The Form of Resistance You Get Praised For

You're moving. You're not going anywhere.

We tend to picture resistance as stillness. The task sitting untouched. The project that never starts. The goal we keep meaning to get to. Or: the serial projects that get dropped midway through because the next big idea has just appeared on the horizon.

But resistance sometimes cloaks itself in a more convincing disguise. One that feels nothing like avoidance. One that feels, in fact, like its opposite.

It looks like a full calendar. An inbox in motion. A to-do list that keeps growing and getting checked off. It looks like someone who is clearly, visibly, demonstrably working. We are busy. And we are praised for it. People are impressed. We are always on the move, always doing something interesting, active, seemingly relevant. People swear they wouldn’t be able to keep up with us.

And yet the goal is never reached. Like the horizon, the more actions we take to approach it, the more it seems to stay out of reach.

This is busyness as resistance. And it is one of the hardest forms to see, because it comes with all the right optics. We feel productive. We look productive. We end the day tired, and probably satisfied with all we have gotten done, which seems like proof. But busy and productive are not the same thing, and busyness is very good at blurring the line between them.

The mechanism is the same as any other form of resistance. There is something we want, and there is a ‘no’ running underneath it. Not a ‘no’ to working. A ‘no’ to the specific actions that would actually move the thing forward. Those actions are uncomfortable, uncertain, or both. We never really feel ready for them. So we fill the space around them. We plan the project instead of starting it, or we start it and drop it midway through. We research the decision instead of making it, or we make the decision and then waffle endlessly about whether it was correct. We organize the system that will help us do the thing, instead of doing the thing.

In Work Without Working, these show up as named resistance behaviors: overplanning, One More Thing Syndrome, living in eternal prep mode, perfectionism. They are not time management failures. They are not productivity tool failures. They are resistance wearing productivity’s clothes. And no time management system, productivity tool, or app is going to save us. We bring the resistance to all of it.

The tell is in the result. Genuine productive action changes something. It moves us forward toward the goal, even incrementally. Busy resistance produces activity but not movement. At the end of the day, the calendar was full and the thing is exactly where it was at the start.

Naming the busyness accurately as resistance, rather than as productivity, changes our relationship to it. We can see it for what it actually is: a ‘no’ in motion.

The good news is that the ‘no’ can be neutralized. That is precisely what the techniques of The Frictionless Mindset are designed to do: not manage the resistance, not work around it, but make it irrelevant, so we actually execute the actions that move us toward the goal instead of endlessly circling it.

And there is one form of the ‘no’ that deserves its own conversation. We mentioned it in passing: not feeling ready. On its own it is a resistance behavior. Combined with the common (but erroneous) belief that we have to feel like doing something before we can do it, it becomes an especially pernicious type of resistance. This is where we go next week.

Busy moving forward,
Alessandra

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