On the Single Most Stressful Thing You Have to Do Today
Everybody has those days where the to-do list looks like Martin Luther’s cascading scroll of 95 theses. You gotta do your laundry and water the plants and take out the trash and get your tires rotated and drop off packages and email your coworker and go for a run and buy groceries and return some video tapes and on and on and on. Those days you have two choices: plow through your obligations like some kind of well-oiled task-completing machine, or curl up into a ball and do nothing and watch your life crumble around you like a Jenga tower in an earthquake. For the most part, when there’s a mountain of stuff to do, it’s almost easier to get it all done because you don’t have wiggle room. You start chugging and you don’t stop chugging until the list is done and dusted. No, the really tough thing is when you have but one singular task on your to-do list…especially if that one task is making a phone call.
I’ve never liked making phone calls. From the time I was a wee lad, my parents had to threaten me with a no-desserts-only-vegetables prison sentence just to get me to talk to my sweet perfect grandma on the phone a couple of times per year. I still start to shake and get the sweats every time my phone rings even though I’m a grown man and 99% of the phone calls I get are spam. Thankfully in today’s increasingly hellish hellscape, a few things have gotten better and one of them is that most of what you used to have to do on the phone, you can do online.
Unfortunately, however, there are still some scenarios where you just need to talk to a human being and those are the absolute worst tasks especially if that’s all you have to do that day. Say you have to call customer service because something you ordered online never showed up and the automated chat on their website is as useless as a toddler in a multivariable calculus class. If that’s all I have to do on a blessed Friday and once I do it, I’m free to play video games or watch YouTube videos, or go to the driving range…I’ll sacrifice all of those wonderful activities to simply avoid making a ten-minute phone call!
WHY DO I DO THIS!? The phone call is rarely difficult. At worst, it’s a test of patience and compassion when you’re on hold for what feels like hours and bounced between people who don’t make nearly enough money for how much people yell at them, and at best it takes like five minutes and then you’re completely free. AND YET! I’ll spend the entire day puttering around the apartment doing small tasks and potchkying about just pretending that I’m doing something important enough to put off my singular task. And to think, all of this would be alleviated if I simply had 10-15 more things I HAD to do or my life would fall apart.
The human mind sure is a weird thing. What about you? Is there one task you put off until the last possible moment even if it’s all you have to do?
You know I do this with showering. NOT FOR TOO LONG, to be clear. But I’ll put it off for a good few hours after a workout by finding absolutely anything else to do. And it’s so stupid because I can’t comfortably sit anywhere until I’m clean, so I sit on the hardwood floor on my phone, or on the sidewalk outside…all just to avoid washing my hair.
I make lists, which is very satisfying. Then, the next day I look at it and get stressed because it looks like there's SO MUCH TO DO. If I'm lucky, I do half, then justify stopping by saying to myself, "I can do these tomorrow." So there is a rotating of new and old endless tasks I procrastinate on. My dream is to someday actually have nothing to do. Which will never happen. Just another thing to be put off.