I hate cleaning my kitchen.

For years I'd leave the dishes for morning, and every morning it was the same thing. Dried food on the pots, a sink completely full, that heavy feeling before I'd even had coffee. One year Dave and I hosted Thanksgiving and left the turkey carcass sitting out for two weeks because we were so overwhelmed at the thought of dealing with the cleanup. Two weeks. That's disgusting, and also exactly the point.

Once I built the habit of washing as I cook, I noticed something. The exact same task, ten minutes at night, becomes an hour in the morning. Nothing about the dishes changed. What changed was how long I let the story build before I dealt with them.

Now think about how often you do this with actual work.

How many times have you delayed creating a strategy because the idea of creating it felt overwhelming? How many times have you said you didn't have the capacity to give feedback, or update the budget, or finally answer that email, when the real next step would have taken five minutes if you'd just started?

I do this with my assistant Maria. This week I actually said to her, "I want to walk you through this program I'm thinking about launching," and then spent five minutes explaining what I wanted to explain, instead of just opening the document and showing her right then. I could have saved us both the time.

Here's what I think is actually going on. When something feels unfamiliar, or we're not sure we'll do it well, or we'd have to ask a question we feel like we should already know the answer to, we don't say that out loud. Or if something actually requires a moment of real thought, we don't give ourselves the ten seconds to just think it through. Instead, we say it's complicated. We say we don't have capacity. We say we're too tired. And complexity becomes the acceptable reason to not start, so we never have to find out whether we're capable of the thing.

And we're doing this at the exact moment it's never been easier to just get something done. We have the internet, AI, more tools than we've ever had. The bottleneck isn't access. It's whether we sit down and do the damn thing.

This week, catch yourself the next time you say "I don't have capacity" or "that's too complicated."

Pause and ask two things. What's the actual next step here? And have I actually let myself think about this, even for ten seconds?

Then actually give it those ten seconds. Not the whole project. Not the whole conversation. Just ten seconds of real thought on the next step. Usually what surfaces is something small. An email. A quick search. One message. Something that takes less than five minutes.

Notice how often the real next step is nothing like the size of the story you just told yourself, and how often you weren't even avoiding the task, you were avoiding the ten seconds it took to see that.

Want to challenge yourself?
Comment with something you caught yourself avoiding, and what the actual next step turned out to be. I read every one.

If you’re reading this via email, just click “Read Online” in the top right corner to view (and comment on) the web version.

With love and gratitude,
Jenn