A cautionary tale involving procrastination, 7,826 decisions, and a bag of candy.
What If You're Right About How Hard It's Going to Be?
To quote Addie LaRue, my best friend who lives fictionally in a book, “This is how you walk to the end of the world.”
Basically, I used my Are We There Yet? Method™ on myself. Overall, and despite being prone to dramatic sighing, I was a delightful client to work with.
Listen, when something is too much for us to tackle right now, I believe in giving ourselves grace because sometimes we absolutely need it.
Being kind to yourself and expecting something of yourself are not mutually exclusive.
But I also believe that sometimes we need to stop giving ourselves permission to avoid something simply because it feels like it’s gonna be hard.
Sometimes you need a day off.
Sometimes you need a better plan.
Sometimes you need someone to help you get started.
Sometimes you need to quit negotiating with yourself and just open the freakin’ website editor.
And notice I’m not saying “Don’t worry. It probably won't be so bad."
Because sometimes it absolutely is that bad. Sometimes you start and discover that you were completely and unfortunately right about how unpleasant the experience would be.
But.
Something else happens, too.
You make progress.
You figure things out.
You make decisions you didn't know how to make before you started.
And eventually, you look up and there’s a website where the old coats used to be.
Your friend who is happy to report that only one bag of candy has been eaten (so far) in the Website Redevelopment Project of October,
Vivian
I didn't have to be willing to do the whole thing every time I sat down. I just had to be willing to do the next thing.
There are at least 3 studies performed by actual neuroscientists, including (and I kid you not) Dr. Kool, et al., that confirm what every woman who has ever brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan has known since approximately the fourth grade. Which is that when given the choice, human beings generally prefer to avoid activities that require a lot of mental effort.
The problem arises when the thing we really want and need to do comes with all of the cognitive effort demands.
So how do you make yourself start when you know perfectly well how hard it's going to be?
Maybe you’ve been avoiding the basement, the closet, or the boxes that came home after Mom died.
Maybe you’re absolutely right that getting through it all is going to be really, really hard.
Maybe there will be tears and frustration and decisions you wish you didn't have to make.
And maybe you don’t have to summon the time and the energy and the patience and the not insubstantial amount of emotional fortitude needed to get through the whole miserable project before you can begin.
I didn't get a website by sitting down and creating a website.
I figured out what the end goal was.
What steps I needed to complete to get there.
And what order I needed to complete them in.
I’m not gonna lie, it was a task list so long that it felt like I was going to need 4 or 5 bags of candy to get through it.
So I added “buy candy” to the top of the list. Because scientific research has also confirmed that incentives can loosen our reluctance to muster and mobilize every cognitive resource not currently engaged in deciding what to watch on Netflix.
And then I began making decisions and completing actual pieces of the project and figuring things out as I went and changing the plan when something didn’t work.
Sometimes we dread doing something because we’re not sure we can actually do it. Other times we know we can do it, but we’re reluctant to do it because we also know exactly how much it’s going to take out of us to get it done.
Until I just got so sick of hearing the voice in my head reminding me to update it so it could actually do its job. And by sick, I mean sick and tired. Or maybe just tired because that voice had started working overtime and was starting to keep me awake.
Listen, I 100% know that anticipated difficulty and actual difficulty aren't necessarily the same thing. And the only way to discover the difference is to begin.
And so I began.
Cue the frustration and boredom and confusion and tears and cursing of technology and all of the decisions that were easy and all of the decisions that I agonized over and will possibly continue to tweak for the foreseeable future.
Sometimes we imagine something will be much worse than it turns out to be.
This was not one of those times.
But also, a website emerged.
This is what I have known all of my life to be true:
So I did what any reasonable professional organizer who makes her living helping other people tackle enormous projects would do.
I avoided it.
For a remarkably long time.
Once upon a time there was a woman who needed to do something and wanted to do something, but did not, in fact, do anything.
For a very long time.
I am that woman.
I've needed to update my business website for a very long time.
And by needed, I don't mean give it a fresh coat of paint and a new photograph of me looking like a woman who has her professional life under control.
I mean my business had changed, my services had changed, and my website was the internet equivalent of a coat closet stuffed full of jackets I don’t really wear anymore next to the couple of coats I wear all the time.
I knew it needed to be done.
I also knew exactly what doing it meant.
Frustration. Boredom. Confusion. Tears. Technology that refused to cooperate with my best intentions. And 7,826 decisions I probably wasn’t prepared to make.
GETTING STARTED
OCTOBER 26, 2026