Every year, taxes gave me an excellent opportunity to observe one of my less impressive habits.
I knew they had to be filed. I knew the deadline was not going to move out of politeness. I also knew that postponing the work would not make a single form disappear.
And yet I kept postponing it.
The reason was not mysterious. I hated doing it.
So I would look at the calendar and think, I still have time. I would decide that today was not the right day. Next week would surely contain a more responsible version of me who woke up excited about tax paperwork.
That man never arrived.
What did arrive was the deadline.
Then I would spend the final days rushing through a job I could have done calmly much earlier. The taxes were still unpleasant, but now I had added stress, time pressure, and the knowledge that I had created most of that pressure myself.
I eventually noticed something that sounds obvious when written down: procrastination did not save me from doing something I hated. It just made me do it later under worse conditions.
Why Avoiding Something Can Feel So Good for a Few Minutes
Procrastination gets described as laziness surprisingly often. That explanation has never seemed very useful to me.
When I postponed my taxes, I was not making a careful decision that they no longer mattered. I was buying a little emotional relief.
If I decided not to deal with the paperwork today, I immediately felt better. The unpleasant task moved out of the present moment and into that magical country called Later.
Unfortunately, Later has a border crossing.
The relief was real, but temporary. Meanwhile the unfinished task stayed somewhere in the back of my mind. Each time I remembered it, I had another small reminder that I was avoiding something.
So the task slowly acquired extra weight. There was the actual work, and then there was everything I had mentally piled on top of it.
This was one of the most useful things I learned from reading about habits and behavior change: we often focus too much on finishing and not enough on the friction involved in starting.
“Do My Taxes” Was Too Big a Beginning
“Do my taxes” sounds like one task. It is not.
It means finding documents, checking accounts, gathering information, opening software, answering questions, reviewing numbers, and eventually filing.
When I thought about the whole thing at once, I felt the discomfort of every step before I had taken the first one.
What helped was making the beginning smaller.
Not “I am going to finish my taxes tonight.”
Just:
- Find the tax folder.
- Put the documents in one place.
- Open the program.
- Log in.
- Deal with one document.
That was much harder for my mind to dramatize.
I could still dislike the job. I simply no longer had to swallow the entire job in one bite.
I Stopped Waiting for Motivation
I used to assume that starting would be easier once I felt motivated.
The problem is that unpleasant jobs are remarkably bad at generating advance enthusiasm.
I still do not wake up thinking, What a beautiful day. I hope there is tax paperwork.
I have not achieved that level of enlightenment.
What changed was my expectation. I stopped requiring myself to feel like doing something before I began doing it.
That sounds small, but it changed the sequence.
Instead of:
Feel motivated → begin → make progress
I started allowing:
Begin a tiny piece → make a little progress → sometimes feel more willing to continue
Not always. Sometimes I still wanted to stop.
But beginning gave me information that avoidance could not. I could discover whether the task was actually as bad as the version I had been rehearsing in my imagination.