How to Stop Procrastinating on a Task You Dread (Start With 10 Minutes)

By Antonio Neves, creator of The 1-Day Method

To stop procrastinating on a task you dread, shrink it to a first move you can finish in 10 minutes, write that move down as today's answer to "What will make today a success?", and do it before you open email. Finishing the whole thing can wait. Today you just start it on purpose. Psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl tie procrastination to mood more than to schedule: you put the task off because putting it off feels better right now. So the fix is to make starting smaller than the feeling.

Everybody has one. The phone call you keep moving to tomorrow. The tax folder. The hard email to a client. The first page of the thing you said you'd write. It sits on the list for a week, then two, and every morning it's still there looking at you.

And you're probably not lazy. You likely got a lot done this week. Just a lot of everything else.

Sirois and Pychyl laid it out in a 2013 paper in Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Their argument: procrastination has a great deal to do with repairing your mood in the short term. The task makes you feel anxious, bored or unsure of yourself, so you do something else and the bad feeling goes away for a while. The bill goes to your future self.

So the thing you're dodging is the feeling that shows up when you sit down to the work, more than the work itself.

There's a second trap stacked on top of that one. In a 2018 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee found that people picked unimportant tasks with smaller payoffs over important ones with bigger payoffs when the small tasks only looked urgent, like they were about to expire. So the dread pushes you away from the big thing, and the fake urgency pulls you toward the small stuff. Answering emails feels productive.

Years ago I was reporting in Juneau, Alaska. It rains there all the time, and I noticed nobody used umbrellas. Nobody. So I asked a man on the street why.

"You know, man, it's just water."

That line works for a dreaded task too. A lot of the dread is weather. You can stand under the awning and wait for it to clear, or you can walk out in it and find out it's just water.

After my family lost our home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, and when I say we lost our home, I mean it doesn't exist, each morning I asked one question: what would make today a success? Not the year, not the month, not the week. Just this day. That question doesn't care how big the whole project is. It only asks about today, which is the size a dreaded task needs to be.

Want a page to do this on? The free 1-Day Method Starter Kit gives you the question, a spot for 3 priorities, the five daily acts and a place for end of day wins. Print it and write the first 10 minutes of the thing you've been avoiding as tomorrow's answer.

Usually one piece of the task is doing all the damage. Maybe it's the number you'll see when you open the bank statement. Maybe it's the awkward first line of the call. Maybe it's that you don't know where to start and that makes you feel dumb. Write the task down, then write one line under it: "The part I don't want to feel is…"

"Do taxes" isn't a task. It's a season. "Find last year's return and put it in one folder" is a task. Write the first move as a verb and a thing: open the doc and write the first ugly paragraph, look up the number and dial it, list the three questions for the meeting. If you can't picture yourself finishing it in 10 minutes, cut it again.

There's nothing special about 10 minutes. Pick whatever's small enough that you can't talk yourself out of it.

Write it at the top of the day: "Today is a success if I write the first ugly paragraph." Then put it in your Essential 3, the three priorities for the day. If the list has 14 things on it, the dreaded one loses every time to the easy ones. When it's one of three and it's written as the definition of a good day, it's a lot harder to slide past.

This is also where the waiting test helps: "What actually happens if this waits until tomorrow?" If the honest answer is "nothing, and it's been nothing for three weeks," maybe it isn't today's priority and you can let it go without the guilt. If the answer makes your stomach drop, it goes in the 3. I wrote more about that test in How to Prioritize as a Founder When Everything Feels Urgent, and it works for anybody with a full plate.

"Later today" is where dreaded tasks go to live forever. Pick a time and a place: "8:30, kitchen table, laptop closed except for the one doc." Then do it before you check email, because the inbox is full of small stuff that looks urgent and it will win.

Writing the plan down helps even before you act on it. E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals keep popping into your head and get in the way of other work, and that making a specific plan for them quiets that noise, even before you've done anything. That's what lets you think about something else until 8:30.

If you want to compare this to other ways of attacking the hard thing first, I broke down eat the frog vs time blocking vs the rule of 3.

When the 10 minutes are up, you're allowed to stop. Seriously. If you keep going, great. But the deal you made was to start, and you kept it.

Then write it down that night as one of the day's wins: "Opened the tax folder. Found last year's return." It sounds small. It's the first time in three weeks the thing moved. Tomorrow's first move goes right under it, so tomorrow starts from where you left off. If you've never kept a list like that, here's how to track daily wins in about 2 minutes.

Then the task has probably grown in your head while it stayed the same size on paper. Three things help.

Go even smaller than 10 minutes. Two minutes. Open the file and close it. Look up the phone number and save it as a contact. It feels silly. It still counts, because the hardest part of a task you've avoided for a month is touching it the first time.

Tell one person what you're doing today and when. Not for a pep talk. Just so somebody else knows 8:30 is the time.

And if you skip a day, don't make it a referendum on who you are. Pick tomorrow's first move and write it down. In Phillippa Lally's habit study at UCL, missing a single day didn't materially set people back. If the stuck feeling goes way past one task, I wrote about what to do when you feel stuck in life.

One more thing, plainly. If you're avoiding almost everything, if you can't sleep, can't focus, or the dread follows you all day for weeks, that may be more than procrastination. Anxiety and depression can look a lot like putting things off. Talk to a doctor or a therapist. That's not a planner problem, and getting help is a smart move.

Because the tasks you care about carry more feeling. Psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl describe procrastination as a way to repair your mood in the short term: putting off the task makes the anxious or uncomfortable feeling go away for now, and your future self pays for it later. The more a task matters to you, the more there is to feel when you start it.

No. You can procrastinate on one dreaded task and still stay busy all day doing other things. Sirois and Pychyl's research ties procrastination to managing your mood: you put off the task because of how it makes you feel. A 2018 study by Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee also found people choose small tasks that only look urgent over important ones with bigger payoffs.

Shrink it to a first move you can finish in 10 minutes, write it down as your answer to "What will make today a success?", and pick an exact time and place to do it before you check email. When the 10 minutes are up you're allowed to stop. Starting is the win.

Often, yes, because the morning is before the inbox fills your day with small urgent things. But the time matters less than having a specific one. Write down a set time and place instead of "later today," whether that's 8:30 AM or 2 PM.

Make the first move even smaller, like two minutes: open the file, save the phone number. Tell one person when you'll do it. Ask "What actually happens if this waits until tomorrow?" and if the answer is nothing, let it go. If you're avoiding almost everything for weeks, talk to a doctor or therapist, since anxiety and depression can look like procrastination.

This is why I made The 1-Day Method Planner. It's the paper version of the question I asked every morning after the fire. Each day has room for your answer to "What will make today a success?", your Essential 3, up to five focused tasks, the Top 5 daily acts and your wins, and it takes under 5 minutes. For a task you dread, that means step 3 and step 5 live on the same page: in the morning you write the first move as your success line, and at night you write down that it happened. One of the Top 5 is Finish, complete one meaningful task. It's undated, 90 days, $29.99, so you can start it today instead of waiting for the first of the month.

If you want the whole method behind it, the question, the Essential 3 and the Top 5, The 1-Day Method book is short on purpose.

Not ready to buy anything? Grab the free Starter Kit and write the first move of that task on it today.

Antonio Neves is an author, keynote speaker, and former journalist for NBC, PBS, and BET Networks. He's delivered more than 400 keynotes for companies like Google, McDonald's, and Visa. After his family lost their home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, he created The 1-Day Method to rebuild his life one day at a time.