🌴357. Effort vs Effort Perception
I recorded this episode late.
All year I’ve been disciplined. Daily episodes. Even from Nepal with poor internet And yet here I am, back home, beachy, relaxed, watching eight hours of cricket… and suddenly a three-minute podcast feels heavy.
That’s the bit I wanted to call out.
It’s not that the work is hard. It’s that the perception of effort ramps up when you’re in soft mode. When you’re already moving, working, exercising, creating, the extra thing barely registers. When you’ve gone full couch, everything feels like a task.
I talk about why the last stretch of anything feels harder, just like the final kilometres of a run. Same effort, louder brain. And how habit stacking and timing matter more than motivation.
The takeaway is simple. Don’t wait to feel ready. Change the context. Do the thing while you’re already in motion.
Because once you start, it’s fine. It’s the thinking about it that’s exhausting.
key ideas I unpack
- Why the last leg of the year feels heavier than the rest
- Effort vs perception of effort and why your brain lies
- Soft mode vs motion mode and how context changes everything
- Why doing the thing is easier than gearing up to do the thing
- How habit stacking saves you from yourself
questions to sit with
- Where are you blaming fatigue when it’s really a context problem?
- What task feels big purely because you’ve stopped moving?
- What would change if you did that thing earlier, faster, or mid-motion?
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