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But this doesn’t yet explain our predilection for special calendar dates. Why do we more often reschedule the start of a new venture for a Monday rather than a Thursday? The reason is that many of the other activities on our agenda are tied to the official divisions of the calendar. The modern industrial week, for example, is rigidly divided into five days of work followed by two days of play. Work-related projects that would suffer from a two-day hiatus are therefore timed to end by Friday. As a result, we’re less preoccupied with ongoing business affairs on the following Monday than earlier in the week, and new projects find us less resistant. The long holiday season preceding New Year’s Day is even more effective than the weekend in this regard. Many of our projects are geared to terminate before the holidays begin, and the accumulation of new obligations doesn’t reach serious proportions until the first working day of the new year. In the interim, we feel less busy. Hence we’re more inclined to embark on new ventures.

Is making New Year’s resolutions a trap? It can be, if it’s used merely as an excuse for postponing a necessary activity. But the backlog of unfinished business is lighter on New Year’s Day, as a result of which new ventures do have a better chance of getting off the ground. Thus starting on New Year’s Day may also be a strategic response to the backlog, in which case it isn’t a trap. It’s carrying around the backlog of past reversions and unfulfilled anticipations that’s a trap. If we were entirely free of traps, we wouldn’t carry around a burdensome backlog of unfinished business. There would then be no point to making New Year’s resolutions—starting on January 1 would be indistinguishable from starting on May 12. When we’re totally free of traps, we live each day as though it were the start of a new millennium. But given that we are trapped by a backlog of unfinished business, it makes sense to schedule the start of new activities at a time when the backlog loses a little weight.

We’ve seen that the backlog of unfinished business provides an explanation for the basic phenomenon of procrastination: the reluctance to engage in a new project even though we seem to be unoccupied. The backlog also explains why we make New Year’s resolutions and why we are always thinking. But it doesn’t explain the most striking phenomenon of all relating to procrastination: the special difficulty at the start of new enterprises. The backlog functions as a source of tendencies that compete with the tendency to engage in the new project—but there’s no reason to suppose that the competition is any stronger at the start of the new project than after the new project has already been begun. So why is writing the first sentence of a letter more difficult than writing the second sentence?

Here is a plausible explanation. Once the new project has been begun, it generates its own inertia in amounts that are normally sufficient to overcome the inertial pull of the backlog. We’ve been assuming that a goal generates inertia as soon as we form the intention of achieving it. If this is so, then the inertia of the new project would have its countervailing effect right from the start. But suppose that starting a new project is a two-step procedure; first we formulate our intention to undertake the project, and second we perform the mental equivalent of pressing an “enter” key. Suppose also that the inertial tendency to complete what was begun is produced only when the intention is “entered.” In effect, pressing the enter key is the first bit of work that needs to be done on any project. After the intention is entered, the new project will have its own inertia to keep it from being sidetracked by the backlog. But the first step of entering the intention has no such support. If this is how intentional action works, then we would expect to experience difficulties in getting started that disappear once we’re on the way.

Procrastination is a resistance to engaging in a new task even though we seem to be unoccupied. We’ve discussed one cause