Ricardo didn’t think of himself as a procrastinator. He worked eleven hours a day. The problem was that of those eleven hours, maybe three were the work that actually mattered. The other eight were motion: emails, calls, low-stakes operations — anything that created the sensation of doing without the cost of real thinking.
Where he started
Day 1. Ricardo arrived with a different diagnosis: “I don’t have time.” But when they reviewed a typical week together, the patterns showed. The business proposal he needed to write — the one that could change the quarter — had been sitting for three weeks. Low-impact activities got done with no resistance. The high-impact one never found its moment.
Ricardo’s procrastination wasn’t passivity. It was low-resistance activity used as a substitute.
The first days
The first exercise was identifying his high-resistance tasks: the ones that generated the most avoidance. These weren’t always the most technically difficult — they were the ones that involved exposure, external judgment, or visible failure risk. The business proposal was the obvious one. There was also a pending conversation with his business partner about the company’s direction.
The two-minute rule came in as a complement: if something takes under two minutes, do it now. That cleared the small noise he was using as an excuse to avoid the big items.
First three days: Ricardo wrote the business proposal. It took four hours. Not perfect — he acknowledged that himself. He sent it.
The turning point
Day 9. The response to the proposal came back with real interest. Not a close, but an opening. Ricardo realized he had avoided that proposal for three weeks out of fear of a response that didn’t materialize. He’d paid three weeks of anxiety anticipating something that never happened.
That opened a deeper question, which he worked through with a values review: which tasks was he systematically avoiding because their outcome would define whether the company had a future? The avoidance wasn’t about laziness. It was about betting high.
Where he is now
By day 14, Ricardo has a simple system: each week, identify the two highest-resistance tasks and do them first, before anything else. He doesn’t always follow through. But the weeks he does, the rest of the week runs differently. The conversation with his business partner is still pending. It has a date on the calendar.
Techniques that worked
- High-resistance task identification: naming what you’re avoiding and why
- Two-minute rule: clearing low-effort noise that functions as avoidance substitute
- Values review: connecting difficult tasks to what actually matters