A time management coach explains that often it’s not the difficulty of a task that leads to procrastination, it’s the emotions connected to the task.

 

You can feel the muscles between your shoulder blades tense up and your stomach feels a bit queasy. Is that a headache coming on?

You know you really should do that task that’s collecting cobwebs on your to-do list. It’s important. It needs to happen. And it’s not even that hard. But you find it emotionally exhausting to even think about getting it done. So you protrastinate and distract yourself, hoping that you’ll have the courage to check it off the list someday—just not today.

Sound familiar?

As a time management coach, I’ve found that people sometimes avoid tasks because they’re genuinely hard. But oftentimes it’s not the difficulty that leads to procrastination, it’s the emotions connected to the task. The only way to overcome this barrier is to accept and acknowledge the emotional weight of the work we do and give these tasks the time and energy necessary to finally get them done. 

What contributes to the emotional weight of work? 

Part of what can feel so confusing about why we put off emotional tasks for weeks or even months is that they’re often not huge projects. We can procrastinate on something as simple as sending a two-sentence e-mail.

So what creates this emotional weight? And how can we recognize that we’re in a situation that deserves some special treatment?

Here are some of the most common reasons that a task could have a high emotional weight:

• People: The task is connected to someone who you have a negative relationship with, someone who can be critical, or someone who you want to impress.
• Delay: The task is past the due date and one or more people are waiting on you to complete it, so you feel some guilt and shame for not meeting expectations.
• Ambiguous: The task’s definition is unclear, and you’re not sure where to start or how to get to your desired end.
• Stretch: The task is beyond your current scope of knowledge, so you feel some imposter syndrome and have some insecurity on whether or not you’re capable of completing it.

Take a quick look at your task list and notice if there are any lingering items that fit these categories. If you are procrastinating on tasks because of these reasons, here is how you can address the emotional weight of your world.  

Expect less to do more 

If you notice that some of the work you’ve been avoiding fits this high-emotional-weight category but your overall work is not particularly stressful, focus on doing less emotionally difficult tasks at once but work on them more consistently.

This will help you get much more done, much faster. Here are some examples of how you could limit yourself and be consistent:

• I only do one of these tasks a day.
• I only spend one hour a day on these activities.
• I only reply to one of these types of messages a day.

Also give yourself space to get this type of work done. Don’t tell yourself, “Oh this is just a short e-mail, it should take me two minutes.” Give yourself 30 or even 45 minutes to write the emotionally weighty email, read it over, mull on it a bit, and then send it out.

You can’t take this approach for all of your work. But for especially emotional tasks, not rushing yourself can actually help you get them done instead of putting them off further. 

Toggle between high-emotion and low-emotion tasks 

The less-is-more approach works excellently if most of your work is emotionally neutral to positive. But what if almost all of your work is emotionally difficult. For instance, this can be the case with outbound sales or customer service jobs.

In these cases, I recommend that you take a toggle approach where, if possible, you go between high-emotion tasks and low-emotion tasks throughout your day.

For example, maybe you do an hour of cold calls, and then you do your less intense email or text follow-ups. Or maybe you answer an angry customer email, and then you reply to an email just asking for some routine information. Keep going back and forth throughout the day, so that your emotions have the opportunity to lower between high intensity times.

And if all of your work is quite intense, then try to do a quick calming activity in between tasks such as breathing exercises. Simply slowing down your breath for a short while can lower anxiety, depression, and anger.

Get help 

If you’re noticing that even with the above strategies that you’re still getting stuck because the task fits in the ambiguous or stretch categories, ask for help. You can often save yourself hours of agonizing by reaching out to your boss or a colleague for clarification on where to find information or how to approach a task.

And if internal resources aren’t available, you can research online, talk to experts, or even explore what kind of support AI can give you to get a task done. Most likely someone else has struggled in this area and found a solution. 

Celebrate progress

When you finally get something done that’s been lingering for months, don’t criticize yourself by saying, I can’t believe it took me that long. That was so easy. Why didn’t I get it done sooner?

Get excited! Be proud of yourself. Celebrate the progress!!

My daughter physically knew how to walk on her own for weeks. But because she really didn’t like the sensation of falling as she was learning to balance, she kept holding onto our fingers. What finally got her toddling around on her own was literally cheering her on whenever she would walk independently. My husband and I made a huge deal over her trying, and she finally went for it. You can do the same for yourself too where you create a lot of positive energy around getting these emotionally weighty tasks off the list. Turn on some dance music and be proud of yourself.

The amount of relief you’ll feel when you get these things done will be enormous. This emotional lift will free you up to have time and energy to do so many other things much more quickly and easily. You have what it takes to move forward no matter what the emotional weight.

 

A version of this article appeared on fastcompany.com, posted on October 22, 2024

EXPERD, Human Resources Consultant, Jakarta – Indonesia