The Frictionless Mindset

Why do I do everything except what I need to do?

You do everything except what you need to do because you have resistance to the tasks you don't do. Resistance is the negative thoughts and feelings you have added to them. You can see them in the words you use about those tasks. Unframing is one technique that neutralizes the resistance.

You are not sitting still. Things get done, some of them useful, and by the end of the day the list has changed. What you needed to do has not.

It is not about difficulty

Look at what you did instead. Some of it may have been easy. Some of it may have been harder than the tasks you are putting off. People can even take on a genuinely difficult job to stay away from a simple one.

So the difference is not how hard the tasks are. The other tasks, easy or hard, do not have a “no” attached to them. The tasks you need to do have one. That is the whole difference.

This is not a shortage of discipline

Whatever is going on, it is not that you cannot do things. The day is the evidence. You did things all day.

So it is not effort, and it is not character. Resistance is something attached to specific tasks. That is why the rest of the list gets done and those tasks do not.

Why it does not feel like refusing

Each thing you did instead was real and needed doing, and each choice made sense at the moment you made it. The tasks you need to do were never taken off the to-do list. They were moved to later, one seemingly reasonable choice at a time.

That is why this is hard to catch. There does not seem to be a moment of saying no. But there was one, every time something else got picked.

What the “no” is

The usual explanation is that the other tasks are an escape from something, and that is accurate as far as it goes. The tasks that need doing have a “no” attached to them, and the rest of the list is a way of obeying that “no” without ever having to say it.

What that explanation leaves out is what the “no” really is. It is resistance. It is not coming from the tasks. A task is a set of actions, and actions carry no feeling of their own. It is coming from negative thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and feelings about the task. You can see them in your description of the task.

Nothing here asks you to fight a feeling or push it down. While those thoughts and feelings stay in place, the resistance stays in place. Once the resistance is neutralized, the feeling has nothing left to feed on.

When it does not sound negative

Sometimes nothing about the description sounds negative. “I’m grateful for every one of those wedding gifts. I just don’t feel like writing the thank-you notes.” There is no complaint about the gifts or the people. There is only the last part.

That last part is resistance. Sometimes looking a little closer brings it to the surface. Is there a reason you don’t feel like doing it? “I think it will be boring, and I’m not sure I know what to write.” Other times there is nothing underneath it but a belief most people never examine: that you have to feel like doing something before you can do it. Waiting for the feeling to arrive is still refusing the task, just more politely.

Why making it smaller does not reach it

The standard advice is to shrink the task until the first step is too small to resist. Open the file. Write one line. That advice organizes the work, and organizing the work is useful. But it only deals with the size of the task, and the size was never where the resistance was. A smaller first step is still a step into the same task, with the same resistance attached to it.

See the difference in your own words

There is a quick way to see this for yourself. Take the sentence you say about a task you keep moving. Then take the sentence you would say about something you did instead.

That is what The Neutrality Check is for. It sorts a sentence into facts and judgments. Give it both sentences. The one about what you did instead will usually come back as nearly all facts. The one about the task you keep moving is where the resistance shows up.