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2 min read

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Feb 5, 2026

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We often procrastinate — not because we’re lazy, but because the next step feels unclear. Faced with discomfort, our brains drift toward easy distractions: doomscrolling, outrage, or comparing ourselves to others. It looks like progress, but it isn’t.

In life, only a few choices truly matter — your health, your partner, and your closest relationships. Everything else is noise. The same is true in building products: most tasks don’t move the needle, but a few critical ones do. The danger is that we sometimes invent problems just to feel busy.

Work always expands to fill the time available. Even when building my project Lazyweb, with plenty of real challenges, I found myself tempted to chase irrelevant tasks — like SOC2 compliance with zero users. That’s not just unnecessary; it’s absurd.

Some work is necessary but unimportant (like authentication for sign-ups). Other work is completely unnecessary (like A/B testing with 17 users). The trick is knowing the difference.

In large organizations, two forces drive this:

Incentives. People inflate scope, spin up cross-team projects, or pitch migrations to look strategic — even if it doesn’t help users.

Avoidance. When the real problem is upstream or unsolvable, teams chase tractable but low-value work instead.

For founders, the danger looks different:

High effort, high uncertainty. When stuck on tough problems (like debugging a backend), we invent “urgent” tasks — pricing, branding, compliance — that avoid the real challenge.

Delusion. We plan for hypothetical success: “If we go viral, scammers will attack, so let’s harden infrastructure now.” That’s premature optimization.

As YC says: “Build product, talk to users.” Elon Musk put it bluntly: “The most common mistake of a smart engineer is optimizing something that shouldn’t exist.”

When I catch myself drifting into fake problems, I treat it as a signal to reset — take a walk, cook, journal, or even binge some brain-rot content. Afterward, I return to the one real problem in front of me, breaking it down step by step until momentum returns.

Right now, I’m doing exactly that — writing this reflection before diving back into the work that matters for Lazyweb’s launch next week.