I don't feel like starting

Three very different books, one shared observation

Steven Pressfield, in a 2002 book, gives a name to the force that keeps us still in front of the thing that matters most: he calls it resistance, and notes that it shows up precisely when the work is important. James Clear, in a 2018 book, looks somewhere else entirely: not at how much you want to, but at how easy it is to show up. David Goggins, in a 2018 book, tells the same story from the side of someone who shows up anyway.

Three almost incompatible ways of thinking, and one point they agree on: the expensive part is the decision to start, not the work. The task takes as long as it takes; deciding is what costs, and it costs again from scratch every time.

A decision, though, can be moved backwards in time. Instead of making it when you are tired, you make it yesterday, and you write it into an hour.

What that means in practice

Pick a 25 or 50 minute slot, today or tomorrow. If someone else books the same time, at that hour you are on a video call together, each working on your own thing. If nobody books it, you work anyway, with a drawn desk companion next to your own tile.

A session opens with two minutes in which each person says, in one sentence, what they are going to do. Then you work in silence. In the last two minutes you say how it went, and it closes.

• You don't have to explain why you didn't feel like it: nobody asks.
• You don't have to share your screen: what you do stays yours.
• You don't have to talk for the whole session: after the first sentence, you just work.
• You can leave whenever you want, without explaining yourself.

If the thing you keep putting off has been the same one for months, our page on why we put off the same things looks at the problem from another angle. If instead the block is that there is simply too much to do, start from where to start.