667 Today, Do That One Thing You've Been Putting Off

Today, Do That One Thing You’ve Been Putting Off By Tim Herrera Like any modern office worker, my inbox every so often becomes an unwieldy mess of unanswered emails, half-written messages that need to be sent and more “Sorry I’m so late getting back to you!” notes than I ever thought I’d write. It’s usually fine, we all manage, that’s life. But every so often, I have that one email I need to write but that I just can’t force myself to take care of. You know the type: It’s something you have anxiety about even after leaving the office, and you know you’re making it worse the longer you put it off. Maybe it’s not even an email. Maybe it’s a memo you have to write, a phone call you have to make, a meeting you have to set up, or whatever else. I’m taking a wild guess here, but you probably thought of one specific thing on your to-do list while reading that last paragraph, right? Psychologists call this kind of avoidance self-sabotage: It’s when we put off or ignore a situation or task to our own detriment because doing it would force us to confront our fears or anxieties. This often manifests itself in extreme procrastination (not that I’ve ever had problems with that), and there are many reasons we fall into these patterns.