Why Founders Avoid Their Most Critical Tasks

You know the feeling.

There’s a thing you say you care about:

Rewriting the sales narrative, rebuilding onboarding, talking to 10 customers.

But every time you sit down to do it, your brain slides off it like Teflon.

You’re not broken.

Your brain is doing exactly what it’s built to do:

Run an internal ROI calculation on whether this is worth real effort.

Let’s work with that instead of against it.

Brain Stuff for Builders

Why some tasks “pull you in” and others feel impossible

Recent neuroscience work1 on cognitive control uses a framework called the Expected Value of Control (EVC).

In plain language, your brain invests effort when three things line up:

1. Reward: “If this works, is it actually valuable?”

2. Efficacy: “Does what I’m doing really increase the chances of that reward happening?”

3. Cost: “How much mental effort will this take right now?”

New findings2 on the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), the area often linked to this control-allocation process, explicitly describes this as integrating expected reward and effort costs to decide whether to spend more control on a task.

Behaviorally, experiments in the last few years show the same thing: when researchers independently increase reward (bigger payoff) and efficacy (your performance actually matters), people put in more cognitive effort.

When those signals are low or unclear, effort drops and people drift to easier tasks.

For founders, that looks like:

• Dodging the “talk to 10 customers” block because you’re not convinced those conversations will actually change anything.

• Getting pulled into polishing pitch decks because the reward is obvious: “maybe this investor will finally say yes”.

• Living in Slack and email because the short-term “reward pings” are loud and the effort cost feels low.

The takeaway isn’t “try harder.”

If your brain is resisting effort, fix the reward and efficacy story, not just your to-do list.

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💡 Idea of the Week

Framework to try: Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions

Economists and psychologists have spent decades looking at a simple split:

• Irreversible decisions: once you do it, you can’t easily undo it without big cost.

• Reversible decisions: you can change or reverse course relatively cheaply.

Recent work3 in environmental and investment economics still uses this lens: when an investment is uncertain and irreversible, it often makes sense to move more carefully or value the option to wait (this is a core idea in modern real-options thinking).

On the psychology side, studies4 confirm a quirky effect: reversible decisions often make people less satisfied, because they keep mentally revisiting all the other paths they could have taken.

Why it’s worth your time (especially now)

In the last few weeks of the year, everything starts to feel urgent and high-stakes.

If you treat every choice like an irreversible bet, you:

• Overthink small, reversible moves

• Burn decision energy on things you could easily test and change

• Have less bandwidth left for the few calls that are hard to undo (fundraising terms, key hires, big strategic shifts)

Labeling which decisions are actually hard to reverse lets you slow down on a small number of real bets and speed up on everything else.

Key takeaway

You don’t need a perfect prioritization system.

You need to:

Protect more time and care for 1 to 3 truly hard-to-undo decisions, and treat most other choices as reversible experiments with a review date, not permanent commitments.

Try this:

1. List 10 decisions / projects currently on your plate.

2. Mark each one “irreversible-ish” or “reversible-ish.”

3. Cap the “irreversible-ish” list at 1 to 3 items and consciously give those more thought.

4. For everything labeled “reversible-ish,” make a fast call and add a simple line:

   “We’ll revisit this on [date] based on [metric / signal].”

You’re aligning your effort with what the research says: save your deepest deliberation for the few moves that are genuinely hard to undo and let the rest be learning runs.

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This Week’s Founder Insight

“I keep avoiding the one thing I say is most important.”

Composite of a few founders I’ve coached:

• Early revenue, small team, and funding.

• Big strategic push they say matters: a new pricing model, a repeatable outbound motion, or a real onboarding fix.

• In practice, the week fills with:

  • Ad hoc calls

  • Small product tweaks

  • Investor updates

  • Back-to-back meetings

When we look at their calendar, the “most important” work either doesn’t exist as time blocks… or keeps getting bumped.

Instead of shaming that, we run an EVC-style conversation:

• “What is the actual reward of this project in the next 3 to 6 months?”

• “How confident are you that the way you plan to tackle it will work?”

• “Is there a smaller, higher-confidence version we could do first?”

Often we find:

• The project is framed too vaguely (“improve onboarding”) to have a clear reward.

• The plan is a huge, low-confidence build instead of a tighter test.

• Their brain is correctly tagging it as “big effort / unclear payoff.”

Once we reframe:

• “Run 10 user interviews focused only on onboarding drop-off, synthesize patterns, and test 1 small change,”

instead of

• “Revamp onboarding end-to-end,”

their resistance drops. Their brain now sees:

Clearer reward × higher likelihood of success × manageable cost.

In other words: a better expected value of control.

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🤝 Founder Circle CTA

In early 2026, I’m opening one small Founder Circle, with 6 founders.

It’s for funded or serious bootstrapped founders who already have some traction and want:

• Clear priorities each quarter (not a bloated to-do list)

• A space to talk through hard decisions with peers, plus two coaches:

  • Me and a former B2B SaaS founder

• Peer community that builds accountability and supports you, so you’re not facing it all alone

Join the Waitlist

Only a few spots left, so don’t wait!

If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:

• Dixit, A. K., & Pindyck, R. S. (1994). Investment under Uncertainty. Princeton University Press.

• Gilbert, D. T., & Ebert, J. E. J. (2002). Decisions and Revisions: The Affective Forecasting of Changeable Outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.