To-Do What You’re Afraid of To-Doing

If you find yourself moving a particular item several times from one day’s “to-do” list to the next day’s, there’s probably something unpleasant about the task that you don’t want to experience. Chances are, that task is pretty important.

Important tasks are often the errands people instinctively avoid. They are sometimes new and unfamiliar and even may have a “learning curve.” They can be more time-consuming than less important undertakings. Important tasks are often open-ended, like that single phone call that might lead to several other phone calls before an issue is resolved. They are often intimidating, like requests that might end in rejection or disappointment. Perhaps most unpleasant, important tasks might change our lives—and that is scary.

Anticipatory anxiety is often more painful than the actual event you are afraid to experience. When you keep postponing a feared event, your imagination has more time to build the event into a seemingly deadly ordeal.

If your fear makes a mission seem impossible, you may find yourself trying to relieve your anxiety by saying, “That task was really not that important. I don’t really need that money back, or to write that book I always wanted to write, or to get the house I dreamed of, or to get to know that special someone.” Those thoughts, in turn, might tempt you to scratch the most important tasks off of your list.

The solution is to find the scariest thing on your to-do list and do it first. Call that person and ask for your money back, start the first chapter of your book, block off a specific day to go shopping for a new house, or ask that special someone out on a date (That one’s probably on the to-do list in your mind, even if you haven’t written it down). Once you get the activity done, and you’re still alive, your inner anxiety machine will say, “Oh, I guess I’d better learn to tone it down a little.”

So, in many cases you will find that the best course of action is to move the scariest job on your to-do list to the top. Get it over with, and see what life looks like on the other side.

Now that I’ve said that, I’ll go ahead and admit that sometimes a task can remain on your to-do list for weeks precisely because it’s really not that important (or because someone told you to do it but you never really wanted to). We’re sometimes just as afraid to scratch an unimportant task off of our list without doing it as we are to do an important task.

What this means is that, when a task on your to-do list is nagging you, you are the only one who can decide whether it is important enough to do next, or whether it’s unimportant and just needs to be erased. Whichever it is, it’s often best to get it off the list right away, one way, or the other.