What Your Drift Is Really Telling You

Understanding personal drift and what to do about it

It usually starts small.

A project takes longer than expected. A new opportunity catches your attention. Your energy pulls you in an unexpected direction. Before you know it, you’re looking at your plans and wondering how you ended up so far from where you meant to be.

That’s drift — and it often feels like failure. After all, you had clear intentions, made solid plans, set meaningful commitments. Watching them gradually slip away must mean something’s wrong, right?

Not necessarily. Sometimes what looks like aimless drifting is actually about being pulled in multiple meaningful directions. Sometimes it’s about discovering that your original path wasn’t quite right.

And sometimes — more often than we’d like to admit — it’s about the natural tension between our aspirations and real-world constraints.

1. Figure out when you started drifting

Instead of jumping straight to the why, start with the when. Pull out your calendar or project lists and look for the moment things started shifting. Maybe it was when that exciting new project caught your eye, or when you took on that extra commitment at work, or even when you said yes to something that didn't quite feel right.

Pinpointing the moment of drift often reveals the specific choices you made and why you made them. While these choices might reflect broader patterns in your life, starting with the concrete moments of decision gives you clearer insights to work with.

When I work through this with clients, they sometimes discover that there was a point in time when they decided to go a different direction for all the right reasons but didn’t de-commit from the original direction or make the obvious explicit with their team that the choice was tantamount to changing the goal and plan. You’d be surprised how often people forget that changing what seems to be a course of action often changes the destination.

At other times, we start drifting before we start taking action because we’ve chosen goals and aspirations that aren’t really ours or will require other changes that we’re not ready to make. If you started drifting before you started taking action, simplistic aphorisms like “just start!” will fail you — there are deep reasons why you haven’t started that need to be addressed.

2. Assess why you’ve drifted

Once you’ve identified when the drift began, you can better understand why it happened. While your situation is unique, most drift falls into one or more of these patterns:

1. You have competing priorities. When we set goals and make plans, we often imagine a world where everything fits perfectly together. But real life doesn’t work that way — your deep work time gets eaten by urgent client needs, your creative projects compete with family responsibilities, and your big dreams bump up against daily realities.

2. Things are taking longer than expected. This is actually the second-most common reason we drift. Because we often choose new directions before we’re done with our current projects and objectives, when our current stuff gets delayed, we’re delayed with starting our new work. We thus end up in a cascade and, in our mental plotting of where we are and where we should be in time, we’re way off.

3. You’ve hit one or more dead-ends. As frustrating as it may be, hitting dead ends isn’t necessarily a sign that you’ve done something wrong or that you’re drifting in the real sense we’re talking about here. It’s actually a species of things taking longer than expected. I’m including it here because it feels like drift.

4. You’ve been snagged by emergent projects, problems, and situations. Life has a way of throwing unexpected challenges our way — from political upheaval to family health situations to inheriting your boss’s problems or bright, shiny objects (BSOs). These aren’t just distractions; they’re real projects that demand your time, energy, and attention, often displacing what you had planned.

5. You’ve been chasing a BSO and didn’t know it. While some BSOs are obvious distractions, others masquerade as productive activities that seem essential to your progress. These sneaky BSOs often serve as convenient ways to play it safe or avoid the challenging parts of your real priorities.

Yes, I packed a lot in a few sentences above. If you want to dive deeper into them, follow the links, or even better, get your copy of Start Finishing.

3. Decide: Adjust Course or Stay the Current Path?

Here’s where most productivity advice would either shame you back to your original path or tell you that any path is fine as long as you're trying. Neither extreme serves you well.

Instead, get honest about what your drift is telling you. Are you avoiding something important that really does need your attention? Or are you discovering a path that better aligns with who you are and what matters most?

Each type of drift calls for a different response:

• If you’ve drifted from something that still deeply matters to you, it’s time to recommit — not with shame, but with clarity about what made this goal important in the first place.

• If you’re dealing with truly emergent situations, the answer might be adjusting your timeline and expectations rather than your direction.

• If you’ve discovered a better path, the answer might be to fully commit to it rather than feeling guilty about leaving the old one behind. Sometimes what you didn’t mean to build is the best thing you could’ve built.

It may just mean that the info you had at the time was limited and you’re incorporating what you know now. Or perhaps you got caught up in the New Year’s fever dream and chose what amounts to “should” resolutions that aren’t aligned with who you want to be in the world. Or maybe you set out to do a joy-making project and discovered it brings you more dread and boredom than joy.

Or maybe emergent political and world issues are snaring more of your attention and energy than you thought they might, and you’re realizing they’re going to eat a project slot until they get resolved or you find your way to channel your attention differently. Better to account for that as (at least) one of your five projects instead of misdiagnosing it as demotivation, overwhelm, or fear related to other projects. You’re still on the hook for goals that aren’t serving you.

If you are adjusting to get back on track, avoid trying to make up for lost time — you can’t. You are where you are and best to start from there. Update your success pack or your team and drive on.

If you’re staying on your new (“drift”) course, be prepared for the emotional journey ahead. Letting go of original plans — especially ones that felt important — can trigger grief, frustration, or resentment. That’s normal. Remember: if you’re moving toward something that matters more deeply, the energy you invest will yield greater returns than forcing yourself back to a path that no longer serves you.

When you’re ready, update your success pack and team, then drive on. Yes, this is the same as if you’re staying on the original course, but it’s often better to do the emotional work above before you let your success pack and team know what’s going on.