I have a graveyard of big projects I never started. The book outline. The side business. The course I was going to build. Each one sat there for months, sometimes years, while I told myself I'd get to it "when things calmed down."
Things never calmed down. And I started to notice something humiliating: I wasn't avoiding these projects because I was lazy or busy. I'd happily do two hours of pointless admin to avoid twenty minutes of real work on the thing that mattered.
The projects didn't scare me because they were hard. They scared me because they were big and vague. Once I understood that, I finally figured out how to move. Here's what actually worked.
You procrastinate on big projects because your brain can't act on something vague and overwhelming — it can only act on a small, clear next step. Procrastination isn't a willpower problem; it's a problem of the task being too large and undefined to start.
The shift that fixed it:
For years I treated my procrastination as a character flaw. I was undisciplined. I lacked grit. If I just wanted it badly enough, I'd do it.
That framing kept me stuck, because it was wrong. I'd watch myself avoid a big project while cheerfully doing genuinely tedious busywork. That's not laziness — laziness would avoid the busywork too. I was working hard at avoiding the one thing that mattered.
What I was actually doing was fleeing discomfort. A big, vague project triggers a low-grade dread: where do I even start, what if it's bad, this is going to be hard. So my brain steers me toward anything that relieves that dread, and tidy little tasks relieve it perfectly. They feel productive and they're not scary.
I wasn't lazy. I was anxious, and busywork was my anesthetic.
Reframing procrastination as avoidance, not laziness, changed everything. You don't fix laziness with willpower. You fix avoidance by removing the thing being avoided — the vagueness and the size. The American Psychological Association frames procrastination the same way: not a time-management flaw but a strategy for dodging negative emotion. Seeing it clearly was one of the shifts behind the productivity system that finally survived my burnout.
Your brain genuinely cannot act on "write the book" or "launch the business." Those aren't tasks. They're outcomes, and they're enormous and shapeless.
When I'd sit down to "work on the project," I'd freeze, because there was no clear thing to actually do. The vagueness itself was the wall. Faced with a wall, I'd retreat to busywork, where the steps were obvious and small.
The fix was to stop thinking in projects and start thinking in next actions. Not "build the course" but "write one bullet list of what the first module covers." Something so specific and small that there's no ambiguity about what to do, and no room for the dread to take hold.
| Vague and frozen | Small and doable |
|---|---|
| "Write the book" | "Write the first three chapter titles" |
| "Launch the business" | "List five names and pick one" |
| "Build the course" | "Outline module one in bullets" |
| "Get in shape" | "Lay out workout clothes tonight" |
The magic is in the size. The step has to be small enough that starting it requires almost no courage. Because the only hard part, it turns out, is starting.
Here's the principle that broke the logjam: lower the bar for starting until it's almost impossible not to.
I used to set ambitious sessions. "I'll work on the project for two hours today." That target was so big it triggered the exact dread I was trying to escape, so I'd avoid the whole thing. The ambition was sabotaging me.
So I shrank it. My new rule: just do five minutes. Open the document and write one bad sentence. Outline one tiny piece. The goal isn't progress — it's just to start, and to make starting so trivial that the dread never wakes up.
Two things happen when you do this. First, you start, which is the entire battle. Second, and this is the trick, once you've started, momentum usually takes over. The hardest part was getting moving; once moving, continuing is easy, and "just five minutes" routinely becomes an hour I didn't have to force — which is exactly why protecting a single 90-minute block works so well: a bounded start is one you can always face.
You're not lowering the bar for the project. You're lowering it for starting. The finishing takes care of itself once you're in motion.
One sneaky form of procrastination disguised itself as work: I'd sit down to do the project and burn the whole session just deciding what to do.
Deciding and doing are different modes, and trying to do both at once is exhausting. You sit down ready to work, immediately hit "but what exactly should I do," and that question is enough to stall you out into a tab-opening spiral.
So I split them. At the end of each work session, while I'm still warm, I decide the very next action for next time and write it down. Then when I sit down again, there's no deciding to do — the decision's already made. I just open the file and execute the step that's waiting for me.
This sounds minor. It removed an entire category of stalling. The blank-page paralysis at the start of a session was a huge chunk of my procrastination, and pre-deciding the next step erased it. Future-me arrives to a clear instruction instead of an open question.
It pairs perfectly with the small-step rule: the next action I leave myself is always tiny and specific, so future-me has no excuse and no dread.
Here's how it actually plays out, start to finish.
The projects in my graveyard never died from lack of ability. They died from never being started, because I kept treating them as giant scary blocks instead of long strings of tiny doable steps. Shrink the step, pre-decide it, lower the bar for starting — and the thing that sat untouched for a year finally begins to move.
If shrinking the first step appeals to you, it's worth seeing how this small-start habit fits into a wider system for getting hard things done without grinding yourself out.
Q: What if even the small step feels hard to start? Make it smaller. If "outline the module" still stalls you, the step is "open the document and write one line." There's no step too small. If you're frozen, the action isn't tiny enough yet — keep shrinking it until starting feels almost silly.
Q: Isn't five minutes too little to make real progress? The five minutes isn't the point — it's the doorway. Most of the time, starting flips a switch and you keep going well past five. And on the days it doesn't, five minutes of real work still beats the zero you'd have done while avoiding the giant version.
Q: How is this different from just breaking a project into tasks? It's similar, with two crucial additions: the step has to be small enough to defeat dread, and you separate deciding from doing by pre-defining the next action. Plenty of people break projects into tasks that are still too big to start. The size and the pre-deciding are what make it work.
Q: Does this work for projects I'm afraid will turn out badly? Especially those — fear of a bad result is a major driver of avoidance. A tiny first step lets you start before the fear can mount its case, and a rough first draft is far easier to fix than a blank page is to fill. Permission to do it badly at first is part of the unlock.
My biggest projects sat untouched for years not because I couldn't do them, but because I kept trying to start them all at once. The fix wasn't more discipline. It was making the first step too small to be scary.
You don't have a procrastination problem. You have a steps-that-are-too-big problem. Shrink the next action until starting takes no courage at all.
That project you've been avoiding for months? Don't try to work on it today. Just write down the one tiny next action, and do only that. The graveyard is full of projects that were never too hard — only never started.
I spent years saving the hardest task for when I 'felt ready.' Doing it first instead quietly fixed my focus, my dread, and my output.
I tracked every distraction for a week and was horrified by what I found. Then I fixed the three that mattered most.
I chased big, audacious goals for years and burned out every time. Then I built my whole life around wins so small they felt like cheating.
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