Day for Closing Doors: How to Take Pressure off Little Tasks
How your mental energy gets hijacked by trivial unfinished tasks.
What do a parking ticket, an unwatched YouTube video, and $20 you owe your friend have in common?
About 3 weeks ago, I got a parking ticket
I was only gone for 5 minutes, which made it even more infuriating.
Like any rational person, I paid it immediately, learned my lesson, and moved on with my life.
Except that's not what happened at all.
Throwing money away is not a pleasant thing, so I kept putting off paying it.
The ticket sat on my desk for weeks. Every time I walked past it, I felt a tiny stab of irritation.
Not just about the fine itself, but about my own procrastination. The task takes literally less than 5 minutes online, yet somehow those 5 minutes felt like 5 minutes too much to be cut out of the present.
Well, that was f*cking stupid. When I finally sat down to pay it, the whole process took less than 2 minutes.
But here's what I realized: that parking ticket had done more than cost me money. It had opened a door in my mind.
Getting the ticket opened a door.
Putting off a phone call opens a door.
Leaving a half-watched video in your browser tab opens a door.
Not giving back borrowed money, even when you have the cash, opens a door.
The more doors opened, the more mental clutter.
The more doors opened, the more your focus gets scattered by the wind blowing through.
To focus properly, close the doors.
Small doesn’t mean unimportant
Little easy to do things that lead to success are also easy not to do.
If something takes 5 minutes, I can as well do it later. I will always have 5 minutes. Right?
You will, and that’s the problem. If something is painful and nagging, you will take not only 5, but 60 and 180 minutes to fix it as soon as possible.
But when a task is neither urgent nor demanding, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Then next week. Then next month. It sits at the back of your head all this time, using up mental energy you don’t even realize you are spending.
That's how doors stay open—not because you can't close them, but because you always could.
Why we leave small things for later?
Before “How?”, let’s get “Why?” out of the way.
There are several reasons why you left the doors open:
They feel optional: Big deadlines have consequences—you get fired, fail the class, disappoint someone important. Small tasks rarely have immediate stakes. The parking ticket won't turn into an arrest warrant tomorrow, so my brain treated it as "whenever I get around to it."
Decision fatigue: Your brain has limited mental energy for making choices. It's easier to defer than decide.
Planning fallacy: You consistently underestimate how long things take and overestimate the motivation of the future you.
No external accountability: Nobody's checking if you paid that bill, made that call, cleaned that drawer. Without social pressure or deadlines, tasks get tempting to defer.
Paradox of ease: Because small tasks are simple, you assume you can always do them later. This is how anytime becomes never.
Emotional avoidance: That phone call may lead to an awkward conversation. Organizing papers means confronting how behind you are. You are not avoiding the task—you are avoiding how the task makes you feel. This is the most common cause!
Set hard rules
Stick to solid rules to eliminate mental fatigue of decision.
Here are a few I came up with. Go ahead and modify the list if you need.
If a task takes less than 3 minutes, I will do it immediately. No question, no second thought.
I can’t have more than 2 doors open at a time. If it gets past 2, I have to close at least one immediately.
If I think about the same open doors 3 times, it gets done that day. Three mental pings means it's taking up too much headspace.
If I catch myself saying “I'll do it later”, I set a specific time.
No task gets to sit in my physical space for more than 48 hours. Bills, forms, things to return—they get dealt with or filed properly, not left as visual reminders of my procrastination.
Small tasks deserve the same respect as big ones. Peace of mind is worth 3 minutes of feeling bad.
Close the doors
That $40 parking ticket cost me more than money. It cost me three weeks of mental energy.
Look around. How many doors do you have open?
That email you need to send, the subscription you need to cancel, the book you need to return.
Each one is quietly taking your mental RAM.
You can close them all in less time than it takes to watch a TV episode. Your future self—the one who can actually focus—will thank you.
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To read next:
This is the third post from the new schedule (Week 3), next up:
