TRY · 8 MIN
Avoidance Test
TAIU
Timing and avoidance look identical from the inside.
Tests whether a delay is timing, or avoidance wearing timing as a disguise.
Try it →
Was this useful?
Resources
Want to go further?
Everything worth your time on the question: What have I known for months and not acted on?
← Back to the sessionREAD · BOOK
Solving the Procrastination Puzzle
Timothy Pychyl
Short, unsentimental and free of productivity theatre. If you have been calling something perfectionism, he will give you a better name for it.
Pychyl's research says procrastination is not a time management problem at all. It is short term mood repair: we avoid the task because starting it produces a feeling we do not want to have right now. Once you accept that, the useful question stops being how do I get organised and becomes what feeling is this protecting me from, which is a question you can actually answer.
Read more ↗
Was this useful?
READ · BOOK
Quit
Annie Duke
Best for deciding that the honest answer is to stop carrying it.
The counterweight to almost everything else written about avoidance. Duke argues that we are far better at persisting than at stopping, and that most of the cost of a bad commitment is paid after the point where we already knew. If the thing you keep postponing is something you have quietly decided against, this is the book that gives you permission to say so and a way to test whether you are right.
Read more ↗
Was this useful?
READ · BOOK
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
Read it if the exercise found a principle you have never allowed to bend. It is the strongest available argument against the tidy version of consistency.
The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.
Read more ↗
Was this useful?
READ · RESEARCH
The procrastination equation
Piers Steel
Best for finding which part of the delay is actually driving it.
Steel's meta-analysis pulls delay apart into four moving parts: how much you expect to succeed, how much you value the outcome, how easily you are distracted, and how far away the payoff is. It is worth the time because it stops you treating avoidance as one thing. Two people avoiding the same task are often failing on completely different terms, and the remedies do not transfer.
Read more ↗
Was this useful?
Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.