Why Easy Things Can Feel Harder Than Hard Things
Why the difficulty of a task doesn’t tell you how difficult it will be to engage with it.
We usually decide how difficult something should be by looking at the task.
- Preparing a complex presentation is hard.
- Sending a short email is easy.
- Solving a significant business problem is hard.
- Completing routine paperwork is easy.
That ranking makes sense if we are measuring knowledge, skill, or complexity.
It becomes much less useful when we are trying to understand why something is difficult to do.
Task difficulty and cognitive difficulty are different measures. A task can be intellectually simple and still require considerable effort to engage with. Another can be genuinely complicated and surprisingly easy to get absorbed in.
That is how the easy thing can sometimes feel harder.
You can spend two hours happily working through a complicated problem while a five-minute email sits unanswered. And, you are clearly capable of doing both. In fact, if someone gave you a choice between explaining your entire business strategy and replying to the email, there are days when the business strategy might win.
We use the difficulty of the task to predict the effort it should take to do it. But cognitive effort isn’t simply another measure of how objectively difficult something is. The effort involved in engaging with a task is its own part of the equation.
The task is only part of what your brain has to do
When we call something easy, we are usually describing the work itself.
A short email requires little time or expertise. Routine paperwork may involve decisions you have made hundreds of times before. Nothing about the task appears especially demanding.
But your brain has to do more than understand the task. It has to engage with it.
That demand can be very different from the difficulty of the work itself. A complicated problem may give you plenty to think about. There is something to solve, discover, understand, or decide. The work itself helps keep you involved because it continues to give your attention something to work with.
A routine task may offer much less. You already know what to do. There may be nothing particularly interesting to discover and no complicated problem waiting to be solved. Apparently “you’ve done this a hundred times before” is not always the motivational advantage we imagine it to be.
How appealing or unappealing a task feels also affects how readily we engage with it. That doesn’t mean every task you avoid is secretly unbearable. Sending an invoice is unlikely to require a support group. It does mean that objective difficulty is not the only characteristic affecting whether we readily engage with something.
A task can be simple and unappealing. It can be difficult and interesting. It can require very little skill while giving your attention almost nothing to grab onto.
This can create the strange experience of moving easily into work that other people would consider difficult while repeatedly struggling to engage with something everyone agrees should be easy.
Five minutes tells you how long something takes
Small tasks are often described by their duration.
“It will only take five minutes.”
That may be completely accurate. Once you begin, the task may take exactly five minutes. But duration tells you very little about how readily you will engage with those five minutes.
A short task is not automatically an accessible task.
There is a difference between intending to do something and translating that intention into action. You can fully intend to send the email, complete the form, make the appointment, or submit the expense report. The intention can be perfectly sincere while the action remains stubbornly theoretical.
That makes “it only takes five minutes” a much less complete description than it first appears.
Five minutes measures the duration of the task once you are doing it. It doesn’t measure what happens between intending to do it and actually beginning.
Anyone who has spent considerably more than five minutes thinking about, avoiding, remembering, rescheduling, and feeling annoyed by a five-minute task has already conducted a small and deeply irritating field study on this distinction.
Time, complexity, and cognitive effort overlap sometimes, but they are not interchangeable measures. That becomes important when we use one of them to make assumptions about another.
Simple tasks can become strangely personal
When difficult work feels difficult, the explanation is readily available – the work is hard.
If you are solving a complicated business problem, developing a strategy, or making a consequential decision, nobody is surprised when it requires effort. The difficulty makes sense.
Simple work creates a different problem.
If the task requires little expertise and very little time, struggling with it can seem harder to explain. The simplicity of the task becomes part of the evidence against you.
Why haven’t I done this yet?
That question can turn quickly into a judgment about effort, discipline, or competence because we have already decided the task itself cannot explain the difficulty.
If the presentation is difficult, the presentation gets blamed. If the email is easy, you get blamed.
This is where a measurement problem can quietly become a character judgment.
We looked at the task and concluded that it should require very little effort. When our actual experience didn’t match that prediction, we assumed the problem must be the person doing it.
But the effort required to engage with something varies even when the task itself does not. The missing information is what doing the task requires from the person doing it at that particular moment.
That doesn’t mean difficulty is arbitrary, or that every unpleasant task contains a hidden neurological mystery. Sometimes paperwork is just paperwork and you would rather be doing literally anything else.
It means “easy” is giving us less information than we think it is.
“Easy” doesn’t tell you how easy something will be to do
Calling a task easy can be perfectly reasonable.
It may be quick. It may be familiar. It may require almost no sophisticated thinking. None of those descriptions tells you how much effort it will take to engage with it at a particular moment.
You can find a task simple and still find it difficult to do. You can find a problem complicated and still become deeply engaged in solving it. There is nothing inconsistent about those experiences. They are telling you different things about difficulty.
One describes characteristics of the task. The other describes the experience of engaging with it.
Keeping those measures separate becomes especially important when the gap between them starts telling a story about who you are. If you assume an easy task should require very little effort, struggling with it can become evidence that you are lazy, undisciplined, inconsistent, or somehow failing to use abilities you obviously possess.
But that conclusion begins with a faulty assumption.
The task may genuinely be easy.
That doesn’t mean it is easy to engage with.
