The avoidance is never lazy. It is industrious. Three emails to clarify scope. Two Slack threads about resourcing. One deck on strategic alignment. By noon you have spent four hours proving you cannot start.

Watch the queue at the hawker centre. The stall with the longest line moves fastest because the uncle is making the food. The empty stall next to it has a handwritten sign: "Closed for stock-taking." Stock-taking for the third Thursday this month. The work of not working is a full-time job.

Most postponement is not about capacity. It is about exposure. The real project — the pitch, the prototype, the first customer call — puts you in a position to be visibly wrong. Explaining why you haven't started yet keeps you visibly reasonable. Reasonable is safe. Reasonable is how you spend six months and ship nothing.

The trick is recognising the pattern before lunch. If you have written more about the constraints than you have written toward the deliverable, you are not planning. You are rehearsing reasons. The constraints are real. They are also infinite. There will always be one more dependency to clarify, one more stakeholder to loop in, one more variable to de-risk.

So today: two hours, no comms, on the riskiest piece. Not the scaffolding. Not the alignment. The part that only works if you're right. Because the fastest way to find out if the work is impossible is to try the work.