Thrashing

Don’t let procrastination on one task derail everything else.

A bad failure mode: you have a task T that you have to do but can’t, because of some kind of aversion. When you try to work on other things, the alarms are going off in your head — you should be working on T because you’ve been putting this off for so long and life is finite and the years are short.

The end result: because one thing is blocked, everything grinds to a halt. A very annoying state to be in.

The fix

No perfect solution, but apply a sense of proportionality. You can’t ignore T forever. You also probably won’t solve it in the next ten minutes.

Timebox T: allocate some block of time every day to try to advance it, or at least work around it (e.g., ask a friend for help). The rest of the day, dedicate to moving other things forward.

The key insight is compartmentalizing the damage — preventing one stuck task from contaminating everything else.