Merlin - great advice. I just gave essentially the same pep talk to a group of young executives in a leadership program I spoke to about improving productivity and reducing toxicity in the workplace. I suggested they filter on the “Cringe Factor” and commit to making at least one thing they dreaded doing go away each day.

I promised them that in a week they would feel much better about their To Do list. I’ve had a raft of e-mails from attendees thanking me and telling me their stress level has gone way down as a result of breaking these terrible tasks down to their true next action.

I have one…a major project, that’s been sitting like a monkey on my back for over 6 months now. The longer it goes, the more I cringe. And its ridiculous, really, but every time I go near doing it, even the little next action, I just freeze up and turn off. The worst part about it is that I really like doing it…but now that I am thinking about it, perhaps I’m frozen on it because there is another task that isn’t nearly so urgent that is still dependent on it—and that’s the one that really frightens me. Silly silly all of it—because if I just did both tasks, they would and I would succeed. And I suppose therein lies the fear. Amazing how neurotic the human mind can become…being afraid of success, jeesh.

Thanks for the great reminder. I think I need to make an entire week a CRINGE week. ;-)

I find that the things with the highest cringe factor for me are the things that have been languishing the longest, and therefore often the ones I most desperately need to knock off the list.

It’s been forever since I’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but isn’t this sort of like what he refers to as a “gumption trap?”

Good advice, whatever name you give it. Now if I can just make myself follow through and get these things done!

I keep a to-do list that gets rewritten every week. Undone items are brought forward in the order of their age, so they make their way up to the top of the list. (I “star” the most important and vital ones, old and new.) Eventually the shame of something lingering on my list for several weeks gets to me (and I get tired of having to bring it forward each week) and I take care of it, and at least once a week I commit myself to removing the top/oldest item on my to-do list, if not the top/oldest five.

this is such good advice. I started doing this about 3 months ago, and its really helped me get through the stumbling blocks - the “cringes”. Often, when too many “cringes” build up, I really feel trapped by what is on my TODO list and I just cant get it out of my head.

Once again, great advice. Keep up this site, I love it.

Ironically enough I cringe at the thought of doing this. Maybe it means I should.

Thanks for this, Merlin.

As I wind up my six month experiment in analog-only organization, one of my main complaints with using index-cards as an action (as opposed to project) management tool is that it’s far too easy to hide the cringe items from yourself. Just drop another card on top, and bingo!

It’s a poisonous habit that lets you feel better about yourself than you deserve. Sort of the absolute inverse of a good lifehack, which after all is supposed to make you deserve to feel better.

Nice approach. Not including those relegated to the S/M list, I have this one: Finish Steve Hagen’s book ‘Buddhism - plain and simple’. This may have something to do with me being buried in other books all the time or, more likely, ‘plain and simple’ is not doing it for me :-)

There is another option besides a) make the loathsome task less cringe-worthy, or b) just get the damned thing done:

c) never do it!

If this cringe-worthy task has been on your to-do list for a long time AND you have are still alive, maybe you never really NEEDED to do this task? This solution is the fastest, too! <:)

I’m going to have a real go at this. There’s some decidedly cringeworthy todos lurking in the recesses of my todolist at the moment. The problem is that I get easily distracted by the more interesting todos, and the fairly boring ones lurk around until they blow up my face.

Per #4: When asking myself “what freaks me out” about any given writing task, the usual response is “That’ll take too much time!” Seriously. A thousand words is an hour; for a 225,000 words, plus rewrites, my brain immediately says “That’s 450 hours!” and then adds, “Oh, yeah, and that’s 630 days! You’ll be done TWO YEARS from now! Muahahahahaha!”

Sometimes I hate my brain. It does the math too quickly.

Merlin, great post! I just came back to work today after a weeks vacation and found that just looking at my to-do list or my 3 pages of e-mail makes me cringe. Some of the e-mails made me cringe more than the to-do list so I opened them first. Unfortunately that made my to-do list longer and uglier. The only thing that can overpower my cringe is the urge to “check it off the list”. At the end of the day most of the things were checked off. Thanks for the motivation!

ooooh. cringe-worthy things. Does putting the GtD book down 13 times in one chapter (I think I was in the implementation details) count? I’ve got something that’s been on my list for just over 2 years. It’s half done, which only makes it worse.

I’ve gone as far as to make a separate todo list for things that make me cringe. When the top of my todo list is full of things I know I’m not going to do, it just makes me feel bad about myself and stops myself doing the rest.

So I move them to a list of ‘jobs I’m avoiding’, and move it to the back of the folder so I don’t have to look at it every few hours. Then, when I’m in such a bad mood that it doing the unpleasant jobs won’t make it worse, I go through this list, and do them.

And, the rest of the time, I can go through my usual todo lists without being put off by things I really don’t want to do.

A variant I read about a while ago is to reward yourself with a fun task every time you have performed a cringe task.

Adding a new todo may obviously also mean “split up into more managable chunks”. Sometimes an item is merely cringe-inducing because of its size. Or it consists of sub-tasks of which only one is cringe inducing.

I find it helps to not underestimate the amount of work when pitching a contract just in the hope you will win.

The real tooth-grinders for me are always phone calls. I’ll email and fax and send carrier pigeons all day, but for some reason I just don’t like the phone - talking to people that way, rather than face-to-face (which I find generally pleasant) or textually (which I find more efficient) is just a put-off for me.

Sadly, not everyone in my life does email.

I’m not sure how to restate the Next Action “call Fred” to be less cringe-inducing, but I do have success with having a dedicated phone call night, where I get through as many as I can in one sitting, just to have them out of the way.

I think that’s actually a pretty good example, Brad —and FWIW, I’m with you on phone calls.

You might try something like:

• List 3 things to go over with Fred
• Read over Fred’s last email
• Prepare pre-emptive fake interruption in order to get off call with Fred
• Google Fred for embarrassing life details whose mention might keep call short

But, seriously, I know what you mean. Some cringers you just have to hold your nose and jump. Sometimes it helps to focus on the next two or three non-horrible things you can work on when the cringer is cleared away.

Thanks for the tip Merlin. My twist on your “cringe” tactic is to put a yellow highlighter slash across the “offending” index card that contains the TODO item that makes me cringe. Once the item is complete, I rip up the card and toss it into the round file. Man that feels good.

Great Hack!

While it’s definitely not the answer to all my cringe ToDos, I’m going to second “bignoseduglyguy“‘s suggestion of “Never Do It” and even suggest stronger words: “Exorcise This!”

Seriously. A couple years ago, I realized that there were some “I really should” things always in the background of my brain. I realized one day that they represented sort of a religious fascism, my own I’m-not-jewish jewish guilt junk, things that I had unconsciously picked up along the way that I thought I was supposed to do. I realized:

1. I never, ever want to go to church again. Period.
2. I love her dearly, but I don’t, in fact, want to call my mom once a week.

There have been many more mundane Exorcise This! to-dos since then that I’ve rooted out like, and some even related to my business and other areas, but those first half-dozen ones struck me like a bolt of lightning.

So, once every couple months, I look through my list of supposed Really Important™ to-dos, especially at the ones that make me cringe, and see if any of them need the ol’ exorcise treatment.

Brian Tracy calls this, “Eat that Frog.”

(For extra credit, find the item on your list that’s been making you cringe for the longest. Anybody else turning up items that have been inducing cringes for over a month? Ouch. I suck.)

I think the “Call mom” item that’s been lingering on my list for half a decade deserves at least an honorable mention.

Reading GTD?

Hey Brad! Thanks a lot. I’m remembering this.

Or you have the issue of me, reading this article to procrastinate working on said list, and justifying it as “trying to find a better way to manage my time” as opposed to just doing stuff.

Maybe the best thing you’ve ever posted. Thanks for a year of solid productivity tips. And I don’t even own a Mac!

I just stumbled upon something similar … recently I was staring at my ever-growing task-list. “Which of these tasks do I hate the most?” I wondered, and then decided to label one: WORST. (I had to call a company back about an incorrect bill — I’d already paid it, but I was just hating the idea of trying to explain this to them.)

Then I stared at the WORST task, and all the other ones there. Within five minutes I had picked up the phone and made the call. For some reason, once I’d deemed one (but only one) action to be the absolutely most-dreaded thing possible, it took the mystique out of it! It just didn’t hold any power over me anymore.

I have TODOs on my pda from LAST YEAR. I might get perma-frown if I cringebusted them all away… but you’re the productivity talking guy, i’ll give this a shot.

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