Anna Spent Three Hours Trying to Start a Ten-Minute Job
The job wasn’t particularly difficult. Starting it was another matter.
Anna needed to make a phone call.
It was not an especially complicated phone call.
Find the number. Ring. Ask the question. Write down the answer.
Ten minutes, Anna thought.
Three hours later, Anna had still not made the call.
“Make a phone call.”
Anna’s brain had found several additional tasks hiding inside it.
The ten-minute job had hidden parts
Anna hadn’t deliberately added them. They just appeared.
Anna opened the email that contained the information.
Then she noticed another email she had forgotten to answer.
She opened that one too.
Then she remembered she needed to check something before replying.
Twenty minutes later, Anna was reading something only distantly related to the original phone call.
She closed the browser.
Then reopened it because the phone number was in there.
The task had become a loop
Anna had actually spent three hours repeatedly trying to get into it.
The problem wasn’t simply motivation
Anna wanted the task finished.
In fact, wanting it finished was part of what kept it occupying her attention.
But starting could become harder when Anna was dealing with brain fog, fatigue, too many decisions, uncertainty, anxiety or competing demands.
Neurodivergent executive-function differences could add another layer.
Sometimes the barrier was not “I don’t want to do this.”
It was: “My brain cannot find a simple doorway into this.”
Anna’s old solution was usually to try harder.
She would tell herself to stop being ridiculous and just do it.
Curiously, adding criticism to an overloaded brain did not make the brain more efficient.
So Anna tried something different.
Anna made the doorway smaller
Find the phone number.
Capacity still mattered
There were days when these strategies made a difficult task manageable.
There were also days when Anna genuinely did not have enough capacity for the task.
That distinction mattered.
Breaking a task down could reduce unnecessary load.
It could not manufacture unlimited energy, concentration or cognitive capacity.
Sometimes the useful decision was still: not today.
Anna’s good-enough line
Make the doorway easier.Then see whether there is enough capacity to walk through it.
If the task could be simplified, simplify it.
If support would help, use support.
If today genuinely wasn’t the day, move it rather than spending the whole day fighting with it.
Anna eventually made the phone call.
It took nine minutes.
Nobody asked any of the difficult questions she had prepared for.
The person on the phone needed her name, one reference number and the reason she was calling.
Anna put the phone down.
She resisted the temptation to spend the next hour being annoyed that it had been so easy.
The phone call had been easy.
Getting her brain to the starting line had been the difficult part.
