The Clean Keyboard Moment
Where I spend twenty minutes dislodging crumbs instead of replying to one email.
Yesterday, I cleaned my keyboard with a earbud. I was meant to reply to an email that would have taken two minutes, but instead I spent twenty on crumb extraction. Not because I was lazy, or even busy, but because replying felt like exposure. And scraping between keys felt safe. This is how my brain protects me: by offering productive-looking detours while the real work waits in the corner, making increasingly judgmental eye contact.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Most people I know are constantly circling tasks like planes waiting for a landing strip to clear. We want to start, we plan to start, but then we find ourselves in the kitchen making tea we don’t even want, or adjusting the brightness settings on our laptops like that’s the missing link to creative flow.
I have spent entire mornings in what I call the productive void, that strange state where I’m doing everything but the thing I actually need to do. It’s a curated playlist of useful distractions: responding to low-priority messages, tweaking calendar invites, reorganising folders, and pretending that writing a to-do list is the same as doing the items on it. My most dangerous lie is: “I’ll just get this out of the way first.”
The Lie That Sounds Like a Plan
“I’ll just do this first.” The soft launch of not doing anything at all.
There’s a difference between a legitimate pause and a deliberate delay. A pause is honest. You step away because your brain is fried or your body needs a break. But a delay is a performance, to yourself, mostly. You’re not taking a break; you’re auditioning for the version of yourself who will definitely, absolutely get started right after cleaning the fridge.
And it’s not that I don’t want to do the work. I want it done. I just don’t want to live in the vulnerable, messy middle part, the bit where the outcome isn’t guaranteed, where I might discover I’m not as good at this thing as I hoped, or worse, that I am, and now I have to live up to it.
The System People
Who are they? How do they live like this? Should we be worried?
I admire people who have systems. Not in a sarcastic way. Real admiration. People who batch tasks, who do email on a schedule, who take breaks before they need to. People who use Notion without irony. People who say things like, “I just like clearing my inbox before breakfast,” and mean it.
I don’t trust them.
Marie Kondo, for example, terrifies me. She folds socks with a kind of spiritual authority that suggests she’s never known chaos. People with that kind of precision in their lives either had a very gentle childhood or they’re suppressing urges that involve plastic sheeting and a freezer. Show me a colour-coded spice drawer and I will show you a person who has definitely Googled “how to dispose of evidence.”
Meanwhile, I live in a system best described as vibes and consequence. There’s a calendar somewhere. It just rarely aligns with reality.
The Emotional Logic of a Clean Counter
Why we do small things instead of the thing that matters.
There is something seductive about doing small, finishable things. Wiping a counter. Filing a receipt. Sending a text. I suspect it’s because they offer proof of effort. You can point to them. They count. They’re visible.
But the real reason small tasks win is emotional. Sometimes, the problem isn’t even the task we’re avoiding. It’s the emotional weight that hitchhikes with it. Even replying to a simple message can spiral into: Am I being too formal? Too eager? Too vague?
So instead, we scroll. We forward a meme. We clear out our inbox like we’re on a reality show called Inbox Zero: Redemption Arc.
This is how avoidance disguises itself, not as laziness, but as low-stakes control. Like, “Look at me staying on top of things” while the actual thing gathers dust and dread in the background.
Lisa Feldman Barrett says our brain isn’t designed to react to logic, it’s designed to predict how we’ll feel next. And sometimes, that prediction is: “This will be mildly uncomfortable. Better alphabetise your PDFs instead.”
Avoidance as Self-Care
When doing “just one more thing” becomes a lifestyle.
People say time management is about priorities. Maybe. But for me, it’s more often about avoidance management. It’s a question of how far I can get from discomfort before I have to turn around and face it. I’ll scrub the floor, restock the fridge, answer three unrelated emails, and tell myself I’m being a responsible adult. But deep down, I know I’m just delaying contact with the hard thing. The thing that matters.
Adam Grant talks about pre-crastination, the need to get easy things done quickly so we feel a sense of progress. I am a founding member of that club. I once paid a bill early just to feel accomplished enough to avoid opening a difficult document.
Shrinking the Thing
The only way I ever get started and why it kind of works.
And the real trick, I’ve found, isn’t to push harder. It’s to shrink the thing. If I can’t reply to the email, I open it and write one sentence. If I can’t write a full paragraph, I write a bad one. Not as a warm-up. As the work. Because most of the time, the problem isn’t that I don’t know what to do. It’s that I don’t want to feel how doing it might make me feel.
Daniel Pink once said that we don’t procrastinate to avoid work; we procrastinate to avoid feelings. Which, to be fair, sounds like work too.
Starting is never glamorous. There’s no music cue. Just the quiet click of finally not lying to yourself.
Everything But the Next Thing
Completion, celebration, and immediately finding something else to avoid.
So I delay. I drift. I dust off books. I alphabetise my thoughts. I make chai like I’m preparing for a guest who never arrives.
But eventually, if I’m lucky, the noise quiets. I remember that the only way out is through. And I do the thing. Not well, not fast, but finally.
And then, of course, I reward myself by doing everything but the next thing.
Author’s Note
I wrote this on a day I was supposed to be doing something else. Which is fitting. I wanted to say something about attention and effort and the weird ways we protect ourselves from our own goals. But mostly, I just needed to tell the truth.
If you saw yourself anywhere in this, the chai breaks, the to-do list revisions, the oddly urgent decision to clean your tech accessories, you’re not alone. I’m right there with you, not starting the next thing.
So, here are three things I’m going to try sticking to:
Do the hard thing first – not the urgent one, not the shiny one, the one I’m most likely avoiding.
Shrink it till it fits – one line, one reply, one call. No ceremony.
Stop romanticising the prep – the playlist doesn’t need to be perfect. Neither does the plan.
No promises. But I’ll try. After I wipe my screen one more time.