In this week’s newsletter:

• The gap between intention and action
• An experiment to cut down on self-negotiation
• Corporate workshops
• Coming in December: the book!

Hi, it's Aine.

How much time have you spent negotiating with yourself today?

You’ve got a solid idea of what needs to be done, and you’ve probably even organized and planned for it.

But you keep revisiting exactly what to work on, whether to start, when a task really needs to be completed, whether something else should come first, or whether a decision needs more thinking.

It keeps going until these small negotiations start winning your day.

The time and energy spent on them accumulates, delaying goals, taking up space in your head, and keeping you from the work you care about.

Intention v action

There's a name for this: the intention-behavior gap is the distance between what we genuinely intend to do and what we actually do when the time to act arrives.

You can make a perfectly good plan for the day and still not take action at the moment of starting, especially when you add in real-life conditions. We’ve all been there.

In order to begin something, your brain has to hold the original intention in mind while also weighing what seems most urgent right now, what might require less effort, and what feels easiest to complete.

There are a lot of reasons a plan can become negotiable at the point of action, and then ‘I’ll do it later,’ feels like the best choice.

A task may still be unclear, the available time may feel too limited, there might be missing information, other things might be demanding your attention, or it might bring enough uncertainty that another task feels easier and more rewarding to handle first.

What those all have in common is that the original intention is no longer the only thing you’re responding to.

It’s being weighed alongside the current conditions in front of you.

Then ‘later’ arrives with a whole new set of conditions to evaluate, and the negotiation can keep repeating even when you started the day with a solid plan.

An experiment to help

For the next day or two, keep a note or notes app nearby.

Every time you catch yourself moving away from something you intended to do, pause and write down what’s making ‘not right now’ seem like the reasonable choice.

This might be when you start coming up with reasons to delay, change course over and over again, or keep trying to re-decide what’s next.

Don’t try to solve it yet or force new motivation. Just give yourself a day or two to collect a list of observations.

When you’re immersed in your day, that quick internal shift of ‘I’ll do this later’ can feel like honest, useful information. Writing down observations of what’s behind the thought can help create distance from the immediate relief of putting things off.

It helps you see whether you’re identifying real needs or looking for relief from uncertainty, effort, or discomfort.

Once you make the pattern visible, you have new information.

You can see which conditions keep turning settled intentions into fresh decisions, and whether the negotiation is helping you solve something or just slowing you down. Then you can stop treating each ‘not right now’ as a completely new question when it’s really the same pattern showing up again.

Booking trainings, lunch & learns, and keynotes

I work with companies, professional organizations, and teams that want practical, science-based tools for better thinking, focus, and resilience. I also have programming that supports keeping critical thinking skills sharp alongside AI usage.

If you host speakers or trainings (or have a connection that could benefit), I'd love to connect.

Coming in December: Fix Your Day (the book!)

I'm turning JournalingFix into a practical guide for closing the gap between what you know is possible and what actually happens in your day.

Fix Your Day explores why, even when we're capable, we can still lose access to the actions that would move us forward. It introduces a method for using short, structured writing to recognize, reset, and make faster progress through the daily situations and patterns that slow us down.

More info coming soon as publication gets closer.

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Cheers to a week of forward action,

– Aine

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