These Are My Top 3 Productivity Excuses. You’ll Probably Recognise Them.

Tips for taking your ‘excuse-bot’ off autopilot and beating self-sabotage

Rebecca Pendleton
5 min readFeb 25, 2024
Photo by Lina Kivaka: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-covering-face-with-book-on-bed-1524232/

I have not written for some time. At least not publicly; not on Medium. In my journal, sure — and emails, work chats, Product Requirements Documents, birthday cards. But not anything that the lovely people who have clicked ‘follow’ on my Medium profile have access to read (unless you sneak into my house and read my diary, which I would appreciate if you didn’t — thanks).

Every time my fiancé has said to me ‘Hey, you should write online again! You enjoy it!’, my autopilot brain immediately responded with:

“Ahhh…no. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or not. No.”

This kept happening, and my response got a bit annoying after a while. I felt icky, like when you haven’t showered for a few days after being ill in bed. I decided to probe — what’s going on? Why am I not ‘doing the thing’ — writing online and practising my creativity?

When I rolled back the covers of this bout of procrastination, I revealed a horrid mound of excuses that came crawling out.

Ugly, self-sabotaging excuses. The building blocks of an unhappy, resentful life. The toolkit that our autopilot ‘excuse-bot’ uses to…

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Rebecca Pendleton

Product Manager & Aspiring Writer / Coach. I love self-development, service design & stationery. Sober but not preachy.