The desk is clear. Notifications are off. The phone is in another room. Only the needed app is open and the folders are finally named the way they should have been named years ago. Everything is arranged so that starting will be easy.
But we have not started. The blank screen mocks us. Our not starting is resistance and the room is so thick with it we could put it on a plate and serve it up with a knife and fork.
What is going wrong? We’ve followed all the latest advice, have a perfect system in place and still feel the resistance.
To be perfectly honest, I think productivity advice has improved this year. Some of the loudest voices finally stopped telling us to force ourselves. Willpower has long been the standard answer to productivity problems but people have caught on to the fact that it does not work as a consistent strategy. Since the research it was based on ran into replication trouble, the advice pivoted. Environment design replaced it. Build the system. Arrange the defaults. Make the right action the easy one, so the decision is already made when you get there.
That advice is not bad. It just doesn’t address the real problem. A well built system organizes work beautifully but it cannot make us do the work.
My experience with filing taxes shows the gap.
Here’s what the task really was: Collect a certain kind of data, fill out the form, hit submit. That is the whole task. Now look at the conditions around it. The deadline is known a year in advance. The documents arrive by mail or by download. An entire industry exists to make the process smooth, and the software does the arithmetic. If good conditions produced action, nobody would file late.
But I missed the deadline. I put the task off so thoroughly I had to request a six month extension. Then, with six additional months and every condition improved, I started one week before the new deadline. The same week I would have used anyway. The extension changed the calendar and nothing else.
Accountants do this task all day, for months, on other people’s returns. Many of them find it interesting; some find it absorbing. Same forms, same deadline, same software. Whatever I was reacting to was not in the return, because they handle the identical object and do not react that way.
It was in how I was thinking of it. Not the thoughts I said out loud (although probably a few choice ones landed). The thoughts and beliefs I placed on the task myself.
What did I add to the task? Nightmare, boring, ordeal, heavy, an inconvenience. None of those were objective features of the task. They are features of the judgments I was carrying about the task.
That is resistance. Not the task, but the negative thoughts and feelings we have added to it, visible in the way we respond to the task. It is not a property of the room, the calendar, or the software. It sits between a person and a task. This is what the current advice never touches.
The Frictionless Mindset neutralizes the resistance instead of expending energy routing around it. Acceptance, Alignment, Action: take the task as it is, confirm it belongs to something you want, then act. When the resistance is gone, there is no longer any reason not to start.
Willpower asked us to overpower our resistance. Discipline asked us to outlast it. Environment design routes around it. None of them removes it.
In my book Work Without Working, Section 1 is where this begins, with recognizing our resistance, locating it, accepting tasks, events, and our feelings.
September is the month everyone rebuilds the room. The systems are worth having, and I am not going to argue anyone out of theirs. Just notice, when the room is finished and the thing still is not started, that the room was never what was in the way.
You have not failed at discipline. You do not need a better app. You are carrying judgments about the task that the task did not come with.
Yours in jettisoning,
Alessandra