Inertia: Getting The Ball Rolling
September 12, 2026
Inertia is one of those things where the obvious advice
just startis technically true but useless, because if starting were easy we'd have already begun. So let's go a level deeper.
The laundry's been sitting in the basket clean for four days. Not because we don't have time to put it away, it takes maybe ten minutes, but because every time we glance at it, something in us goes
not right now,and we close the door instead. That's inertia. It's not laziness and it's not really about the laundry. It's that starting anything requires activation energy - a push that propels us forward.
Here's the interesting thing though, once we're moving, we usually don't want to stop. I remember so many times when I literally dreaded doing something, like yard work or figuring out my taxes, but once I got started it was rarely as big a deal as I imagined. The hard part was crossing the line from not-doing to doing.
Make The First Step Amusingly Small
Typically when something needs doing, we think about the whole task - clean the kitchen, start the workout routine - and that's exactly what derails us before we even begin. But put five dishes in the sink, doesn't feel like much at all and that's the point. We're giving ourselves a low enough bar to jump over. Usually, once those four dishes are in the sink, we do a fifth, then a sixth. In other words, we typically keep going and before we know it, the entire kitchen is clean.
Be Open To Starting Poorly
Ever notice how much easier it is to write a text message with
omwthan to write a properly worded response to a work email? Sure, one may be more important than the other, but part of it is because we've given ourselves permission for the text to be sloppy, but not the email. We're trying to start and be proper at the same time. By separating the two and allowing ourselves to write a terrible first draft of that email - bullet points, no greeting, whatever gets the ideas out - we've begun and then can go back and make it sound professional on the second pass. I can affirm, that it's way easier to fix a funky paragraph than to write a perfect one from scratch. In fact, this is also why so many people who have thought about writing a book, never actually do it. They are looking at the whole task - writing an engaging story, editing, publishing - which can feel extremely overwhelming, when all it really takes to get the ball rolling, is jotting down a couple sloppy paragraphs.
Fix The Room Not Our Motivation
Think about the difference between a gym bag packed and sitting by the door, versus our gym clothes buried in a drawer somewhere. Same workout. Wildly different odds we'll actually go. It's not that having the bag packed means we're more disciplined. It's that the clothes buried in a drawer requires us to make five extra decisions before even getting out the door, and any one of those is a chance to bail.
This is why people who cook a lot often set all the ingredients out before turning on the stove. Not because they're necessarily super efficient but because stopping mid-recipe to dig around for what they need is exactly the kind of gap where
let's just order outcan sneak in. It's the same for those that keep a book on their nightstand so they read before bed instead of scrolling the internet. They're not relying on willpower. They're relying on the book being right there.
Attach It To Something That Already Happens
I'll do it when I feel motivated,is a plan that depends on a feeling that may never show up. A better plan is tying the new thing to something we already do without thinking. We brush our teeth every day, so we leave our vitamins right next to the toothbrush. We always make coffee in the morning, so while it's brewing we do our five minutes of stretching or jumping on the trampoline. We're not adding willpower. We're hitching a ride on a habit that already exists.
Sometimes It's Not Inertia
Notice if it's actually inertia or something else. Sometimes what looks like inertia is disguised anxiety about the task, unclear next steps or genuine ambivalence about whether it's worth doing. Those require completely different strategies. In other words, not every stall is about starting. Sometimes we've been thinking about replying to a friend for a couple weeks, and it's not that replying is hard, it's that we don't actually know what to say, or there's something a little uncomfortable in the conversation we're avoiding. That's not inertia, that's a different matter that no amount of just write the first sentence fixes, if the real issue is we're dreading what comes after. So it's worth asking ourselves when we're stuck,
Is this actually hard to start, or am I just avoiding what happens once I do?
The Pattern Underneath All Of It
Newton's law of inertia,
An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion at a constant speed and in a straight line unless acted upon by a net external force.
Inertia is a predictable physical law and the wisest people don't fight it, they redirect it by changing the conditions so less force is needed. Every one of these little tricks is doing the same thing: shrinking the gap between not-doing and doing. The four dishes, the gym bag by the door, the vitamins next to the toothbrush, none of them require us to suddenly become more disciplined and motivated. They are simply ways to get the ball rolling, so there are fewer excuses standing between us and the first move.