How to stop avoiding important conversations

We’ve all done it. Put off the phone call we really need to make. Left that email in the inbox. Decided not to raise an issue at the team meeting. I’m talking about the conversations you know you need to have, but can’t find the right time to start. So you wait, telling yourself that a better opportunity will present itself later.

Before you know it, your postponed chat turns into a dropped ball… and you have a new problem. To add to the issue you needed to discuss, now you have to justify the delay in bringing it up. Which adds to the pressure… making it even more difficult to pick up the phone. So you avoid it again and the problem escalates.

What can you do to avoid this spiral of despair? How can you stop avoiding these important conversations, and reduce the stack of unprocessed stuff that can stress you out or worse? The answer is surprisingly simple. You need to add a processing step.

Procrastination is a processing problem

What exactly are you avoiding? I bet it isn’t the conversations themselves. True, a few of them could be awkward, but nothing that you can’t handle. It’s more likely that you’re avoiding having to figure out what to do with the underlying task.

Productivity guru David Allen—inventor of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system—realised that people lose control over their tasks when they haven’t decided what to do with them. His solution is simple: regularly sit down with a cup of coffee and evaluate everything that’s on your plate.

As every follower of GTD knows, you can’t abandon things in your inbox—whether that’s email, Slack or paper on your desk. You need to process these items regularly. (Hence Merlin Mann’s “inbox zero”.) Allen also invented the two minute rule: if a task can be done in two minutes, you have to do it right now.¹ You’re not allowed to write it down on a list, because all that management will take longer than just tapping out an email.

But what does this productivity advice have to do with avoiding important conversations?

A conversation is just an action item that involves another person

Unlike machines, other people are inherently unpredictable. Which is why we feel some apprehension when we need to liaise with someone. What if they don’t behave as I expect? What if they don’t want the same things as me? These nerves tend to dissolve when you actually speak to the person. They’re worse in anticipation, particularly when you haven’t had a chance to think the task through.

But that hint of concern is enough to put you off dealing with the task right now. Instead of using the two-minute rule—either hash out an email or put an action item on a list that I know I’m going to review soon—we avoid it. Perhaps telling ourselves that we’ll get back to it later.

Remember, important conversations aren’t necessarily difficult conversations. Often, what makes them difficult is the fact that you’ve put them off!

How to escape avoidance

Once you’ve identified that you’re avoiding important conversations, there’s a simple way out. Account for the costs of your avoidance.

Write down the consequences of dropping the ball or delaying getting back to someone. How does it affect your projects’ success? Your reputation? Your professional relationships?

Now decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs. If they do, you’re not procrastinating at all. You’re making a rational business decision. But if they don’t, you’ve got your evidence that it’s worth trying something different.

The next time you come across a task that requires liaising with someone else:

1. Decide whether you can resolve it in less than two minutes—if so, do it now.
2. If not, put it on a list.
3. Process that list every week, checking what the next action is and doing it.

The problem with avoidance is that it doesn’t work. Things always come back to bite you in the end. Most of the concerns we have about communication are overblown. As soon as you sit down and figure out what needs to happen, they recede. Then you can get on the phone, say your piece, and relax. Because you know that there aren’t any demons haunting your inbox.

1. David Allen: “The Two Minute [Rule] basically says, look, any action you’ve figured out that you could actually complete within two minutes, of where you are in the context you are, in the location you are, you’re better off [doing] that right then than to hang up on it, not do it, put it in the backlog or whatever.” ↩