Stop Procrastinating: How Bike Shedding Wrecks Your To-Do List and Productivity

Let’s be honest—everyone hates to-do lists. Not because we’re lazy (well, maybe a little), but because they have a nasty habit of reminding us that we’re avoiding our lives.

But here’s the real kicker: it’s not the list we hate. It’s the hard stuff on the list. The stuff that’s boring, annoying, emotionally draining, or smells like effort. So instead, we become productivity illusionists. We do the easy things—the fun things—the “look at me, I’m being so productive” things.

You know what I mean:

“Respond to Karen’s email about snacks” (done!) “Sharpen all the pencils” (essential!) “Rearrange apps by color” (visionary!)

Meanwhile, the real tasks—the uncomfortable, the overdue, the career-defining—sit at the bottom of the list like a pile of wet laundry you keep stepping over. Until tomorrow. And then the next day. And then you die. But hey, your apps were color-coded.

This, my friends, is bike shedding.

It’s a term that comes from Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, where people spend all their energy on unimportant stuff because it’s easy to understand, and avoid the big stuff because it’s hard and makes their brains sweat. Think: arguing about the color of a bike shed while approving a nuclear power plant. You laugh, but we all do it. I used to be a gold medalist in it.

Until I went to culinary school.

There, you couldn’t afford to screw around. One of the first things they drilled into us was timing. Want to serve a beautifully composed meal? Then you start with the hardest, most time-consuming component first. Braises take hours. Potatoes don’t care about your excuses. If you start by slicing parsley because “it’s soothing,” you’re going to serve raw lamb and mashed nothing.

Eventually, that logic made its way into my daily life.

Now, when I look at my to-do list, I tackle the absolute worst thing first. The thing I least want to do. The task that makes me sigh like a Victorian widow. The email that’s been in draft form since the Bush administration. I do that.

And you know what? It works. By the end of the day, assuming time permits, my list is empty—and not because I stayed busy, but because I did what mattered.

If you want less stress in your day (and maybe fewer nervous breakdowns at 2 a.m.), stop bike shedding. Face the thing you hate first. Get it done. Get it gone. And then enjoy the smug satisfaction of doing something small like folding towels later, guilt-free, like the functional adult you always suspected you could be.

Have you been bike shedding lately? Drop a comment with the task you’ve been avoiding—and commit to tackling it first tomorrow. Let’s hold each other accountable.