The matter you keep avoiding is not laziness. It is a threat response.

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

It has been on the corner of the desk for eleven days. You are not a lazy person; in those eleven days you have cleared everything else on the desk, twice, and answered emails that did not need answering. But this one matter, the one with the unhappy client and the point of law you are not sure of and the senior who is going to ask, has not been opened. Every morning you decide that today is the day. Every morning something more urgent appears, which, when you think about it honestly, is a strange thing to keep happening for eleven consecutive days.

The junior version of this has a senior in it. The senior version does not, and it is just as common. A partner, whom we will call Anele, described a letter to a long-standing client that she had been “about to write” for three weeks. The letter had to say that the strategy the client had chosen against her advice had not worked and that the position was now worse. A head of legal described a conversation with the chief executive about a contract that had been signed without her department’s input, which she had put off for a month while it grew quietly more expensive. Seniority removes the fear of the senior and replaces it with the fear of the client, the board, or the discovery that one’s own earlier advice was wrong. The mechanism is identical.

Practitioners at every level treat this as a discipline failure and respond by resolving harder, usually on a Sunday evening. It rarely works, and the reason it rarely works is that the problem was never discipline.

Avoidance is the brain protecting you

The matter being avoided is almost always the one that carries a threat: of being wrong, of a confrontation, of discovering that the position is worse than the client believes, of a reaction from someone whose opinion matters. The brain does not distinguish carefully between a threat to your standing and a threat to your safety. It treats both the way it treats any threat, and one of its oldest options is to move away. Every time you do not open the file, the threat recedes for a moment, the body registers a small relief, and the avoidance is rewarded. Sirois and Pychyl (2013) describe procrastination in exactly these terms, as a form of short-term mood repair: the delay is not about the task at all but about escaping the feeling the task produces, and the escape is immediately reinforcing even though it makes the feeling worse the next day. By day eleven the habit is well established, and the threat has grown, because eleven days of delay is now part of what the file contains. Anele’s letter had to explain not only the bad news but also why it was three weeks late.

This is why willpower is aimed at the wrong target. Willpower is a tool for doing something unpleasant. It is not a tool for reducing a threat, and as long as the threat stands at its full size, willpower will lose to it most mornings, because the threat system is older, faster and better funded than the part of the brain that makes resolutions. The target is the threat.

Shrinking the threat

The first step is to write down, in one line, what exactly is being avoided. Not “the matter”, which is too large and vague to be afraid of in any useful way, but the specific thing. “I do not know whether the prescription point is good.” “I have to tell the client the offer is the best she will get.” “The senior will ask why this took so long.” “I have to tell the chief executive that this should have come to us first.” Practitioners who do this consistently find that the line is smaller than the dread, and often that there are two or three small lines rather than one large one. A named threat is a threat the prefrontal cortex can work on. An unnamed one belongs entirely to the part of the brain that only knows how to run.

The second step is to make the first action absurdly small. Not “do the opinion”, which is the whole threat in three words. Open the file and read the last letter. Write the one paragraph you are sure of. Telephone the client for five minutes to hear what she is expecting, which is very often less than you feared. The brain’s threat assessment is attached to the matter as a whole; it does not fire in the same way for a five-minute action, and once the file is physically open the momentum usually carries. Anele’s first action was to write the first sentence of the letter and nothing else. She finished it the same afternoon.

The third step is to do it first. Avoided matters do not survive contact with a full day. They are pushed aside by everything more comfortable, and in a legal practice there is always something more comfortable. Practitioners who put the avoided matter at eight in the morning, before email, before the diary, before anyone else’s urgency reaches them, find it done or well begun by nine on most days, and report that the whole day is lighter for it. The threat, once engaged, turns out to have been running in the background all along, and the relief of closing it is out of proportion to the size of the task.

The senior’s role

A junior who is avoiding a matter is usually avoiding a person, and the person is usually senior. This gives the senior a lever that costs nothing. A partner who asks “what are you stuck on?” rather than “why is this not done?” has removed most of the threat in a single question, because the first question treats being stuck as ordinary and the second treats it as an offence. The matter opens the same day. Research on teams bears this out: Edmondson (1999) found that teams in which members felt safe to admit uncertainty and ask for help learnt faster and performed better than teams in which they did not. This is one of the cheapest interventions available to a firm and one of the least used, mostly because the senior who could ask the first question is herself avoiding something, and has not had anyone ask it of her in twenty years.

For those who lead a team, there is a second lever. A head of legal who says, in a team meeting, “I put off a difficult letter for three weeks last month, and this is what I learnt” has done more for the team’s avoided matters than any amount of diary discipline. It tells every junior in the room that the threat is universal, which shrinks it for all of them at once.

PMRI’s Ultimate Time Management Course for Legal Professionals has a full section on avoidance and the first action, built around the way a legal day actually runs, and the High-Performance Productivity for Legal Professionals webinar covers the daily structure that makes “first thing” possible rather than aspirational. For partners and heads of legal who want to work on the senior’s role directly, The Leadership Dilemma in Law deals with the questions a senior asks and what they do to the people who hear them. All are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice. If you would like to talk about what this looks like in your firm or your legal department, start a conversation with us. There is no charge for the first one.