I procrastinate everything

What this looks like

You can’t get yourself to start things. Your list of postponed things keeps growing. You’ve started to suspect the problem is the starting itself, regardless of what you’d be starting. You’re tired from the not-doing, more tired than the doing would have made you.

You’ve made starting into an obstacle, separate from whatever you’d be starting.

What you’ve already tried

• Productivity systems
• Time-blocking
• Breaking everything into the smallest possible step
• Body-doubling sessions
• An ADHD evaluation
• Stimulant medication that made you focused on the wrong things
• Therapy that explored the procrastination
• Promising yourself you’ll start tomorrow

The list grew while you were trying.

What kind of procrastinator are you?

Why “just start” hasn’t reached this

You very likely came out of childhood with a particular relationship to expected effort. You may have grown up under impossible standards where any start was assessed before it could become anything. You may have learned that finishing is what counts, so starting felt like a commitment you didn’t know if you could keep. You may have grown up watching adults drown in unfinished things and absorbed the avoidance. You may have started procrastinating during a specific stretch of overwhelm and never recovered the muscle.

You associate starting with dread now. Each time you’ve started, you’ve already paid the dread cost in advance, which trains you to associate starting with paying the cost. You feel the dread now before you’ve even considered the task.

For the related work side, see I procrastinate everything at work and I can’t finish what I start .

You loaded starting with dread for reasons that made sense at the time. You’ve been carrying the load ever since.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy treats starting as the actual obstacle and dread as the load you’ve been pre-paying every time you’ve considered the task. We work on the seconds before you’d normally start (the open laptop, the blank page, the unsent email) and on the negotiation you’ve been having with yourself in those seconds. Starting goes back to being light because the dread tax stops getting collected first.

You open the laptop and start. The two-hour internal negotiation doesn’t happen.