A cold call takes four minutes. I've spent whole days on things that cost more than that in hours and attention, and felt fine about it the entire time.
The line came out of a compression exercise. I'd been collecting reasons for not doing things, mine mostly, and they all reduce to the same sentence. No time is "if it were faster." Not ready yet is "if it took less of me." Waiting for the right moment, need to prepare more, don't have the setup, wrong week, wrong headspace. Run any of them through and the same thing comes out the far end: if it were easy I would do it. I haven't found one that doesn't.
For about a day I was pleased with that, because it looked like tidy work on excuses. Then it occurred to me that it isn't a statement about difficulty at all. It's a promise about how I'd behave in a world that doesn't exist, which is a very safe place to keep a promise.
So the difficulty story doesn't survive its own numbers. The thing I avoid is cheaper than the thing I do instead. If difficulty were the obstacle, the ordering would run the other way.
The lie isn't that it's hard. The lie is that I'd do it if it weren't.
Try it on whatever you've been carrying around for weeks. Not what if it were easier. What if it were free, one button, no skill involved, done before you've finished deciding. Usually you still wouldn't press it, and that's the part worth sitting with, because it means the effort was never what stopped you.
Mine doesn't sort by difficulty at all. It sorts by whether the thing can refuse me. Code can't. A spreadsheet can't. A person on a phone can, and can do it in a way that's specific to me, on a Tuesday afternoon, with nothing else to blame. Everything I reach for on a bad day has that in common, and none of it is easy. It's just safe.
Which makes "it's hard" a useful lie rather than a lazy one. It flatters. It puts you with the people attempting something difficult instead of the people avoiding something small, and it implies you'd clear it given a better week, more focus, the right setup. The bill gets paid in time, which you don't notice leaving.
I don't know what to do with this. Knowing the sort hasn't changed the sort. I still open the editor first thing and the day fills up on its own, and it's a good day by every measure I keep. The only thing that's different now is that the excuse stops working on me while I'm in the middle of using it.
The honest version of the sentence isn't "this is too hard." It's "I'd rather not be told no by someone who knows my name." That sounds like something a person could work on. I've written it down before.
— Simon