Saturday, September 26

Do the thing you avoid first

There is one thing on your list you have been walking past for days.

Key takeaways

Move the avoided task to the front of your day
Make the call or open the bill before touching your phone
Name the one thing you have been walking past all week

TL;DR

There is one thing on your list you have been walking past for days. Do that one first today, before the easy stuff, before the phone.

Move it to the front

It is rarely big. A call to a guy you owe money to. A form. A bill you have not opened. Something small enough to hide behind a hundred more useful tasks.

Watch where your day starts

You wake up and do dishes you did not care about yesterday. You answer emails that could wait a week. You reorganize something. All of it real work, all of it chosen because the other thing is sitting there breathing.

Picture yourself spending a whole Saturday cleaning a garage so you will not have to make one phone call. The garage looks great. The call takes four minutes when you finally make it. Four minutes against eight hours of sweating.

a sink with two dirty plates and a running faucet

Photo by John Edgar on Unsplash

Stop letting it grow

Avoided things do not hold still. They compound. The unopened bill becomes a late fee. The conversation you keep postponing becomes a conversation about why you postponed it. The doctor visit becomes a longer doctor visit.

And it costs you while you wait. You carry it around all day like a rock in your coat. You are tired at four in the afternoon and you cannot say why. That is the rock. You have been hauling it since breakfast for free.

Today

Before you touch your phone tomorrow morning, do the one task you have been avoiding all week.

Go deeper

Getting clean is not mostly about the big dramatic sins. It is the pile of small things you keep declining to face, and a man cannot be made new while he is busy managing his avoidance. Scripture puts it plainly. Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy (Proverbs 28:13). Concealing is not always lying. Sometimes it is just refusing to look. The mercy is on the other side of looking, and it is waiting there today, not next week.