The Things We Do to Avoid Doing Things

The Things We Do to Avoid Doing Things

On procrastination, avoidance, and the strange ways we waste our own time.

hasif 💌

Nov 02, 2026

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I have a rather exhausting relationship with getting things done. There are days when I wake up with a perfectly reasonable list of things I want to accomplish, and somehow, by the time I go to bed, I have managed to do almost everything except those things. I have reorganised my desk, checked my emails, made coffee, watched a video about a subject I had absolutely no business researching, and spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding what to eat. The original task is still sitting there, looking at me with the patience of someone who has already accepted that I am going to disappoint them.

I find this particularly irritating because I am usually aware of what I am doing. I know I am avoiding something. I know that opening another tab isn’t going to make the work disappear, and I know that the fifteen minutes I have just spent convincing myself to get started could have been spent actually getting started. Yet I continue. There is an almost embarrassing amount of negotiation that happens between me and a task that would probably take twenty minutes to finish.

And I don’t think we talk enough about how much effort goes into avoiding things. Sometimes the preparation becomes more exhausting than the actual work. I can spend an entire afternoon preparing myself to do something that requires an hour, as though I am about to undertake an expedition rather than answer an email or finish a paragraph. By the time I have mentally prepared for it, I have already used up whatever enthusiasm I had.

I recently received a submission from one of my subscribers,

Lingua Bones

, who wrote about procrastination, and I wanted to bring their piece into this conversation because it touches on something I have been thinking about myself. I don’t want to summarise their experience before you read it, so I’ll leave their essay right here.

LINGUA BONES’ ESSAY:

I think I know when my procrastination started. You know those moments in childhood that stick out to you, like if I didn’t have that one experience my whole life would be different? I think it was the time I traced a drawing of Sailor Pluto and sent it to my elementary school penpal. I only remember one line from the letter I got back from her:

Did you trace that drawing of Sailor Pluto?

I had another drawing of Sailor Pluto sitting on my desk with layers of pencil marks, partially erased lines. Trying and trying to get that smooth confident linework for Pluto’s long manga legs.

I took a shortcut instead. I skipped through the practice of all those accumulated lines and landed instead in a known outcome: a perfect copy. Sailor Pluto was the Guardian of Space-Time. If she skipped through time herself, she would die on the other side.

I felt embarrassed. I was caught skipping through time. I didn’t die though. I started to avoid time instead. Time doesn’t exist. Only infinity exists. I can live in infinity playing video games, watching movies, writing in my journal and playing outside.

I started experiencing time as an infinite desert with sudden and unexpected drops into deep canyons. Those canyons we’ll call “deadlines.”

I had to write a poem for a middle school English class. The teacher had my sister as a student, and therefore high expectations for me. I had a week to complete the assignment. I avoided it and wrote it that morning. I was praised for my work. I heard the praise echoing deep inside the canyon. Maybe I could get away with this.

I don’t know if I procrastinated as a baby. Can babies procrastinate? They kind of do. My niece would run away from my sister and brother-in-law after she pooped because she didn’t want to have her diaper changed. She wanted to play. I guess the discomfort of a full diaper was okay compared to the discomfort of being changed. She couldn’t imagine how good she would feel on the other side. Maybe procrastination is a lack of imagination. She didn’t like baths either. Babies don’t seem to want to go for baths. I don’t know if I did any of that. I love baths and showers now. If I have something I really need to do (want to do even) my favorite thing is to take a break from time, and take a shower instead.

In high school, another English teacher called me out for only reading to page 211 of the assigned book. She told me my essay was fine, but all my references stopped at page 211. Cliffsnotes, spark notes, frenzied midnight writing, trapped inside the canyon.

Then there’s the whole perfectionism thing. Apparently procrastinators are secretly sneaky perfectionists. They’re too afraid to fail at something so they don’t take any action at all. I don’t think I’m a perfectionist. I do have a voice in my head that says change that line, one more paragraph, that word choice isn’t right. And then the end starts to feel like the beginning, and my original purpose is totally unrecognizable. Was the first draft actually the best one? Another voice that says one more scroll, one more video, one more walk. Then I’ll do it. I’m not sure if this essay is done.

One of my professors in graduate school said to me:

You should go to Japan.

She was looking at my drawings, discussing my work. It’s been 10 years since she said that. I’m done with school now, no more deadlines for assignments. My procrastination has morphed into dilly-dallying. The words live in an expanse of desert inside me.

You should go to Japan.

Like it could be this life-changing thing. That’s how she said it. When will that canyon arrive to swallow me?

Reading their piece made me think about how strangely personal procrastination can be. Everyone has an explanation for it, and everyone seems to have developed their own little collection of excuses. Some people need the perfect environment, some need a deadline breathing down their neck, and some will convince themselves that they work better under pressure. I have used that last one so many times that I almost started believing it was a personality trait.

I have also noticed how easily I confuse being occupied with being productive. As long as I am doing something, I can convince myself that the day hasn’t gone to waste. It doesn’t matter that I have spent three hours moving between applications, checking things that don’t require checking, or making plans for work I haven’t started. At least I was busy. At least I wasn’t sitting around doing nothing. We have become remarkably good at finding respectable ways to waste our own time.

And honestly, I get angry with myself over it. There are things I genuinely want to do, things I have thought about for months, and somehow I keep treating them as though they can wait indefinitely. I want to write more, read more, travel, learn things, make things, and have experiences that don’t involve looking at a screen. These aren’t obligations someone has handed me. They are things I have chosen for myself, which makes the whole situation even more ridiculous. I can spend an entire evening thinking about how much I want to do something and still refuse to spend thirty minutes doing it.

I wonder how much of this comes from the fact that beginning something requires a little surrender. Before starting, everything exists in its most attractive form. A project can be brilliant in my head, a piece of writing can be beautiful before I put the first sentence down, and an idea can remain exciting as long as I don’t have to confront what it actually takes to make it real. The moment I begin, I have to deal with the possibility that my execution won’t match my imagination. I have to look at the first attempt, which is usually awkward, incomplete, and considerably less impressive than whatever I had pictured.

Perhaps that is why postponing things can feel so comfortable. As long as I haven’t started, I haven’t had to find out what I am capable of doing with them. Everything remains possible in my head. There is no unfinished draft to criticise, no failed attempt to look at, and no evidence that the thing I wanted to do was harder than I expected. It is a very convenient arrangement, except that eventually I have to live with all the things I never got around to trying.

I also think we underestimate how much of our time disappears in these little arrangements with ourselves. We rarely decide to abandon something altogether. We simply move it to tomorrow, then next week, then whenever life becomes less busy. We assume there will be another afternoon, another weekend, another year when we will finally have the energy and the attention to give it a proper attempt. Meanwhile, ordinary days continue passing, and we keep finding new ways to occupy them.

I don’t want to turn this into one of those essays where I pretend to have discovered the secret to living a fulfilling life. I haven’t. I still procrastinate, still spend too much time doing absolutely unnecessary things, and still occasionally find myself avoiding an email as though it contains information that could ruin my entire existence. I am writing this essay, after all, and I have probably thought about changing its opening paragraph more times than necessary.

I suppose I am just tired of hearing myself say that I’ll do things later. There are already enough things in life that happen outside our control, and I don’t particularly enjoy adding my own unnecessary delays to the list. I want to be able to do something simply because I wanted to do it, without turning the entire experience into a negotiation with myself.

And perhaps tomorrow I will wake up, make my coffee, open my laptop, and spend twenty minutes doing everything except what I am supposed to be doing. I know myself well enough to admit that. Still, I would like to think that somewhere between all the distractions, excuses, and elaborate preparations, I can occasionally catch myself and just get on with it. Honestly, how much longer are we going to keep making our own lives wait for us?

Co-Author Substack ID:

Lingua Bones

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