TRY · 8 MIN
Avoidance Test
TAIU
Timing and avoidance can look identical from the inside.
Tests whether a delay is timing or avoidance wearing timing as a disguise.
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Resources
Worth your time on this question
Everything worth your time on the question: What have I known for months and not acted on?
Five things on this subject: one TAIU exercise and four things to read. It opens with Solving the Procrastination Puzzle by Timothy Pychyl. Short, unsentimental and free of productivity theatre.
This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.
What am I avoiding: talk it throughREAD · 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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