"I'll do it when I've got a proper chunk of time"

Start with the chunk, because it's the belief the whole heap rests on. Saturday morning, coffee, the lot in one go.

Two problems with it. The first is that the chunk doesn't come. It hasn't come for the last eleven items, which is why there are eleven. Saturday morning has a child's football or a lie-in or a supermarket in it, and the chunk gets moved to Sunday evening, and Sunday evening is the last place anyone wants to do a form, and the heap goes into Monday intact. This is my observation and not a finding, but I'd ask you to check it against your own record. When was the last chunk?

The second problem is what the items are doing while they wait for it. E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, in 2011, ran a series of experiments on what an unfinished task does to the mind. People were given goals and prevented from completing them, and then asked to do something unrelated, like reading or solving anagrams. The unfinished goals intruded. People had more stray thoughts about them during the reading, words connected to them came to mind more readily, and they did worse on the anagrams. The undone thing was running in the background and taking something from whatever was in the foreground. That's the carry, measured.

Then the researchers did something that matters for this book. They let some participants make a specific plan for the unfinished goal, when and how they'd do it. The intrusions stopped. The anagram performance recovered. The goal hadn't been done, but a plan for it did what doing it would have done, and the effect was strongest in the people whose plans were sincere, the ones who actually went on to carry them out. The mind, the researchers suggested, treats a real plan as good enough to stand down.

Put that next to the chunk. "Saturday morning, the lot" isn't a plan in that sense. It's a vague intention with no when and no how, and the carry doesn't stand down for it, which is why the eleven tabs weigh on you all week. A dated line, "Thursday, sweep, ring the dentist", is a plan, and chapter 21 is about making them. And doing the item now, when it arrives, is the most specific plan there is.

An earlier book in this series is about putting off work that matters, and its point is that the dread lives in the gap between the decision to do the thing and the doing. The gap for a form is the same shape as the gap for a report. It's just that the form's gap is filled with a four-minute task and three weeks of carry, and the carry is the only real part of it.