Don't Prolong the Pain of Important Tasks
- Oct 24, 2017
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 15, 2025
Watch the video above or read on for your Business Tip from Lindsey Smith:
I want to share a tip about procrastination that I learned from a pretty cool book called, The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck.
In it, he shares a very interesting concept about procrastination. He uses the example of a woman who really needed to complete some very important and difficult tasks but she would put them off by allowing herself to get busy doing her emails and everything except the important stuff she really needed to get done. So, in her seven-hour day, she would put off the tough task and the one hour needed to complete it by spending six hours doing the easy stuff. But all day this would drag on her mind because she knew that at some point, she would have to do this super-tough task.
So, the author says to her, “You’re spending six hours of your day in pain anticipating the task you need to do, and then another one hour in pain actually completing the task you’ve been dreading. Why don’t you just take one hour at the start of your day to do the tough task so that the rest of your day is pain-free? Instead of being in pain for seven hours, you’re in pain for just one hour with the rest of your day to enjoy.”
Whether it’s your daily workout, difficult calls to make to clients or any other business activity you don’t enjoy doing but you know you need to muscle through, load them at the beginning of your day. You can either spend a couple of hours getting the most important work done or spend your entire day in pain. It’s probably only 30-60 minutes of actually painful work, and if you spend the first part of your day doing that, the rest of your day is super, super easy. Why put ourselves through hours of pain thinking about the task we’re putting off instead of just frontloading it to free up our minds for the rest of the day?!
Some people spend years in pain putting off things they should get to. Frontload the pain and beat procrastination by knowing that doing the most difficult task first will dramatically reduce your agony and free up your mind and time for the rest of your day.
