What have I known for months and not acted on?

A guided 20 to 25 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Most delay is ordinary sequencing. Some of it is a conversation you do not want to have, hiding behind a task.

A person in their late twenties paused on a terraced doorstep, keys in hand, hand not yet raised to the door

If it were done by Friday, what would happen next?

People do not avoid work. They avoid consequences.

Some things on your list are not late. They are decisions you have already made and never admitted.

What you'll look at

01Something outstanding for longer than it should be
02How long it has been sitting there
03What you last did about it
04What would happen next if it were done tomorrow

A note from Mark

In my experience people rarely avoid work. They avoid consequences.

The unmade phone call is not difficult. What is difficult is that the call ends with a decision, and the decision changes something you have arranged your life around.

So I am suspicious of any advice that treats this as a scheduling problem. If somebody has not done a twenty minute task in fourteen months, twenty minutes was never the obstacle.

The other thing I would say is that some avoidance is a decision in disguise. People carry things on a list for years that they long ago decided not to do, and the guilt costs more than the task ever would. Taking it off is not failure, it is bookkeeping.

Read my full view ↓

And occasionally somebody has just been busy with better things. That is a perfectly good answer and I would not talk them out of it.

What you'll get

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

01
What you are actually avoiding
02
Avoidance or sequencing
03
What the delay costs
04
One move, or permission to drop it
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓

01What you came here with
02The avoided thing
03How long
04What you have done instead
05What is actually being avoided
06Whether this is avoidance or sequencing
07What it has cost so far
08What it will cost if it waits another six months
09The fear, named plainly
10The rival explanation
11What deserves protecting
12The credible alternative
13What, if anything, should change
14What remains unresolved
15Where this goes next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

Session
Date
The part of life this belongs to
What we found
The alternative we tested
What deserves protecting
What should change, if anything
Next actions
What to notice or find out
What remains unresolved

Open My Tree

What now?

01 · Save it
The avoided thing described concretely, and how long it has actually been outstanding.
02 · Test it
Do the smallest verifiable part this week. Not plan it. The part that leaves evidence behind.

See more ↓

What I would do

01
Get specific before getting psychological. Name the actual task, then find what sits underneath it.
02
Test whether this is avoidance at all. A great deal of late work is correctly ranked and simply late.
03
Ask what happens next if it is done. The answer is usually the real subject.
04
Weigh the cost of the delay honestly rather than dramatically. Some of it is genuinely cheap.
05
Consider deleting rather than doing. A quiet decision you have already made deserves to be admitted.

Test it

01
Imagine it done by Friday. Notice whether the feeling is relief or dread, because dread means you found the wrong task.
02
Ask who would have to be told, and whether that is the part you have been circling.
03
Count what it has actually cost so far. If the answer is nothing, treat it accordingly.

The alternative

The expected verdict is that you are afraid and need discipline. Two other readings are more common. The first is that you decided against this a long time ago and have never given yourself permission to say so, which means the honest action is deletion rather than completion. The second is that you are avoiding the consequence rather than the task, and no amount of task management touches a consequence. There is also a plainer possibility that the productivity literature never allows for: you have been busy with more important things, and this was correctly last.

Think about this

The item that has survived three versions of your list.
What you do instead, and how useful it looks from the outside.
What would have to happen next if the thing were finished tomorrow.
Who would have to be told.
What it has already cost, if anything.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 8 MIN

Avoidance Test

TAIU

Timing and avoidance can look identical from the inside.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · 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.

Quit

Annie Duke

Best for deciding that the honest answer is to stop carrying it.

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.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A woman in her late twenties walking decisively along a railway platform on a grey morning

Next tool

What should I actually do?

If the avoided thing turned out to be a decision

Continue →What am I responsible for? →

Before you start

I keep putting off the thing that actually matters.

Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.

Further thinking

Solving the Procrastination Puzzle
Timothy Pychyl
The procrastination equation
Piers Steel
Quit
Annie Duke

See the thinking ↓

Book

Solving the Procrastination Puzzle

Timothy Pychyl

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.

Article

The procrastination equation

Piers Steel

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.

Book

Quit

Annie Duke

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.

Book

The Happiness Trap

Russ Harris

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.