I have found that the removal of pressing future time demands has an interesting psychological impact. Things that previously remained undone for a protracted period of time are now easier to start and complete.

A characteristic of these activities is that they have an unknown effort or time requirement before starting them. For example finding the power cable of a music keyboard or refactoring a particularly gnarly class. It seems to be this unknown (and before the event unknowable) commitment that leads to their continual postponement.

A part of this, for me at least, is the desire to determine what is the best use of time. What things should I commit to and what things are not worthwhile to commit to. Because an activity may have an unknown duration beforehand, the benefit received for time committed cannot be accurately calculated. This fuzziness puts in into the delay basket even though a probabilistic calculation of return may indicate that it is more valuable than an activity that has a know time requirement.

With the removal of future time demands the calculation changes. Because time is no longer a scare resource, activities with unknown requirements can just be started. If during performing these activities I think they are taking too long, or not delivering the benefit expected I can just stop. When I do bail out of an activity my retrospective analysis of time spent no longer leads to regret at starting it.

And yes, I did find the power cable. It took about ten minutes.

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