Bonus Episode 14: Harness the Power of Procrastination

The Surprising Power of Procrastination

A quick check-in on the 22-for-22 lists, the idea, borrowed from Gretchen Rubin, of replacing rigid New Year’s resolutions with 22 one-time, check-it-off-whenever goals for the year, no daily consistency required. I check in around the 22nd of each month just to see how things are progressing, with the loose goal of knocking out a couple by month’s end, not because there’s a real deadline, just to keep some sense of pace.

An unexpected discovery

I sat down to check my own lists and found myself pleasantly surprised. My work list had 10 of 22 items underway, two fully completed. My personal list had 15 of 22 underway, eight fully completed, most of which I’d checked off that very morning without even realizing it until I looked at the list.

Why that happened

I’d been avoiding a big, hard task, relaunching my website, and instead of confronting it, I stayed busy with other things. It wasn’t a conscious strategy of “I don’t want to do the hard thing, so let me knock out something easier instead.” I was simply staying in motion, and it turned out a lot of that motion landed on items already sitting on my 22-for-22 list, apparently lodged somewhere in the back of my mind even though I wasn’t actively checking it.

A small, unscientific lesson in this

Things can get done without actively staring at a checklist in the moment. I know that sounds risky advice for executive-function challenges, since we’re genuinely prone to forgetting tasks we haven’t written down. But for open-ended, do-it-whenever goals like these, having written it down once seems to be enough to keep it quietly present, ready to be tackled the moment procrastination energy needs somewhere else to go.

The urgency is still coming, and that’s not a failure

Real deadlines for the website relaunch are approaching, alongside family visits and school-related tasks piling up at the same time. That familiar panic, why do I always do this to myself, is starting to creep in. A listener recently wrote in with a helpful reframe: our brains catalog the dopamine hit of pushing through a deadline and actually accomplishing something, which reinforces the exact pattern of waiting until the pressure builds. It’s not that we never learn, it’s that we’re learning something real, that panic followed by accomplishment feels genuinely rewarding, so the brain keeps repeating it.

A note on who this is for

This podcast speaks specifically to stay-at-home moms with school-age kids, since that’s the season I know, chunks of uninterrupted time that come with their own strange guilt about not using them “enough.” If you’re a working mom or homeschooling with littles underfoot, you’re absolutely welcome here too, just extend yourself extra grace if a strategy built around quiet, uninterrupted stretches of time doesn’t translate directly to your much more interrupted reality. That’s not a sign anything is wrong with you, it’s just a genuinely harder season to work within.

Your practical, actionable step

If you’re procrastinating on something big right now, take a moment to check any open-ended lists or goals you’ve written down but haven’t actively tracked lately. You may find real, quiet progress already happened in the background while you were avoiding the harder task, and that counts.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.