It has been on the list
for three weeks.
You read it every morning.
You move it to today,
and at some point in the afternoon
you move it to tomorrow,
and that small decision
is now the most repeated act
of your month.
You are not avoiding all of it.
Go and look.
Open the thing
and walk it step by step,
and somewhere in the middle
there is one step
you cannot picture.
It is usually one of four.
A decision with two answers
that are both defensible,
which means choosing
makes you responsible.
A person you have to ask,
who will say something
you would rather not hear yet.
A number you do not have
and have to go and find.
Or a piece of it
you would have to admit
you never understood.
Everything else in that task
you could do this afternoon
without thinking.
But a list holds one line
for the whole job,
so the fog attaches
to the word,
and the word is what you read
every morning.
That is the entire mechanism.
It is not size.
It is not discipline.
It is one undefined step
contaminating a task
that is otherwise ordinary,
and you have been treating
the symptom as the shape.
So when something sits,
stop moving it
and open it.
Name the step you cannot picture.
Write that down as the task,
in its own line,
with its own words.
Do that step first,
before any of the easy parts,
because the easy parts
are how you have been
paying yourself
not to do it.
And say it out loud
to somebody.
Most fog is made of a sentence
you have not yet had to form,
and forming it
tends to finish it.
It is almost always
fifteen minutes.
Three weeks of carrying
and fifteen minutes of doing.
And after a few of these
you will notice
the fog is the same shape
every time.
Then you know something real
about yourself,
which is worth more
than the task was.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
