Just Do the Thing You're Avoiding

In Praise of Clearing To-Do List Debt

I am prone to being deeply in to-do list debt. At any given moment, I have maybe 30-40 messages to friends I haven’t answered in the past month, 5-10 calls I owe people, about 4-5 outstanding work tasks from the past year that I still need to complete. I say “maybe” because these are reasonable off-the-cuff estimates and also because I suspect that the numbers are far larger than this and am too embarrassed to actually contemplate it.

Let’s hone in on a few examples. A few months ago, I let a bunch of full trash bags accumulate in my apartment, figuring that since I was going to have to throw them out at some point, I might as well do it all in one go. That tactic, I discovered about 1.5 weeks later, unfortunately results in extremely smelly garbage and lots of bugs. This past January, I told a college friend that I would catch up with her soon. Soon ended up being last week, aka nine months later.

Here’s something that’s still ongoing. About three months ago, I spilled water on my laptop. I visited the Apple store, and they told me it’d be about $500 dollars to replace some parts, with no guarantee that it’d be successfully replaced, so I had in essence murdered my laptop. For a few weekends, I considered visiting the Apple store and other laptop stores to get a replacement, but I had no idea how to tackle such a large task optimally without wanting to .

Fast forward to now. I still have no idea how to buy a new laptop, so I am writing this essay on my work laptop. This has definitely reduced my enjoyment of life slightly because there are websites I can’t visit anymore, and the keyboard doesn’t feel as enjoyable to type on. But at the same time, it’s still a workable situation. Even though I feel antsy about saving any files to the laptop, I can still write my Substack posts and take video calls. I know that in theory, I could just go to the Apple store and exchange money for increased quality of life, but the activation energy required has simply been too high.

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Every task you commit to takes up brain space, and the lack of brain space compounds with the number of tasks you’ve put off. Keep your to-do list manageable. For your future mental clarity, close as many loops in a timely manner. Put a meal on the schedule rather than saying you will catch up with someone. If an important action takes less than five minutes, go ahead and do it rather than adding it to your to-do list. People will notice, but more importantly, you will feel more sane.

Every outstanding task you commit to also brings emotional baggage, and the emotional baggage compounds with the length of time the task has been uncompleted. The way it went with my college friend, the more I thought about messaging her to catch up and ended up not doing it, the more costly the prospect of actually messaging her seemed to become. It would have been overall much more nourishing to simply have caught up sooner rather than later.

You might say that I am in no place to offer thoughts on getting things done because I’m sitting here typing into my work laptop rather than buying a new one. This is a fair assessment, but let me also say that my tendency to not do things makes me an expert at knowing how painful task-list purgatory is, and just how amazing it feels to do the things you’re avoiding.

In the past few weeks, I’ve started to close a bunch of extremely old loops in an attempt to get more mental clarity. I had recently gone to a housewarming party and got invited to write an op-ed for a newspaper, but I got too intimidated to follow up because I don’t actually know how to make arguments. One night earlier this week, I couldn’t fall asleep. I realized the task had festered for far too long, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I followed up, so I sent a very brief email.

Today, I finally called my parents (one week overdue), finished doing paperwork to get some reimbursements this week (six weeks overdue), texted a mentor from high school (five months overdue), and cleared up some deep misunderstandings I had about some basic concepts in statistics (four years overdue rip).

Each time I did the thing I was avoiding, I felt a large weight lift off my chest. It was exhilarating and addicting. I imagine it was like doing crack or riding a rollercoaster, except better for your soul, and FREE. The next time you’re looking some more mental clarity, or to experience a trip while completely sober, I highly recommend just doing the thing that you’re avoiding.

Thanks to my friend Andrew Pynch for encouraging me to write this post rather than getting mired in perfectionism! May I continue to write more instead of avoiding it.