The Hot Pan Reflex

You touch a hot pan and your hand pulls back before you've had a single thought. You don't decide to. Your mind does it for you, because its job is to keep you away from things that burn.

Now watch what happens with the work that matters most to you. You sit down to it - the proposal, the book, the thing with your name on it and a few minutes later you're in your inbox instead. You didn't decide that either. There was no moment of choice.

Your hand just left the pan.

Same reflex.

At some point, your mind learned to file that work as dangerous. Not all work, you get plenty done.

The work that's visible. The work that could be judged. To your mind, that's a hot pan, and it pulls you off before you can touch it.

You've been calling this procrastination and fighting it with discipline. But discipline can't stop a reflex. Nobody keeps their hand on a hot pan through willpower.

I call it the hot pan reflex.

It has cost you more than minutes. Years of evenings. The guilt after them. The projects still waiting.

And one more thing about that pan: it isn't hot. It went cold years ago. Your reflex just never went back to check.