F2F #82: The snooze fatigue

We're doing more and more every day. The cost of executing has plummeted to virtually zero... but has it, really?

Because we're doing more tasks, we have to reprioritise more often than ever and take more decisions than ever. We juggle between dozens of different projects every day, even, but it isn't free from a tax - and a very heavy one at that.

And because we can't do everything at once, we have to schedule tasks, postpone, delegate, etc. I will focus on the postponing/snoozing part of it, because every task you postpone becomes more expensive - not in time, but in mental overhead.

At the time of this writing, I've got two computers on (one at home, one with me). Both have two browsers open with 15-80 different tabs open - different in each computer, of course - on top of the personal tasks I have on Todoist, my work tasks on Linear, chats from my team on Slack, whatever i've got going on inside Claude, and, if it wasn't enough, email and whatsapp.

I've learnt how to live with always something to do: important or not, doesn't matter. There's always something to get back to, and a permanent and endless backlog that will never be emptied. Topping all of that, the permanent feeling of I'm forgetting something important, even if I haven't forgotten anything: the tasks are right there, perfectly documented and organised.

The problem isn't the list. The problem is that we live in a constant To Do vs In progress state. Back and forth. Forth and back.

Async work is one of the greatest gifts remote-first culture has given founders, which is making its way into our personal lives too because no one likes phone calls anymore. No one expects you to respond in real time. You can protect your deep work, batch your communication, work across time zones without friction. I've been running MarsBased this way for over a decade and I do very little sync work (although mostly it's client-facing).

But async comes with a hidden tax nobody talks about. I call it snooze fatigue: the more times you postpone a task, however small it is, the more expensive it gets. I feel it straining my mind every time.

Here's how it works: You receive a task, a message, a decision to make. You don't deal with it immediately because async culture says you don't have to. You snooze it, so it disappears from your inbox because it's not urgent and you move on... but your brain doesn't. It keeps a background thread ruminating, every unresolved item, every "I'll reply later" because:

• If we snooze it for a short time, it'll come back too early and we won't be prepared for that, hence pushing it back into the future again.
• If we snooze it for a long time, it'll leave us the bitter aftertaste of "how's that, actually? will it come back or did i archive it for good?" and when it finally comes back, the cost of remembering where you left off is too much to handle.

Cognitive scientists call this the Zeigarnik effect, the tendency for incomplete tasks to occupy more mental bandwidth than completed ones. You experience it as that background job somewhere deep in your brain, clouding your judgement and creating a feeling of anxiety that follows you through your day.

The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon where people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than tasks they have completed. It is named after the Lithuanian‑Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who first described it in the 1920s. - Wikipedia.

The irony is that the smaller the task, the more disproportionate the toll. A two-minute email reply left unsent for three days generates far more cognitive drag than it deserved. You've spent more mental energy dreading it than doing it would ever have cost. The snooze tax compounds over time, piling up on everything you've got going on, and every time you see that task in your inbox and don't act on it, you pay again. It's a lose-lose situation.

This is structurally different from the standard procrastination problem. We all know that procrastinating on a hard, ambiguous, or emotionally loaded task is understandable because we seek to avoid pain and focus on short-term gains and immediate rewards, most of the time, but snooze fatigue hits you on the easy stuff, instead: a thumbs-up to a teammate, an RSVP to an event, sending a receipt to your accountant, answering an email from your lawyer, etc. You're not avoiding them because they're hard, you avoid them because you can afford to, because the consequences aren't immediate. And, if you're like me, you avoid them because you're not interested in small and inconsequential stuff. I always prefer to work in what excites me, but that is sadly a small percentage of my day-to-day work.

As I read somewhere, the work of a CEO is 80% things you have to do, vs 20% of things you like to do. In my case, it's more like 90-10, but you get the point. You do what you gotta do.

For founders specifically, the knife cuts deeper, and even more so if you have a team. Your team is waiting on those decisions. Before async, two people had a "contract" when they had to work on something: we get together, we do it, we move on.

Now, with async, the cost of sending stuff to other people is also zero. I assign a task to someone and I send that email or Linear comment. Before, maybe I would've thought "can't wait for him/her, I'd do it myself" or just cancel the thing altogether. Now, it's free to fill someone else's tasklist.

If the snooze fatigue wasn't costly enough for yourself, when you work with teams it's that, times ten. When you snooze something involving someone else, you don't just pay the cognitive cost yourself: you shove that tax to everyone downstream.

Getting Things Done (GTD) says that if something takes less than a couple of minutes, do it right away. David Allen figured this out decades ago and it's still right. The snooze tax is a tax you pay for the privilege of maintaining the illusion of managing tasks rather than just doing them. However, I think it doesn't hold up well against today's standards: we have an order of magnitude more tasks than what we had back in the day, when this was relevant and applicable.

The hot take, and uncomfortable fix goes beyond the two-minute rule. You have to unlearn the idea that deferring is always disciplined. Async culture allowed us to go from "I will respond thoughtfully later on, when I will have properly read it and thought it through" to "I will let this sit indefinitely"

The discipline is actually in recognising when a task requires no deep thought, swallowing your pride, and giving it the thirty seconds it deserves before it has a chance to start running in the background. Or, as I say it "ruining in the background".

I've started treating my own snooze fatigue as a signal, not just a symptom. I still don't have an answer for it: sometimes I feel better by tackling head-first a bunch of small tasks, sometimes I delete them altogether, but there's no silver bullet for them, so maybe the real solution is re-thinking how we work and the concept of tasks and delegation.

Async, all things considered, is still the right way to work, but we need something else that will help us separate the grain from the chaff. Maybe it'll be AI, maybe it's working in pairs as if we were pair-programming. Who knows.

The snooze fatigue is real. I'd love to learn how you deal with this, if you also suffer from it! Let's figure it out together.