Reasons The Blog Author Is Not Starting That Task Right Now

A lamp with nifty facets for when I don't have a photo that matches the blog topic



I usually have dozens, maybe a hundred, things I ought to get done in the near future. Some of them are so routine and easy that they almost don't count, like making myself museli for breakfast every morning. Some of them are rare and have few consequences, like hiring a chimney sweep for the fireplace we haven't used (and haven't missed) for three years. 
 
Theoretically, there are people who would find this target rich environment a goad to productivity that would give them joy every time they completed a task. 
 
But I have trouble starting things. I have always had trouble starting things. Until my 40s I had almost no ability to elucidate why I couldn't start a task. Now that I can, I shall! Am I doing it now to procrastinate on other things? Of course!
  • It's too soon so all the factors that need to be considered might not be knowable yet. For instance it doesn't make sense to ask someone what they want for their birthday seven months early because they'll probably want something different by then.
  • It's late enough that the task might no longer be possible and I'm scared of finding that out.
  • I don't feel as sharp or alert as usual. This might be due to lack of sleep or presence of sinus symptoms. Surely if I wait until tomorrow I'll feel up to the task.
  • It's repulsive. Some days I can clean up cat vomit as soon as I see it, some days I need a run-up to mentally prepare for possible smells or sensations.
  • I don't remember the task at a useful time. When I'm half an hour away running errands, remembering to move the laundry to the dryer does not result in actually moving the laundry to the dryer.
  • I want or need to do the thing well but I don't actually have the experience to do it well.
  • There are things I should do along with the main thing to make everything more efficient but I don't want to do those other things and I feel guilty skipping them. (I call them "invisible prerequisites".)
  • The task takes my full focus over a span of time and I have a feeling I'll get interrupted so I don't want to start then have to redo parts after a break. 
  • The cat is sleeping on me.
  • Someone told me to do the task I was already planning on doing and now I feel nagged.
  • Doing the task risks generating other tasks. If I want to check for one task-specific email I'm likely to find other emails that require decisions or thoughtful replies and I'm not able to do those things right now.
  • The task didn't go well last time. Back around 2011 a specialist I was seeing for one thing diagnosed me with another thing. I asked a few responsible questions and the conversation continued. But when I got in my car to go home I realized that the doctor hadn't actually answered "Is this something we should treat?" nor "What can I expect from having this?" I was so distressed and disconcerted that three months later I had a much harder time making myself schedule an appointment there.
  • I have to communicate or coordinate with someone else in order to do the task and they're busy or might be busy or my phone's charging in the other room.
  • I need someone else's buy-in for the task to succeed and I'm not confident I can convince them.
  • Someone made a point of telling me they don't think the thing should be done.
  • I need to do both the planning and the implementing but I only feel up to one of those two jobs.
  • I don't feel satisfied by my leisure activity. Maybe the next chapter will tie up a plot line so neatly that it will push me into switching tasks and coming back to the book later.
  • I feel guilty starting a low urgency task when there is also a high urgency task looming.
  • I had a plan for doing tasks in a certain order now I'm thwarted on the second task so I have to decide how much effort to spend solving that before going on to the third and does the fourth task even make sense if I can't finish task two and that's too much to decide right now so clearly I need a snack and oh look I should rearrange the pantry.
This list of bullet points is specifically about me. But the general ideas; that some tasks are hard to start, the reasons for the difficulty are valid, and the reasons are hard to explain; are important to homeschooling. Many grownups act like a child's inability to verbalize a problem is an admission that the child has zero problems. Many grownups act like a child who can't ask for specific, actionable, common help must not need any.
  
I think my kid's elementary school teachers were good at supporting students who had these kinds of troubles starting tasks but didn't explicitly teach students how to support themselves. The support dropped off after elementary school and that lack contributed to my kid's extreme school-related stress.
 
So a lot of my homeschooling work has been figuring out how to make this better for my kid. That has multiple parts:
  • Finding tasks that are easy for her to start so she experiences starting easily.
  • Supporting her in starting by doing them with her or doing the setup work for her before inviting her to start.
  • Figuring out her hurdles to starting. The last few years of school were so stressful for her than anything too school-like triggers a freeze response so any other hurdles are obfuscated
  • Showing and modeling compassion for trouble starting.
Speaking of that last one, my kid just gave me a choice of two computer games she wants me to play right now and I modeled "Um, the one where I'm not worried I got very behind. But give me five minutes to decide whether to wrap up this blog post or save it for later."

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