Why Can a 10-Minute Task Take Us Three Days to Do? 

For weeks, I drove around with a toaster in the back seat of my car. I needed to return it. I had even put it in the car, which felt like progress. But somehow, I never actually returned it. I went to work, the toaster came with me. I went shopping, it came too. At some point, it was no longer something I needed to return. It had become my travel companion. 😄

The funny thing is that returning it probably would have taken less time than I spent thinking about returning it. And that made me wonder: Why can something that takes only ten minutes feel so difficult to do?

We usually have a quick answer for this: procrastination. But procrastination describes what we are doing. It doesn’t necessarily explain why we are doing it. Sometimes, the task itself isn’t particularly difficult. The real difficulty lies in crossing the small psychological gap between intending to do something and actually doing it.

Psychology has long shown that having an intention does not guarantee action. Researchers sometimes describe this as the intention-behavior gap. We can genuinely intend to exercise, finish a report, make an appointment, return something to a store, or change a habit and still fail to act. In my case, the intention was clearly there. I knew I needed to return the toaster. I had made the decision. I had even put it in my car. Yet somehow, the final action still didn’t happen.

This reminded me of a concept from chemistry: activation energy. In chemistry, activation energy is the minimum amount of energy required for a reaction to begin. Of course, human behavior is not a chemical reaction, and activation energy is not a psychological theory of procrastination. But I think it provides a useful metaphor for something many of us experience: sometimes the hardest part of a task is simply getting ourselves over the threshold required to act.

Think about opening a document you have been avoiding, putting on your running shoes, writing the first sentence of an article, making a phone call, or sending an email. None of these actions is objectively very difficult. Yet they can feel strangely difficult in the moment. Once we begin, however, the task often feels much more manageable. The work hasn’t suddenly become easier. What has changed is that we are no longer standing at the starting line.

Why does this happen? One reason is that our brains do not evaluate tasks only according to how much time or physical effort they require. We also respond to boredom, uncertainty, anxiety, frustration, anticipated effort, and immediate reward. A ten-minute task can therefore create considerable psychological resistance if it contains something we would rather not experience.

This is one reason researchers increasingly view procrastination as more than a simple time-management problem. Emotion regulation plays an important role. When a task makes us feel bored, anxious, uncertain, or uncomfortable, postponing it can immediately make us feel better. We tell ourselves, “I’ll do it later,” and the uncomfortable feeling temporarily disappears. Avoidance has rewarded us with relief.

The problem, of course, is that “later” eventually becomes “now” again. The task has not disappeared. We have simply transferred it to our future self. This connects with another important idea from behavioral science: present bias. We tend to give more weight to immediate costs and rewards than to future ones. Returning the toaster now requires effort. Leaving it in the car requires nothing right now. The inconvenience of postponing it belongs to my future self, while the convenience of doing nothing belongs to me today.

Small amounts of friction can also have surprisingly large effects on behavior. An extra form, another decision, finding a password, making a phone call, driving somewhere, or simply figuring out what to do first can increase the effort associated with a task. Each obstacle may seem trivial, but together they can make beginning feel much harder than the task objectively deserves.

This is why telling ourselves to “be more motivated” may not always solve the problem. Sometimes a better strategy is to ask: How can I make the next action easier? Instead of thinking, “I need to finish this report,” the first step might simply be opening the document. Instead of committing to an hour at the gym, the first step might be putting on your shoes. Instead of thinking about writing an entire article, start with one sentence.

Psychological research on implementation intentions supports a related idea. Vague intentions such as “I should exercise more” leave many decisions unresolved. More specific plans, such as “I’ll walk for twenty minutes after dinner,” reduce some of that uncertainty. When the time for action arrives, we have fewer decisions left to make. In other words, we have reduced some of the friction between intention and behavior.

We also tend to think motivation must come before action: first I feel motivated, then I begin. But sometimes the process works in the opposite direction. We take one small action, that action creates momentum, and motivation follows. You open the document and write one sentence. Then another. Five minutes later, the task that seemed enormous suddenly feels manageable. The task itself hasn’t changed. Your relationship to starting it has.

That is why I think we should be careful with labels such as “I’m procrastinating,” “I’m lazy,” or “I have no discipline.” A label may describe what is happening, but a label is not an explanation. If we don’t understand what is creating the resistance, we may keep trying to solve the wrong problem.

Maybe you don’t need more motivation. Maybe the first step is too big. Maybe there is too much friction. Maybe the task creates an emotion you are trying to avoid. Or maybe the immediate reward of doing nothing is simply winning over the future benefit of getting it done.

So the next time you find yourself avoiding a ridiculously small task, instead of asking, “Why can’t I just do this?”, try asking a different question: “What is making the next step harder than it needs to be?”

Then make that step smaller. Make it clearer. Make it easier.

And if the first step is putting the thing you need to return in your car, remember that there is apparently one more very important step:

You still have to go to the store. 😄

Sometimes we spend more energy carrying an unfinished task around than it would take to actually finish it.

In my case, I was literally carrying it around in the back seat.

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