The Ten Minute Thing I Have Not Done in Three Weeks

There is one item on my list that takes ten minutes.

It has been sitting there three weeks.

I am not going to tell you what it is, because the specific thing is not the point and you have one of your own. You already thought of it. That was fast, was it not.

Here is what makes it strange. In those same three weeks I built things that took twenty hours. I wrote. I shipped. I fixed what broke at eleven at night and got up and did it again. Nobody looking at my week would say that man has a problem finishing things.

And that ten minute thing just sits there.

For a long time I called that laziness and beat on myself about it, which I can tell you from experience does not get the thing done. It just adds a second task to the list. Now you have the ten minute thing, and you have being disgusted with yourself about the ten minute thing.

Here is what I actually think is going on.

The twenty hour job is work. The ten minute job is a decision I have not made yet.

The ten minute thing almost always has a person on the other end of it, or an answer I do not want to hear, or a door that opens once I knock on it. It is not ten minutes of effort. It is ten minutes of effort plus everything that happens after. My body knows the difference even when my list does not. The list says ten minutes. My gut says this one costs more than it says on the tag.

So I hide from it inside real work. That is the part I want to be honest about. Building something hard is a very respectable place to hide. You get to be busy and productive and admired and still not make the call.

I have learned a few things about this. None of them are tricks.

The first is that naming it correctly helps more than pushing harder. When I stop calling it a ten minute task and start calling it a decision, I stop expecting discipline to fix it. Discipline is for work. Decisions need something else.

The second is that the dread is almost never proportional. I have carried a thing for three weeks and then done it in eight minutes and sat there afterward feeling nothing at all. Not even relief. Just the flat realization that I paid three weeks of rent on a house nobody was living in.

The third one took me longest. I am allowed to not have done it yet.

That sounds soft. It is not. I came out of the last several years with a habit of prosecuting myself before anybody else could get to it. Get ahead of it. Say the worst thing about yourself first so it does not land as hard when somebody else says it. That habit kept me upright in some rooms. Out here it is worthless. Out here it just means I am the loudest voice telling me I am failing.

God does not need me to run that case. He has heard it. He was not impressed the first time.

So here is where I land, and it is not a victory speech.

The thing is still on my list today. I am going to do it this week. I am saying that here not because a public promise is magic, but because writing it down honestly is the closest I get to putting the decision somewhere I have to look at it.

And if you have one, and you have been carrying it, take the useful part instead of the shame part. You are not lazy. You are not broken. You are standing at a door, and the ten minutes is not the door.

The ten minutes is the knock.

Knock anyway.

Some weeks the whole win is one small thing crossed off. I will take it.