"I'll feel guilty either way"

By now the heap has a feeling attached, and it isn't boredom. It's guilt. You feel guilty when you see the envelope and guilty when you don't do it and guilty, oddly, even when you finally do, because it took three weeks. Some readers will say the guilt is the price of the heap and they've been paying it and it hasn't helped.

It hasn't, and there's research on why. Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett, in 2010, followed students through two sets of exams. Those who forgave themselves for putting off revision before the first set put off less before the second. The self-forgiveness wasn't letting themselves off. It was what let them start again, and the ones who stayed guilty carried on as before. Fuschia Sirois, in 2014, found across four samples that people who put things off were less kind to themselves and more stressed, and that the lack of kindness accounted for part of the stress. The guilt isn't a corrective. It's a weight, and it's part of what makes the next item harder.

Think about how guilt operates on the heap. The envelope produces a small guilt. The guilt is unpleasant. The way to end the unpleasantness fastest is to look away, and Sirois and Pychyl's mood repair from chapter 5 does exactly that. So the guilt, far from driving you to the form, drives you off it, because the form is now the source of a bad feeling and bad feelings are avoided. A heap with guilt on it is heavier and stickier than a heap without, and you've been adding guilt to yours in the belief that it would help.

There's a plainer point too. The guilt is about the past three weeks and the form is about the next four minutes, and the two have nothing to do with each other. Whatever you feel about the delay, the form is the same form and takes the same time, and the delay is over, because it ends the moment you start. Feeling bad about the three weeks doesn't shorten the form and doesn't lengthen it. It's a separate activity, and it's one you can stop.

So when the item's finally done, and the guilt arrives about how long it took, notice it and let it go without an argument. "Three weeks, done now." That's the whole sentence. The Wohl finding says that people who can say that put off less next time, and the ones who dwell on the three weeks put off the same, and you've tried the second way for long enough to know.

You'll feel guilty either way for a while, because habits of feeling change slowly. What you can change today is whether the guilt is allowed to make the next item harder, and it isn't, because the next item is four minutes and starts now.