#35: Why am I putting off doing that ridiculously undemanding thing?
Emails that will take 10 seconds to answer. That little pile of stuff in the corner of the kitchen that you need to take a couple of minutes to sort through. Taking 30 seconds to fill in a form that you're going to have to fill in at some point. You could just do these things, get them out of your head, and make your life a lot easier. Instead, you hide from them and devote far more mental effort to not doing them than it would ever take you to do them. What's going on? Well, friend - it's not the tasks at all. It's the emotion you attach to them. Instead of beating yourself up for all the things that you're failing to do, you need to lift the lid on your reluctance and ask what it means about your priorities, your values, and your stress levels. The Academic Imperfectionist is here to mop your brow while you face your fears.
For the 'Identify Your Core Values' exercise mentioned in the episode, click here.
Episode transcript:
There are actually good reasons why you're avoiding doing that thing.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
There’s a particular thing that my sister, Fleur, and I do for each other when we visit each other’s houses. We’re messy in similar ways - we let stuff pile up instead of putting it away. We both have a little pile of stuff in our kitchens, a mixture of stuff that needs to be dealt with, thrown away, or filed away somewhere sensible. Things like bills, receipts, letters and forms from our kids’ schools, old pens, coins, hair bands, stuff like that. We both hide from our own little piles. I don’t interact with my pile at all (I say ‘pile’, but really there are dozens of them throughout the house), except to shove it aside when it threatens to encroach on the space I need to use for other things, and occasionally to glance at it while the kettle is boiling and remark absently to myself that I really should get around to dealing with it because the place would look so much nicer if it wasn’t there. But apart from that, I never really deal with it, and Fleur never really deals with hers. But when we visit each other’s houses - which is only every few months, since we don’t live that close to each other - we deal with each other’s piles of junk. It takes probably less than 5 minutes to deal with one. I’ll be in her kitchen, drinking tea, and going through the pile on the table asking her things like, ‘Do you need to keep this?’ and ‘Shall I put this with the other receipts?’ It’s completely painless. She does similar when we comes to my house. You’d almost think we were both really organised people. It’s just that we can’t deal with our own junk. But why not? Like I said, it only takes 5 minutes, and it’s so undemanding that it’s the sort of thing we can do while chatting and drinking tea. It actually takes more effort to shove it aside occasionally over the weeks and months and years than it does to hold our noses and take a couple of minutes to sort it out.
I know this strikes a chord with you. We all have those little tasks that we put off and put off, dreading making a start, perhaps not even knowing where to begin, even though part of us knows that if only we’d take the plunge, it would be dealt with in 5 minutes. You’ve seen the viral tweets that say things like, ‘It just took me 30 seconds to do a thing that I’d been putting off for months’. I can think, right now, of at least 10 emails I’ve been procrastinating for weeks about sending, even though they’d take me less than 30 seconds each. I’m looking, right now as I sit here recording this episode, at an ink-soaked rag that has been on my desk for probably 6 months because I haven’t yet got around to picking it up and walking downstairs with it. It would take me 15 seconds to deal with, if that. If it was upstairs in Fleur’s house, I’d deal with it right now (and I’m sure she’d deal with mine if she were here) - but I’m not going to. It might be gone by Christmas, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
What’s going on? Why do we have these mental blocks when it comes to doing things that we know we need to do, and which we know would take only a few minutes, or even less, to deal with? It’s like we freeze up. It would be so much easier if we’d just bloody do them, which we’re going to have to do eventually.
I was talking about this over lunch yesterday with my friend and fellow academic single parent, Elly Lowe. We both have little menial but undemanding domestic and professional chores that we need to do at some point but which are never pressingly urgent and so we avoid them. I was telling her about how Fleur and I sometimes swap tasks and sort out each other’s mess even though we can’t handle our own. And the thought struck me: the problem is that these tasks are doorways to anxiety. We don’t avoid them because they are demanding - they’re not. We avoid them because, somehow, in some way, they make us feel bad. But it’s not that actually doing them makes us feel bad - it doesn’t. You’ll have experienced this, I expect: when you finally get around to doing that thing you’ve been putting off, you end up thinking things like, ‘Well, this isn’t so bad’ and ‘I can’t believe I didn’t do this months ago’. What makes us feel bad, rather, is knowing that we need to do them. Because we do know we need to do them, right? It’s inevitable that we’re going to have to do them. And it’s that that’s making us feel so anxious, and leading us to avoid doing the thing.
Let’s rewind a little, and think through all this a bit more slowly. You’re a busy person, right? There are demands coming at you from all directions. Deadlines. Emails. Writing targets. Appointments to get to on time and appropriately presented and adequately prepared. Things that have significant consequences if you don’t do them. These are the things that take up your time, day to day, and eat up your energy - which is not to say that you spend your entire day doing them (of course you don’t, because there’s an awful lot of faffing that we need to pack into our days, isn’t there?), but even while you’re not doing them, those uncompleted tasks are there, hovering over you like reproachful grey clouds. You’ll be making lunch and thinking, ‘Here I go again, frivolously taking care of my nutritional needs instead of writing’, and ‘Look at me, checking out the sizing chart for these shoes I’m not going to buy, when I have that application to submit by 6pm’. The point is this: you spend your whole day working your anxiety muscle. You’re either working on meeting some demand or other that’s been placed on you, or if you’re not, you’re feeling uneasy about the fact that you’re not. If there’s ever a time when you’re able to sit down, put your feet up, and relax, confident in the knowledge that there’s absolutely nothing more important for you to be doing right now than chilling and enjoying some me-time … well, I bet you have to work pretty hard to feel that way, if you ever manage it at all. You probably don’t even realise how much time you spend being stressed. We normalise it. We even celebrate it, as academics - which is part of what’s wrong with the culture of academia, but let me not get sidetracked here.
While you’re worrying about the big things, the career-critical things, the financially significant things, that pile of junk on your kitchen counter isn’t even registering, right? It’s not urgent. It’s barely even important. Reviewer 2 doesn’t know or care how long it’s been there. Whether or not you get that job you applied for doesn’t hinge on how much progress you’ve made tackling that pile of junk. It’s so far down your very long list of priorities that you’d need a mineshaft and a headtorch and perhaps even heat-seeking equipment to locate it. And so what goes on inside you, when you glance at it and say to yourself, ‘I really should tidy that away at some point’?
Here’s what goes on. The chair of your internal Anxiety Committee looks up from her unmanageably long list of agenda items and says, Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve been going flat out all day - all fucking year - with this other stuff, this stuff that you’ve told us is actually important, and you want us to worry about that now too? Bitch, get the fuck out of my face before I flip this table, tear off all my clothes, set myself on fire, and run screaming through the corridors of your mind ruining your entire life forever, you absolute joker.
Like I said, these little demands are doorways to anxiety. And they’re doorways that you need to keep firmly shut. It’s not that they make you anxious - they don’t even get that far. Your Anxiety Committee already has a full plate, and you daren’t add this thing to it too. You refuse even to register it as a potentially anxiety-inducing demand. So you ignore it. You don’t allow it on to your task list. Sorry, little pile of junk in the corner of the kitchen - you’ve failed to qualify as a member of The Stuff I Need To Worry About Club.
That is completely understandable, and let’s take a moment to recognise that there’s a sense in which ignoring these little tasks is a healthy and appropriate response to the stress in your life. By refusing to allow these little tasks on to your task list, you’re drawing an important boundary. You’re recognising that there’s only so much you can do. There’s only so much worry you can take. You need to prioritise. Of course you do. You can’t keep saying ‘yes’ to every demand. Sometimes it’s necessary and healthy to say, ‘No, this is too much, this can’t be a priority’.
The problem, though, is that we don’t always draw these boundaries in the right places. We prioritise the urgent over the important. We oil the squeaky wheel and forget the others. We do what we need to do to stop people pestering us, regardless of whether using our time and energy that way will actually improve our lives. Sometimes, when we ignore that pile of junk in the kitchen, what we’re implicitly telling ourselves is, ‘my need for an uncluttered home isn’t important’. And if we’re routinely pushing aside our own needs in that way, especially if we’re doing so in order to devote more attention to other people’s needs and demands, then we end up feeling stressed.
So, what am I saying: just tidy your fucking kitchen already? Well, no. Of course not. What I’m saying is that, although it’s unavoidable that you’re going to have to push back against certain demands in order to manage your anxiety, that’s likely to backfire if you end up doing it in a way that prioritises the wrong things. Specifically, if it’s always your needs that get pushed to the bottom of the pile, you’re not going to help yourself feel less stressed even if you do a great job of getting through all of the items that you do allow onto your task list. So, forget about the pile of junk in your kitchen: the first pile you need to sort through is the pile of demands that you have weighing on your shoulders, so to speak. Those demands that you prioritise: why are they getting your attention? What core values of yours are they furthering? Are they even furthering your core values, or are they getting headspace because someone else cares about them, and you’d much rather let yourself down than let that other person down? It might help here to clarify what your core values are, if you haven’t already done that, or to revisit them if you have - you can use the ‘Identify Your Core Values’ exercise on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website for this - there’s a link in the notes for this episode. As a rule, divide up your time according to what you care most about. And since your time is limited, accept that this means that you’re not going to be able to do everything you feel under some pressure to do. Make peace with that. You’re going to die with an incomplete task list, and the sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. You need to be smart about what gets allowed on to the task list, and what gets shut out - and that’s something that’s impossible to do if you’re deluding yourself that you’ll eventually manage to do everything. If you care enough about tidying your kitchen to talk to friends about how stressed you get about it (as I apparently do), then you care enough about it to bump something else off your task list to make room for it.
Now, this talk about task lists and internal Anxiety Committees is all very well, but what does getting round to tidying that pile of junk or answering that email or sorting out your car insurance actually look like, practically speaking? How do you make space for those things, especially if you don’t know where to start? As a lifelong piler-upper of junk and anxious ignorer of emails, I’m going to share with you a few things that have worked, albeit imperfectly, for me.
The first is what I mentioned right at the start of this episode. Both my sister and I avoid tidying up our own junk, but we have no problem tidying each other’s. Perhaps you know someone with whom you could do a little menial task swapping in a similar way. Tackling someone else’s tasks is easier than tackling our own, because it just involves the task itself, and doesn’t involve the anxiety that’s attached to it. Avoiding doing certain tasks can be important because it helps you keep the anxiety door shut - but other people’s tasks don’t come with doorways to anxiety. Try it.
If that’s not an option, you can try to get the benefits of task swapping through performing a bit of mental sleight of hand. Try viewing your own little tasks as if they were someone else’s. If this was someone else’s kitchen, instead of yours, and if you wanted to help them get the place looking a bit tidier, what would you do? In what ways would you think differently about it all if it were their mess rather than yours? I’ll bet, for a start, that you’d be much less likely to approach the task in the all-or-nothing way that we tend to approach tasks that make us anxious. With your own kitchen junk, I expect you’re telling yourself that there’s no point making any start at all on it unless you deal with the whole lot. No point throwing out just one useless receipt, or putting away just one stray pen, right? What about the others? Do it all, if you’re going to do it at all! Not so when you’re in your friend’s kitchen, though. If your friend is making you a cuppa, it’s totally fine to pick up an old Biro that doesn’t work and ask, ‘Shall I bin this?’ No problem at all. Helpful, even. There’s no way your friend is going to watch you drop it in the bin and then reveal that, actually, having tidied away that one thing, you are now contractually obliged to tidy the entire house. If your friend did that, you’d laugh at her, right? You’d assume she was joking, because if she wasn’t, that would be ridiculous. Well, friend, I’ve got news: it’s just as ridiculous when you take that attitude towards yourself.
This brings me on to the final suggestion. One thing at a time. Baby steps. Reject the ‘all or nothing’. You’ll never get anything done that way - or, maybe you’ll push through one task, but you’ll be too exhausted to tackle the next, or the one after that. You need a less scary and more sustainable approach. Something that’s worked for me is this. Tackle the task in the tiniest increments you can manage. Increments that are so small that it’s the closest you can get to doing nothing without actually doing nothing. What that looks like might be this: every time you leave a room, try to remember to take with you one item that shouldn’t be there and put it where it’s supposed to be. Or: while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil, pick up your phone and send one of those emails that you know will take only a few seconds to send. A useful resource here is the Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg’s ‘tiny habits’ approach. The idea is that you work on establishing a habit of doing something very undemanding - so undemanding that you’re not tempted not to do it - and tie it to an established habit, like brushing your teeth or picking up your keys. He has a free course you can take on his website, tinyhabits.com.
The key message I want to leave you with, though, is this. If there’s some task that you keep putting off, there’s a reason you’re doing that. And while it’s tempting not to think very hard about that, beyond remarking to yourself how useless you are, that’s not going to help. In fact, concluding that you’re a flawed person is the reverse of helpful. Instead, congratulate yourself on recognising that you need boundaries, but accept that those boundaries need some attention. Dig down into your priorities, and revise them if you need to, which you probably will. After you’ve done that, work on doing what you need to do, one tiny, almost non-existent step at a time. You’ll get there, eventually and imperfectly. Until next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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