Starting is the hard part

There is a version of procrastination that looks like laziness from the outside and feels like nothing of the kind from the inside. You know what the work is. You want it done. You have the afternoon. And you open the file, and you close it, and you make a coffee, and you read something, and at four o’clock you have done everything except the thing.

The founder of Untimer edits video for a living and has spent years on the inside of that afternoon. What he noticed, and what the research says too, is that the trouble is almost never the work. The trouble is the first minute of it. Once the edit is open and the first cut is made, the next two hours look after themselves. Getting to the first cut is the whole battle.

What the research says about putting things off

In 2007 Steel pulled several hundred studies of procrastination into one review. The pattern that came out of it is simple to state. People put a task off when the reward for doing it is far away and the task itself is unpleasant to be in, and people who act on impulse put things off more. The distance matters most. A report due in three weeks has almost no pull today, and the pull grows as the deadline gets close, which is why the night before is when it finally happens.

Sirois and Pychyl, in 2013, looked at what putting something off actually does for the person doing it. Their reading is that it repairs your mood in the short term. The task makes you feel bad, so you do something else and feel better now, at the cost of feeling worse later. That is why telling yourself to try harder does so little. You are already trying. The thing you are avoiding is a feeling, and the feeling lives in the first minute.

None of this research is about a timer. It is about people, and it explains why a timer can help: a timer changes the size of the first minute.

A promise the size of twenty five minutes

The first thing Untimer does about starting is make the thing you are starting small. You are never starting the report. You are starting twenty five minutes. That is a promise your afternoon self can make without flinching, and it is the same size every time, so there is nothing to negotiate. You do not decide how long, because that decision is a place to stall, and Untimer took it away on purpose.

Small is most of it. Gollwitzer and Sheeran found in 2006, across a great many studies, that people who decided in advance exactly when and where they would do a thing were much more likely to do it than people who merely meant to. The plan turns a vague intention into a moment. A session is that moment: this, now, for twenty five minutes.

The wind

The second thing is the beginning itself. Untimer has no start button. You press the glass and hold it, and for two and a half seconds a spring winds against your finger and clicks as it goes. Let go early and it unwinds and nothing happens. Hold to the stop and let go, and the session starts on the release.

Two and a half seconds is short. It is long enough to notice that you have begun, and that turns out to matter. A click is something you do while you are still deciding. A wind is something you do because you decided. It gives the beginning a little weight, and it puts a small physical act between the not doing and the doing, which is where the feeling was. Nobody has studied what winding a timer does to the work that follows, so Untimer claims nothing about that. It makes starting something you do on purpose, and that is what it is for. Why you wind it says the rest.

Stopping is allowed, so starting is cheap

The third thing is the exit. A session you start in Untimer is one you can stop at any moment, and when you do, the glass goes back to rest and the app says nothing. There is no failure state and no streak that breaks. The session is on your record with its length and how it ended, and it counts for nothing, which is the honest number.

That matters for starting more than it seems to. Part of what makes the first minute expensive is the sense that you are signing up for the whole afternoon. If stopping costs nothing, starting costs less. Most of the time you will not stop, because the hard part was the minute you just got through. Sometimes you will, and then you will wind again ten minutes later, and there is a mark for exactly that. Stopping early is showing up is about why.

What it looks like on a bad day

Here is the founder’s own bad day, which is most Tuesdays. The edit is open. He does not want to be in it. He holds the glass, because that is a thing he can do without wanting to, and lets go. For a few minutes he does the smallest edit there is. Somewhere around minute eight he is in it, and the bell at twenty five is a surprise. He takes the break, and winds again.

On a worse day he stops at minute six. Nothing is said. He makes the coffee. At some point he holds the glass again.

The record afterwards shows the sessions that ran, drawn as small hourglasses on the day, and nothing about the one that did not. That is a description of the day, and it is true, and it does not judge him for any of it.