Putting off the important things? It's not for the reasons you think

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do now, especially if you're holding back in the hope of doing it properly

All you really need to succeed, according to the writer-philosopher Robert Pirsig, who died last month, is gumption. "Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going," he writes, in a rare part of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance that's actually about motorcycle maintenance. (Well, and the whole of human existence, too - but that's always the case with Pirsig.) "If you haven't got any, there's no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it, there's absolutely no way in the world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed." The biggest dangers, accordingly, are what he calls "gumption traps": seemingly minor external events, or ways of thinking, that play a disproportionate role in depleting it. There are "maybe millions" of these, he writes. But there's one I fall into far more often than others. You might call it the Importance Trap.

This is hardly a brand new insight - but then, as Pirsig liked to point out, looking for new insights can be a fool's errand; what you want are the ones that make a difference. The Importance Trap refers to the way that, the more an activity really matters to you, the more you start to believe you need focus, energy and long stretches of uninterrupted time in which to do it - things that, you tell yourself, you currently lack. And so the less likely you are to do it. Unimportant stuff gets done; important stuff doesn't.