The 3 Reasons You Keep Getting Stuck in Task Freeze

These are the top 3 things I would tell the past version of me who’s stuck on the couch, ignoring her entire to-do list, and endlessly frustrated that she lacks the discipline to do anything.

Your expectations are WAY too high

The standards you mentally set for each individual task are unreasonably high. Good on you for wanting to do a great job, but there’s a difference between “wanting to do well” and “aiming for absolute perfection”.

You will take considerably less action trying to be perfect than if you would if you lowered the standard of what you deem acceptable. Lower your standards in the name of producing more, of taking more action. The more you produce, the faster you learn, the quicker you hone your craft.

👉 Try this instead:

Show up for your next task with the mentality that you want to do B+ work. Give it just enough effort that you product good, not great, results. The funny part? You’re standards are so out of whack and skewed high, that your attempt at B+ work will actually warrant A+ results 🤭 

If that’s not working for you, lower the bar even more. Intentionally try to do a shitty job. A bad first pass at something usually gets the momentum going, so it’s easy to keep rolling right into finishing the task with much higher quality. You just have to keep the stakes low enough to feel like it’s safe to get started.

You’re unwilling to be seen as a beginner

It makes you too uncomfortable to be seen trying, because you prefer to be perceived as excellent. This is why you have such a hard time asking for help and admitting when things feel too difficult. It’s the reason you completely isolate yourself when life feel really hard — you don’t want people to see you when you’re struggling. That would completely shatter the facade that you have it all together, that you have a plan and you’re following it to the letter.

💭 Remember:

It’s okay to not know things. It’s okay to be bad at something. It’s okay to be a beginner. Everything you know how to do really well? You were a beginner at that at some point. Become a perpetual beginner again.

Even if your ego puts up a fight, give other people an opportunity to see you try. You don’t become worth knowing only once you’ve reached your final, perfect form.

You take everything personally

You know all too well that warm flash of shame when you make a huge mistake in a company email. Or the steel ball of guilt that sits in your stomach when you realize you spent the past 3 hours on TikTok instead of working on your own content. Or the wave of comparison that comes along when you see a peer doing better than you — she’s rich, she’s hot, she’s everything I could be if I just tried harder and did better.

Not everything means something about you. In fact, most things don’t mean anything about you — you’re the one assigning the negative spin on the completely neutral event. You’re attaching a self-deprecating narrative to the actions of yourself and others.

👉 Try this instead:

Once you catch the negative story, don’t try to “be positive” about it instead — just aim for neutrality. Simply identify the actual, cut and dry facts of the matter.

You’re not a huge fuck up, you just made a very common mistake when attaching a file to an email. You aren’t a lazy piece of shit who lacks motivation, you’re just overwhelmed and find it comforting to zone out on your phone after work. You aren’t doing so much worse in life than your influencer friend, you’re staring at curated and filtered social media photos, and you have no idea what her life is actually like.

💭 Remember:

The next time you want to give yourself a hard time about your very-specific-to-you problem, there are at least 50 million other people on this planet with that exact same problem.

You’re not a special, rare type of fuck up who needs to remind herself of it every few hours. You’re just a very regular person experiencing very normal problems. You’re doing your best.