Why Do I Keep Putting Important Things Off? Because They're Heavy.
An insurance claim, rounds of forms and emails I would have put off forever. I signed my name. That's it.
People type “why do I keep putting important things off” into Google so often that Google finishes the sentence for them.
I could have written the answer.
Because it’s important, that’s why. The important stuff is the heavy stuff. And when your brain already feels heavy, you can’t find the motivation to pick up one more heavy thing.
I have an insurance claim going right now, for a serious injury that happened a while ago.
At the very start, she asked me for some information. Simple stuff.
And I sat on it.
Not because I didn’t care. Because it went where everything goes after a full day at the job. The drawer marked later. I just didn’t have the bandwidth. My brain was tired, and the couch was calling my name.
If you work a 9-5, you know that drawer. Nobody really leaves at five. You get home still carrying the emails you didn’t get to. The weekend shows up and you’re too tired to do anything with it. And somewhere under all of that is the form, the letter, the thing about your own life that nobody is going to do for you.
The job gets your best hours. Your own life gets whatever’s left. Some weeks that’s nothing.
Here’s what the claim was going to be. She’d ask for information. I’d have to find it, put it in some kind of order, write the email, attach the thing, send it. Then she’d ask again. Two or three rounds of that. Then the forms at the end, a few of them, asking for the final details.
I know exactly how that would have gone.
It would have moved into my head and paid no rent. Every day I didn’t do it, it would have gotten heavier. I would have said “I’ll do it later” so many times that later would have turned into “well, guess I don’t have to worry about that claim anymore.”
Here’s what actually happened.
I opened the chat window. I call it the black box. It’s only black because I keep my screen on dark mode. But it’s a box, and it turns out you can put a lot of your life in it.
I asked Claude Code to help me with the claim. Then I kept asking.
It pulled everything together in an order that made sense. Honestly, not to me. It never really made sense to me. But it made sense to the insurance company, and that’s the only one that mattered.
It wrote the emails. When it was time, it wrote the letter that laid out what I was asking for. Round after round, it kept up. When the forms came, it filled in every answer. It even set up a little watcher that checked every evening to see if she’d written back, so I didn’t have to.
I signed my name. I typed in my personal numbers.
That’s it. That’s everything I did.
I did not fill out one form.
The part that gets me isn’t that it got done. It’s what never happened.
It never moved into my head. I never lay in bed wondering if I’d sent the thing, or when I was ever going to send it. I don’t lie there wondering about work emails anymore either. Same box. Same trick.
There was no drawer marked later, because there was nothing left to put in it.
Lately the big tech companies have been rolling out cute little cartoon helpers that promise to run your errands for you. Good for them. I didn’t need a cartoon.
I needed the box I already had.
So why do I keep putting important things off?
Because they’re heavy. That was always the answer. I just didn’t know I was allowed to hand somebody the heavy part.
Somewhere right now there’s a claim moving along with my name on it.
I signed where it said sign.
I write for 9-5 survivors using AI to get some time back and some life back. If your job gets the best of you and your couch gets the rest, you’re in the right place.
Me, Claude, and the work I don’t do anymore. That’s the whole blog.
The free 9-5 Triage is inside the Lab.
Got a form you keep putting off? Flex shows you how to hand it over: Can AI fill out forms for me?