Why do I procrastinate on hard tasks and do easy work instead?
Complex tasks stop giving quick dopamine hits, which triggers self-doubt and makes easy busywork feel like the only way to get a sense of accomplishment. This trap leaves major projects stalled for months while feeding feelings of imposter syndrome.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Pretending files are corrupted or lost
- 2Blaming software or IT issues
- 3Opening documents and updating a date or two to look busy
- 4Passing tasks off to overseas or other teams
- 5doing low level support tickets as a brain break
- 6doing light physical or mindless tasks like unboxing monitors and pulling cables
- 7staying late to clear out firewall requests
- 8attending to simple tasks or onboarding new users to feel useful
- 9sending manual reminders to the sales team
- 10providing additional training
- 11using shared list views and homepage widgets
- 12relying on notification bells and push reminders
- 13setting up automated scheduled flows to close or snooze old tasks
- 14replacing standard tasks with custom objects
- 15implementing weekly digest reports
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“As the problems get more complex, the dopamine hit for solving problems gets harder to achieve and after a while you question your skills, which I'm pretty sure is where Imposter Syndrome kicks in.”source ↗
“If I could make sure my ducks are in a row then I wouldn’t be procrastinating in the first place 😉”source ↗
“Compared to projects that are months long and result in a lot of complaining from everyone along the way.”source ↗
“When I've spent all day bogged down with loads of complex issues that don't have perfect solutions... a nice little password reset or "here's how to download a report and open it in excel" is a relief.”source ↗
“You can actually feel like you accomplished something rather than having the same conversation about something that is never moving forward because no one is going to pay for it”source ↗
“Our business unit went live with Salesforce less than a year ago. And since then, we've accumulated a lot of overdue tasks.”source ↗
“One day you wake up and realize: "This depends on me. No one is going to force me to get up early, or finish that hard task, or call the difficult customer."”source ↗