278: 4 Things Keeping You Stuck – Part 4 – Not Knowing Where to Start

“I Don’t Know Where to Start”: Wrapping Up the Stuck Series

Today wraps up our four-part series on what’s keeping you stuck. Quick recap: episode 275 asked you to measure your capacity and match it to the type of task you’re attempting. Episode 276 asked you to check your real stress — actual deadlines, not manufactured guilt — and see if you have enough of it to spark action. Episode 277 asked you to tread carefully through the social media scroll and focus on one small step forward instead of everything you wish you were doing. Today, we’re tackling the thing I hear more than almost anything else: “I’m so overwhelmed. I don’t know where to start.”

The monkey advice you’ve already tried

The typical advice goes like this: start at step one. Define the project, identify every step, put those steps in order, schedule them on your calendar to hit your deadline, and knock them out one by one. Easy. Podcast over, right?

That’s genuinely great advice — if you’re a monkey climbing a tree. It is never how a fish brain works. We don’t experience our tasks as a tidy line from step one to step five. So let’s throw that out and jump in the water instead.

Your brain operates on a need-to-know basis

Here’s how to picture it: you’re swimming along a clear brook, and there are stones scattered across the bottom — some glittery, some tiny, some huge — encountered in totally random order. They were never lined up in a path. It’s almost like your brain hasn’t been given security clearance to how your life is “supposed” to work. It runs on a need-to-know basis, and until something registers as an actual need, it just sits there, unnoticed.

That’s exactly why telling yourself the only way you’ll ever get it together is to find the “right” system and follow it consistently doesn’t work. Your brain is allergic to routine, to consistency, to the boredom of doing the same thing the same way every time. It wants to operate ad hoc — as needed. The dining room table gets cleared right before Thanksgiving, because that’s when it’s actually needed. The powder room gets scrubbed when guests might show up. Whatever situation genuinely matters to you — and it’s okay if that’s rooted in caring what people think, or wanting things nice for a play date — that’s when those things will actually happen. I’m sorry to say it, but that’s just how it is.

So does that mean you’re stuck living in chaos forever? Not necessarily. Plenty of fish brains get their homes together — just not by forcing themselves into a linear checklist. They get there by discovering, as they swim along looking for the next interesting rock, that they can eliminate some of the rocks entirely.

Less stuff is the highest-impact move you can make

Minimizing what you actually own is the single most reliable way to make your home easier to keep up with. The same way an interior designer will tell you paint delivers the biggest visual impact for the lowest cost and effort, having less stuff delivers the biggest functional impact for the least ongoing cost. It takes effort, I won’t pretend otherwise — but it’s effort you can do in a way that actually works with your brain instead of against it.

Build a non-linear pending list

One of the most powerful tools I recommend is a non-linear pending list — basically a brain dump, with checkboxes, kept somewhere digital (I like the Notes app). Not a numbered, ordered checklist — just one long list you can scroll through until something sparkly catches your eye. Check it off, and it drops to the bottom while everything else shifts up.

On a high-capacity day, pick a big, heavy rock. On a day with zero capacity and no stress pushing you, pick the tiniest item on the list and see if that little bit of motion gives you enough of a dopamine hit to want to do one more. Keep scrolling until the next shiny thing calls to you.

This is also how you end up wandering past three overwhelming rooms and suddenly getting the itch to tear apart the laundry room instead — and somehow that one unplanned task snowballs into folding a load of laundry, then another, and you look up and realize catching up on laundry was the last thing you expected to do today.

The other underrated benefit of a non-linear list: sometimes you’ll scroll through and realize a deadline already passed, or the thing never actually mattered, and it just falls off. You’ll discover how much of what felt urgent wasn’t actually important to you, your family, or anyone — and that’s its own small dopamine hit.

Give yourself permission to follow the motion

Motion leads to action, even action you weren’t expecting. Getting anything done feels good, and that feeling fuels the momentum to tackle the harder thing you didn’t want to start with in the first place — like trying to climb a hill without any momentum from the downhill before it. Any motion is a win. Stop shutting yourself down when you meant to clean the kitchen but ended up sorting shoes in the mudroom, bagging up ten pairs that no longer fit, vacuuming the floor, then somehow starting the dishwasher and lighting a candle while you danced around putting the kitchen back together too.

Sitting at the base of the tree trying to figure out which branch to grab first — when you can’t even reach it yet — is what’s killing your momentum. Stop worrying about the “right” first branch and just start swimming.

Join us in Fish School — first week free

If this kind of lesson resonates and you want fellow fish to swim alongside, that’s exactly why I keep pushing Fish School. Having people to check in with — “what are you doing today?” “I need to do this, but I really want to do that” — and permission to just do the thing you want to do first is genuinely unmatched accountability. I could hand you every tool for free (and I have, on this podcast) and you still might not do it. You could buy a course and still not finish it. Accountability is the actual game-changer.

Carts for this new season of Fish School are open now at joylovinghome.com/membership through Labor Day, with the new season kicking off the Tuesday after. And since I’m behind on getting the word out (fish brain, no shame), I’m running the first week of Fish School for free inside my free community — join at bit.ly/joylovinghomecommunity (it’s a Facebook group) to sample the motion lives and Zoom calls before cart closes the following week.

If joining isn’t the right move for you right now, at least go back and replay episodes 275 through 278 — most run 12 to 17 minutes — and just move around while you’ve got me in your ears. See what a little motion does for you. And if you want the extra accountability, come join us.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.