here to say that the hour spent wrestling with a poorly-defined project is not wasted. It’s necessary. That’s what the work actually looks like. It doesn’t feel great, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

There are ways to approach the work differently to alleviate the suffering. You can go for walks while talking into the voice recorder on your phone. You can collaborate with someone else. You can take lots of notes so that it feels more like you’re doing something. But it takes what it takes, and the discomfort of not seeing the shape and scope of the project is just part of it. Doing it badly a bunch of times before you see progress is part of it. Feeling lost is part of it.

An hour with nothing to show for it puts you one hour closer to success, even if it doesn’t seem like it. As you repeatedly draw yourself away from distractions and diversions and back to the task at hand, you are getting stronger. It is only a matter of time before things get clearer.

Even the person with the beautiful, blond-wood-and-white-light office and the brand new laptop has to sit and struggle sometimes. When an idea is new, it’s reasonable that we don’t know exactly how to proceed. So we sit there anyway, not knowing what to do. That’s the work.

You know what, you might as well look good doing it. That’s why I keep a hairbrush in my desk (not shown). And a pretty candle on the windowsill in front of me. But that’s all optional. And so is the misery.

What’s the difference between you and the model in the stock photography, in this moment? Maybe she gets paid just for showing up, and you don’t. But you’re both doing the work, even when it doesn’t look like much.