Day 16

6 min readFeb 4, 2022

“Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” — Seneca

Listen to Ryan Holiday’s audio commentary

There’s a stack of dirty dishes in the sink. The car’s driver door is jammed. The closet upstairs needs a new bulb. Your inbox is flooded every morning with emails from businesses you don’t remember subscribing to.

What do most of us do? Anything we can think of except solve the problem or remove the irritant. We hand wash the dishes we need for just this meal. We climb over the passenger side to get in and out of the car. We make do with the phone flashlight anytime we need something from the closet. We delete the emails rather than go through the two or three additional steps to unsubscribe.

That’s not to say we’re procrastinators — which is more generally the bad habit of putting things off until the last moment. That’s a nasty habit too. But this is something more easy to rationalize, this is the “Oh I’m definitely going to do it, but not right this second.” I’ve got time later in the week, we tell ourselves. We imagine our future selves will be more motivated or better rested or less busy or…No, no more adding problems to your future self’s plate.

Your challenge today is to solve one of those persistent problems you continually assign to your future self.

As Seneca wrote in The Shortness of Life (Ryan mentioned this essay and many of his other favorite translation of Seneca in the second Q&A. Click here to watch), “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: It snatches away each day as it comes and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today…The whole future lies in uncertainty: Live immediately.”

So today, make a list of all the problems you’ve been trying to ignore, all the work you’ve been pushing off that you know could solve those problems. Now, pick one. Then set yourself to solving it so at the end of the day, when you’re reflecting on the day’s events in your time diary, you can enjoy that satisfying feeling of finally being freed from that one nagging problem.

Make no mistake — you will feel so much better once you do:

In a 2013 study, it was found that task aversion compounds the negative associations we have with the task. Putting off problems only increases stress and anxiety, feelings of low self-esteem and self-blame.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by two professors from Wake Forest University showed that making a plan to complete tasks we’ve been putting off frees us from this anxiety. They found that when participants made concrete plans to finish something, performance on the task substantially improved.
Have you ever felt the rush of happiness and relief when you finally accomplished a series of tasks in a day? The reason, according to American Psychological Association, is that dopamine — a powerful neurotransmitter directly responsible for motivation and focus that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers — increases when we finish tasks, regardless if the task is small or large.

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today,” Abraham Lincoln said.

That thing you’ve been meaning to pick up for the house, go get it today. The check engine light is on in your car, get it taken care of today. Tooth’s been aching? Call and make the appointment. Been meaning to set up an FAQ for your website? Open a Google doc and draft it up. Wanting to get to inbox zero? Do it today.

You might think of Stoicism as cultivating the ability to endure. You might think of the Stoics as people who are able to put up with everything, who grit their teeth and bear it. To an extent, they do, but only with things that are unavoidable and out of their control. This thing we’re asking you to identify and then to solve, this is not one of those things: it is both avoidable and entirely within your control. Indeed, the very thing that makes it avoidable is the fact you have control over it!

In truth, a Stoic doesn’t needlessly suffer. Think of someone like Ross Edgley. Ross holds multiple world records, but is best known as the first person in history to swim 1,792 miles all the way around Great Britain. A serious student of Stoicism and the author of The Art of Resilience, Ross defines resilience as suffering strategically managed. “What I mean by that,” he elaborated on the Daily Stoic podcast, “if we were running a marathon and you had a pebble in your shoe — resilience isn’t continuing to run, grinding the pebble into the ground. No, you stop and take the pebble out of your shoe and then continue on.”

A Stoic is able to endure that which is outside their control. As for that which is inside their control — a Stoic eliminates the problems they can eliminate. They stop and take the pebble out of their shoe. They load the dishwasher. They get the car door fixed. They change the lightbulb. They unsubscribe from the annoying emails.

They solve the nagging problems.

Where are you grinding the pebble into the ground? What problems are you tolerating day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year? Solve it today. Stop and take the pebble out of your shoe.