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; you have cleared everything else, twice. This one matter, the one with the unhappy client and the point of law you are not sure of and the senior who will ask, has not been opened. Every morning you decide to start it, and every morning something more urgent appears, which is a strange thing to keep happening for eleven days.

Practitioners treat this as a discipline failure and respond by resolving harder. It rarely works, because the problem is not discipline.

Avoidance is the brain protecting you

The matter that is 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 thinks, of a partner’s reaction. The brain treats that threat the way it treats any threat, and one of its options is avoidance. Every time you do not open the file, the threat recedes for a moment, the body registers relief, and the avoidance is rewarded. 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.

Willpower is aimed at the wrong target. 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 big to be afraid of; 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 it took so long.” Practitioners who do this find the line is smaller than the dread, and often that there are two or three small lines rather than one large one.

The second step is to make the first action absurdly small. Not “do the opinion”. Open the file and read the last letter. Or write the one paragraph you are sure of. Or telephone the client for five minutes to hear what she is expecting. The brain’s threat assessment applies to the whole matter; it does not fire in the same way for a five-minute action, and once the file is open the momentum usually carries.

The third is to do it first. Avoided matters do not survive contact with a full day; they get pushed by everything more comfortable. Practitioners who put the avoided matter at eight in the morning, before email, before the diary, find it done by nine on most days, and the whole day is lighter for it.

The senior’s role

A junior who is avoiding a matter is usually avoiding a person, and the person is usually senior. A partner who asks “what are you stuck on?” rather than “why is this not done?” has removed most of the threat in one question. The matter opens the same day. This is one of the cheapest interventions available to a firm and one of the least used.

The Ultimate Time Management course from PMRI has a full section on avoidance and the first action, and the High-Performance Productivity webinar covers the daily structure that makes “first thing” possible.