A few months ago, a picture fell off the wall in the hallway outside our bedroom. It didn’t do much damage to the wall, and the glass didn’t break. I figured it would take about 10 minutes to put a new hook on the wall and re-hang it. So I put it between the bookcase and the staircase railing and penciled it in for the weekend.

But it stayed there, on the floor, for months.

I walked past it every day. Every single time, some small part of my brain filed a report: still haven’t done that. It was like feeling a little flick of failure, several times a day. When I finally rehung it, it took ten minutes. But before that, the ‘not-fixing’ took months.

Increasingly, I’m beginning to understand that procrastination is a subscription to guilt.

We talk about procrastination as a one-time cost that eventually comes due. Like in college, you think, “I am not going to write this paper all week, I will just stay up late the night before it’s due and do it then.” When we commit to procrastination, we think we’re committing to doing it later and under more pressure. But that’s not what actually happens for me. What happens to me is a charge that hits every time I open my to-do list. I scan the list, see the thing, feel the feeling that made me skip it last time, and then I skip it again. Nothing has been accomplished, but I’ve spent calories on it.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done time management system has a two-minute rule: if a task takes less than two minutes, don’t write it down, just do it. The logic is efficiency. Capturing a task, filing it, reviewing it, and eventually doing it costs more total effort than the two minutes the task actually requires. But there’s another benefit for me, because the overhead isn’t the only problem. The real problem for me is often that writing something down converts a one-time task into a recurring one. Not recurring in the sense that you have to do it repeatedly, but recurring in the sense that you have to see it repeatedly. Every review, every scan, every time you go to the list for some other reason, the task sits there charging rent.

For me, I’m usually avoiding tasks because of embarrassment. Something didn’t go the way I wanted, like I need to report out on a project that didn’t go well. Or I tried to get a raise or promotion for someone and failed, and I have to tell them. Or I’m avoiding it out of dread, like I know I have to circulate a document for feedback and I know I’m not going to like the feedback so I avoid sending it. Either way, the procrastination makes the task SO.MUCH.WORSE.

If I think of procrastination as a subscription, I haven’t yet figured out how to cancel it, but I have started noticing the charge. That’s not nothing, but it’s not the same as fixing it, either. I still avoid the hard email. I’m just more aware of what it’s costing me while I do.

The picture that fell off my wall is back up. It looks exactly like it did before. Next time maybe rehanging it can cost me less. Meanwhile I’ll put ‘unsubscribe’ on my to-do list.