It’s 11:00 AM and it already feels like the day has asked too much of you.
The work in front of you isn’t just “a task.” It feels like a demand. A weight. Almost like someone quietly parked 3 million tons of concrete on your chest and then said, “Okay, now just focus and get it done.”
Your mind isn’t a clear blue sky. It’s a blizzard. Every thought is buried under 30 feet of snow. Your body feels off. Your head is in a fog. You’re not interested, you don’t want to engage, and if someone asked how work is going, the most honest answer would be: “Please just leave me alone.”
This isn’t laziness. It’s a state. And right now, that state is: “I hate that I have to do anything at all.”
So what do you do with that?
Step one: Stop arguing with the feeling
The instinct is to fight yourself.
You tell yourself you “shouldn’t” feel this way. You “should” be grateful, energized, driven, whatever. That internal lecture doesn’t melt the snow. It just buries you deeper.
Instead, try this:
“Right now, I feel a huge amount of resistance. I don’t like this work. My head is foggy. My body is uncomfortable. That’s what’s true in this moment.”
You’re not approving it. You’re just naming it.
The second you stop arguing with how you feel, you free up a tiny amount of energy that was locked in the fight. That little bit of energy is precious. You’re going to need it.
Step two: Shrink the definition of “doing the work”
The work feels daunting because your brain is holding the entire project in view at once. Of course that feels impossible. It’s like standing at the bottom of a mountain and thinking the only move that counts is “reach the top.”
Today, “doing the work” cannot mean “finishing everything.” That’s too big. Your nervous system has already voted no.
Today, “doing the work” might mean something insultingly small:
- Open the file. That’s it.
- Write one messy sentence. Not a paragraph. Just a sentence.
- List three bullets of what has to happen later, without doing any of it.
You’ll be tempted to dismiss that. “That doesn’t count.” But notice something: your brain is willing to consider these. You’re not recoiling the same way you do from “finish the whole thing.”
When everything in you is saying “Who needs this?” you have to lower the bar to something your mind doesn’t immediately reject. You’re not performing for anyone right now. You’re trying to get traction on a day that wants to slide away.
Step three: Switch from “finish mode” to “touch mode”
There are days for sprints and days for marathons.
This is a “touch” day.
On a “touch” day, the win is: I touched the work. I made contact with it. I didn’t ghost it. That’s all.
In practice, that might look like:
- Spend five minutes reading through where you left off, then close it.
- Draft a rough outline in bullets, not complete sentences.
- Answer the one email that’s blocking you, and then stop.
Does this complete the job? No.
Does it keep the work from turning into a bigger monster tomorrow? Yes.
“Touching” the work keeps the connection alive. It tells your future self, “I didn’t abandon this. I stayed in the game, even on a heavy day.”
Step four: Separate “how I feel” from “what I do next”
Right now, everything inside you is screaming that how you feel and what you do must match.
“I feel foggy, annoyed, done with people, done with tasks… so obviously I need to shut everything down.”
But they don’t actually have to match.
You can feel, “I hate this” and still do a two-minute action. You can think, “What’s the point?” and still move one piece forward. The feeling is information; it doesn’t have to be a command.
Try asking one simple question:
“Given how awful and resistant I feel right now… what is one tiny move that future-me would still be grateful I made?”
Not the perfect move. Not the heroic move. Just the smallest move that keeps life from getting harder later.
It might be:
- Paying one bill so it doesn’t hang over you.
- Writing one honest line in a draft.
- Jotting tomorrow’s first step on a sticky note.
That’s it. You’re building a small gap between your mood and your behavior. That gap is where your power lives.
Step five: Make the work physically easier to approach
Your body feels uncomfortable. Your chair is annoying. Your posture is off. The air feels wrong. When you’re already mentally at a “leave me alone” level, tiny physical frictions turn into gigantic excuses.
So your job is to strip away some of that friction:
- Adjust your chair, stand up, sit somewhere else, or put a pillow behind your back.
- Drink some water or a warm drink; give your body a small reset signal.
- Clear a tiny square of your workspace—just enough that one task can live in that space.
You’re not “setting up the perfect workspace.” You’re just making starting a little less awful. If the work is buried in snow, this is you shoveling a small path to the front door instead of digging out the whole driveway.
Step six: Decide what “enough” looks like before you start
On heavy days, the task doesn’t just feel daunting—it feels endless. If you don’t set a finish line, your brain assumes there isn’t one. That’s where the “Who needs this?” feeling gets loudest.
So decide in advance:
“If I do X, that counts as enough for this chunk of time.”
Examples:
- “Read and edit two paragraphs. That’s enough.”
- “Work on this for 10 minutes with a timer. That’s enough.”
- “Write three bullet points of next steps. That’s enough.”
You can always do more if something clicks. But if it doesn’t, you still get to say, “I did what I said I would do.” That sense of completion calms the “buried in snow” feeling, even if only a little.
Step seven: Give yourself credit for showing up at all
It’s easy to look at a day like this and say, “I failed. I didn’t crush it. I barely did anything.” But that’s not the real story.
The real story sounds more like this:
- “At 11:00 AM, I wanted to abandon everything.”
- “My head was foggy; my body was uncomfortable; I truly did not care.”
- “And even in that state, I still did something that nudged life forward.”
That counts.
You’re not measured only by your best days. You’re shaped by what you decide to do on the days that feel like a lost cause.
If all you can do with this kind of morning is:
- A microscopic piece of the work
- Done in a way that prevents chaos tomorrow
- While treating yourself like a human instead of a machine
…then you did more than it feels like. You held your ground in the middle of the snowstorm.
Tomorrow might be lighter. It might not. But you will have proof that even when your mind is buried and your whole body is saying “leave me alone,” there is still a small, stubborn part of you that can move.
You don’t have to be on fire to take a step.
Right now, that step is enough.