Change is coming.

When life has been humming along according to plan for quite some time, it’s easy to forget that change is always approaching. Eventually—tomorrow, or many years from now—change will knock on our front door.

It’s best to be prepared when possible, but sometimes we’re not. Sometimes a change is both unexpected and life-altering, and it knocks us down like a chest-high ocean wave.

This is okay, because most change is good, in the end, even when it seems bad at first. But when you get knocked down, give yourself some time to get back up.

Doing our best work takes focused effort. And focused effort requires space and time to think clearly.

Shutting the office door for the morning, ignoring texts and emails for a couple hours, or even hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on our doorknob—such measures are necessary in order to produce the best quality work we’re capable of. We don’t like to take them, though—at least, I don’t—because we’re afraid of alienating others or seeming standoffish.

I keep a “Things to Remember About Myself” document on my computer. It’s about a page long and consists of statements like this:

When you get busy, you start spending part of your “doing” time thinking about how much you have to do and trying to decide what you should do first. After a few minutes of this, you have even less time, which causes you to worry more, and so on. It's a vicious cycle.

Do not allow this cycle to establish itself. Start anywhere, and move ruthlessly through your list, taking no prisoners and hearing no cries for mercy. Most of your tasks will take less than 10 minutes, and you will be amazed at how much time you really have when you act.

Here’s a thinking tool that might help when you’re stuck on a big project. Let’s call it project-centered journaling.

1. Take out something to write on (I like legal pads for this purpose).
2. Start writing about the project without self-editing. You might write about the ultimate goal of the project, a problem you need to solve, important variables you might be ignoring, or even your current feelings about the state of the project. Keep writing until you either run out of things to write about or reach a new level of understanding about the project.
3. Read what you’ve written and extract next steps.
4. File or toss what you’ve written.

Project-centered journaling is distinct from regular journaling in that while you’re writing about a specific topic (the project at hand), you’re not writing for posterity or future use, so there’s no pressure to write well or even clearly. You may never look at these notes again. The process is the point, and its goal is simply to help you identify a path forward, right now.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

— Richard Feynman

In familiar situations, we behave predictably.

We follow roughly the same path through the grocery store each time we visit (usually turning right as soon as we enter the store). We brush our teeth in the same way each morning and night and drive to work along the same well-worn route. We’re creatures of habit, and familiar cues tend to elicit familiar patterns of behavior.