‘Ugh’ Tasks: Why Basic Items on Your To-Do List Are Suddenly Insurmountable

You flinch every time you remember that you still have to do them

Robert Wiblin
Forge
Published in
5 min readSep 16, 2020

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Tired exhausted man covering face with hands in front of laptop.
Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

You’ve had one at some point, maybe even right now: that thing on your to-do list that makes you flinch whenever you look at it. It’s not that the task in itself is so bad — it’s just that you’ve put it off for so long that now…

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Robert Wiblin
Forge
Writer for

I research the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them at 80000hours.org. More about me: robwiblin.com.