Confessions From a Chronic Procrastinator

With all this unstructured time on my hands, I’ve started making daily to-do lists. It’s less about productivity and more about preservation—an attempt to keep myself from dissolving into a social media–consuming degenerate. I’m basically redirecting the part of my brain that craves little dopamine fireworks from Instagram toward the slightly less destructive satisfaction of crossing things off a list.

So far, it’s going okay. I’ve journaled four days in a row, which I think is a personal record. There’s a kind of relief in that—a reminder that I’m still capable of forming a habit, even if it’s just checking things off.

But there’s one task I keep skipping. Every day I write it down, and every day I quietly migrate it to tomorrow’s list: clean the apartment. And every day, it looms a little larger. I’m not entirely sure why it feels so impossible. The idea of it makes me anxious, like I’m being asked to walk into something much heavier than just clutter.

Maybe it’s the endless stream of tiny decisions, but I think, deep down, it feels like cleaning is a kind of reckoning. Each mess is a breadcrumb left by some past version of myself who was overwhelmed, distracted, or too tired to care—a trail of postponed decisions and half-hearted intentions.

And now, here I am. The future version, finally catching up to all those laters.

I think I’m going to try something new today: instead of writing clean apartment on my list, I’m going to break it down into something smaller. Wipe down the bathroom counter. Fold one load of laundry. Just one. And maybe—just maybe—that’s the trick to shrinking this soul-crushing mountain down until it’s nothing more than just a series molehills.