Why shrinking works when willpower doesn't
Avoidance isn't laziness — it's an unanswered question. A task sitting in your list as "finish the proposal" is really a stack of unmade decisions, and your brain quietly refuses to load all of them at once. A first bite works because it removes every decision but one, and makes that one physically small: open the file, write a bad sentence, put the form on the desk. Once the task exists in the world instead of in your head, continuing is a much cheaper decision than starting was.
This is the same move DuckDoro makes every day, just narrower. In the app, the hardest task gets named the frog and the timer stays locked until it gets one session — so the avoided thing is the thing that gets done first, not the thing that gets rescheduled. If the problem is the whole list rather than one task, start with the brain dump tool instead. If you're not sure why a particular task is stuck, the frog quiz sorts it into fog, spotlight, mountain, or stone, and the deeper mechanics are in how to stop avoiding a task.