5 Actionable Ways To Stop Overcomplicating Simple Things

5 Practical tools to declutter your thoughts and get unstuck.

The mind that never stops thinking stumbles over the smallest stones. If you tend to think a lot and analyze things on the fly, you will get paralyzed by a lack of clear direction. Learn how to find it.

1. Breaking down

The strongest weapon in your arsenal. Even simple things can have many layers to them. Breaking them down to the parts you can understand is like climbing a mountain—every step reveals more of the horizon.

For the sake of clarity, let’s go with a general and relatable example.

Say you want to learn how to cook. You open a recipe and feel overwhelmed—so many steps, terms, everything seems complex.

Breaking down in that case looks like:

1. Chop an onion.

2. Heat the pan.

3. Throw in garlic.

4. Now it’s not cooking a whole meal, it’s just doing one small thing at a time. From confused to capable by stacking small, clear actions.

The same rule applies everywhere—from building a pottery business to learning Python.

Complexity disappears when you break it down into something your brain can grasp and your hands can do.

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One general concept → many single actions → plan (optional) → execution.

1. Complicated thing: You don’t know where to start, it scares you, very tempting to leave for later, a progress killer.

2. Single actions extracted from the complex thing: Start with those giving either clarity for next steps or have the biggest leverage.

3. Plan: Identify tasks, put them on your to-do list, block time in your calendar. If the thing isn’t very time-consuming, don’t plan—do it at once.

4. Simplest but hardest part: You know what to do. Now you just have to… do it. How to do difficult things that you don’t have to do? You will find tons of posts about it here.

2. Copy the process

Let’s say you need to put together a PC, but you have never done it before. You open YouTube, find a step-by-step tutorial, and watch how the expert does it—the tools they use, the order of steps, how they handle each part with calm precision

You don’t just learn what to do. You absorb how they do it. Their posture, pace, habits, and mindset.

The same applies to anything else that feels overwhelming—business, fitness, writing.
When you are unsure where to start, don’t try to figure it out alone—copy the process of someone who’s already mastered it.