The hiding place
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Most people who describe themselves as busy are telling the truth. They’re just not telling the whole truth.
Last Tuesday I had two hours blocked off for writing. Clear calendar. No calls. The document was open on my screen with a cursor blinking at the top of an empty page. I had the topic, I had the research, I had everything I needed to start.
I opened my inbox instead.
Not because I had urgent email. I didn’t. I opened it because email is answerable. It has edges. Someone asks a question, you respond, the thread resolves, and you get a tiny chemical reward for having completed a thing. Meanwhile the blank page just sits there offering no feedback, no resolution, no clear indication that what you’re about to produce will be any good.
I caught myself fourteen minutes later. Fourteen minutes of responding to messages that could have waited until Friday, none of which moved my business forward, all of which felt productive in the moment because my fingers were moving and problems were being solved. When I finally closed the inbox and looked at the blank document again, I had that sinking feeling you get when you realize you weren’t being interrupted. You were hiding.
(Belay helped me dismantle most of my hiding places. More on that in a minute.)
Productive hiding
There’s a researcher at Carleton University named Tim Pychyl who has spent decades studying procrastination. His most useful finding, at least for me, is that procrastination has almost nothing to do with time management. It’s a mood management problem.
When you’re facing a task that’s uncertain, difficult, or emotionally loaded, your brain generates a low-grade discomfort. Not pain, exactly. More like a hum of anxiety about the outcome. Your nervous system wants that hum to stop, so it steers you toward a task that provides immediate relief: answering an email, reorganizing your files, updating a spreadsheet, scheduling a meeting. The discomfort disappears, temporarily, because you’ve switched to something knowable.
Pychyl’s team tracked students for five days leading up to a deadline, pinging them eight times a day to record what they were doing and how they were feeling. As the important work got harder and more stressful, the students drifted toward easier, more pleasant tasks. But they also reported guilt, a signal that beneath the surface relief, they knew what they were doing.
The finding that changed how I think about my own days: in a follow-up study, when researchers told participants their mood was fixed and couldn’t be improved by switching tasks, the procrastination vanished. People only avoid hard work when they believe the avoidance will make them feel better. Take that belief away and they just do the work.
Which means every time I open my inbox instead of the blank page, my brain is running a calculation: this will feel better than that. And it’s right, for about fourteen minutes. Then the guilt starts, and the document is still empty, and I’ve traded a temporary mood improvement for actual progress.
I think most people who call themselves overwhelmed are doing some version of this. The calendar is full. The to-do list is long. The day disappears into logistics and coordination and admin tasks that need doing. And all of it feels like work, because it is work. But it’s also a hiding place. A way to stay busy enough that you never have to sit with the discomfort of the work that actually matters.
What I found underneath
A few months ago I started working with a virtual executive assistant through Belay. I’d describe the practical side of that shift in a past newsletter, the hours I got back, the cognitive energy I recovered, the simple math of not spending my best thinking hours on scheduling.
But there’s something I didn’t write about then because I hadn’t fully processed it. Once the admin work was gone, the inbox managed, the calendar coordinated, the logistics handled by someone who wasn’t me, I was left with a lot of open space. And that space was terrifying.
I’d spent years telling myself the story that I’d create more if I had more time. That the admin was the bottleneck. That if someone just handled the logistics, I’d be free to write and think and build. And then someone did handle the logistics, and I was free, and I sat at my desk on a Wednesday morning with three open hours and no excuse to reach for the inbox, and I froze.
That was the moment I understood what the busyness had really been doing. It was filling the hours so I didn’t have to face the uncertainty of creative work without a buffer. As long as I had emails to answer and meetings to schedule, I could tell myself the reason I wasn’t writing more was external. Remove the external reason and you’re left with the internal one: the work is hard, the outcome is uncertain, and sitting with that uncertainty is uncomfortable in a way that no amount of inbox management can prepare you for.
The first week without my hiding places was the most productive writing week I’d had in months. I had more time, sure. But the real difference was that I had nowhere left to go when the discomfort showed up. I had to sit with it. And when I did, it passed faster than I expected, and the writing came.
The question
If someone removed every administrative task from your day tomorrow, every email, every scheduling thread, every logistical coordination, and handed you eight clean hours to do the work that only you can do, would you know what to do with them? Or would you feel the urge to fill them with something safer?
If the answer is the second one, that tells you something important. The time was never the problem. The busyness was the solution to a different problem: the discomfort of doing work that might not pan out.
I still catch myself reaching for the inbox when the cursor is blinking and the page is empty. The difference now is that I recognize the reflex for what it is: not productivity, but a retreat from the work that scares me. And most of the time, recognizing it is enough to make me stay.
If you’re at the stage where administrative work is eating your days and you’re ready to find out what’s underneath, Belay is what finally forced me to confront it. They match you with a U.S.-based virtual executive assistant who handles the operational load so you can stop hiding behind it. Grab their free guide at belaysolutions.com/scott.
But fair warning: when the hiding places are gone, you actually have to do the work.
And that’s the whole point.
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
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