Why We Don’t Take Action (and what to do about it)

My relationship with taking action has changed in the past several years.

About two years ago, my wife and I decided to start a blog to document all that we were learning and experimenting with in our lives. Since that decision, made on a long car ride together, we’ve published over 100 blog posts and written more than 100,000 words—enough to fill nearly two books.

It’s been very rewarding, but it’s also been a lot of work. 

Taking action and sustaining that action over the long haul has not always been one of my strengths, and so when I look back through the archives of our blog, I really do feel proud of what we’ve accomplished. 

The commitment to write weekly and the accountability of doing it with my wife, have helped me to grow in ways I didn’t expect. This new practice has also given me the chance to identify and work through roadblocks that occasionally keep me from taking action and making progress in meaningful areas.

I still haven’t arrived, of course. Consistent action is still a daily challenge.

But I have grown a lot this past year, and thought I would take the opportunity to share what I’ve learned about the art of taking action. Here are six factors that I’ve found can keep me from taking action—and what to do about them.

Perfectionist Tendencies 

The root of perfectionism is in the false security and sense of control you get from your perfect plans about the future. 

These plans give you comfort like a pacifier does for a baby. But they leave you afraid to take action, because every step into the messy real world is a threat to your perfect—but fragile—plan. 

It gets worse. A meta-analysis in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found perfectionism to be a common risk factor in a host of psychological pathologies including depression, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

When I get stuck in a perfectionist mindset, my favorite trick is to take action immediately without any concern for quality. I aim to work as fast as possible without overthinking, in order to break through the seal of inaction. 

It’s wiser to adjust and refine your plan while you’re moving, than to try to construct a masterpiece in your mind without the feedback of reality.

Dreading the Task 

Every person has tasks they’d rather not do. Whether you find the job boring, tedious, exhausting, or frustrating, it’s tempting to procrastinate in these scenarios rather than face them head on.

But this posture of running away from action changes your psychology towards life itself.

If it’s really something you have to do, no amount of avoidance is going to make it go away. And avoiding it means it will be in the back of your mind all day, and possibly multiplying into more problems. 

Instead of turning away, what if you ran full speed at these tasks and knocked them out. Don’t think twice about it, just do it reflexively. Taking action in this way puts you back in the driver seat as an active participant in your own life and it feels great.

Feeling Sorry for Yourself

Self-pity is a waste of time. 

It doesn’t solve your problems. It makes you an unattractive person. It pushes your responsibilities onto others. And to top it off, it’s not even fun. If you’re going to take up a vice, there are certainly far more fun ones to choose.

But when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, it’s nearly impossible to see all of this. 

You’re too preoccupied with your own thoughts and feelings to realize that you are making an irrational choice. 

Fortunately, I find that even in my gloom, I’m able to ask myself a probing question: Is this worth it? And the beauty of a question is that it pulls you out of a reflexive state (self-pity) into a reflective one. While habits powerfully shape our lives in the collective, it’s actually pretty easy to break free from the orbit of a single instance with a simple act of intention.

Distracting Thoughts

Sometimes you want to take action, but your mind feels full or busy. You’re preoccupied by problems in other areas of your life or distracted by open loops that you haven’t closed. 

I used to think the solution was to write these thoughts down, or even try to tackle them quickly so I could get to work.

That never works.

Inevitably, the problem in my mind is more absorbing than the task at hand, and I never got back to what I originally wanted to be working on. I end up working on the urgent instead of the important.

The path of action involves training your brain to turn away from those other thoughts and to distract yourself with work instead. The quicker you can get yourself into the swing of action, the more likely this is to work. And the more often you do it, the more it becomes a habit and the default way you handle these situations.

Distracted by Easy Pleasures

Meaningful action almost always requires hard work. And let’s be honest, at any given moment there are a whole menu of easy pleasures that seem more appealing than digging into that hard work. 

I’ve tried every trick in the book, but the only thing that works for me is the “2 minute rule.” While you’re still in the haze of temptation, commit to taking action for just 2 minutes, giving yourself permission to stop after that. 

But once you start working for a few minutes, you will almost certainly keep going. The hardest part is starting, but once you get going, the momentum is working in your favor.

The ‘Why Bother?’ Mentality

Have you ever failed so often in an area that you begin to have a “why bother” attitude about taking action? Why bother giving up your bad habit today when you know you’ll just pick it up again next week. It feels like the work you put in this week will just go to waste, and so you wonder if it’s even worth the effort.

The problem is that you’ve broken so many small promises to yourself, that you no longer trust yourself to follow through. 

You need to rebuild that trust. 

The way to do that is with small actions over many days. Choose an action so small that you can’t possibly not do it, and then stick with it for 30 days in a row. In one month, you will have a new relationship with yourself.