The project you're genuinely excited about is sitting right there. You want to work on it. There's no external barrier. Nobody's stopping you.

And you can't start.

You open social media instead. Or clean the kitchen. Or research a tangentially related topic for two hours. Anything but the thing.

This isn't laziness. This is initiation failure due to cognitive load estimation.

Your brain does an unconscious pre-scan of any task before starting it. For the exciting project, that pre-scan reveals: complex, multi-step, requires loading significant context, has high standards attached, involves uncertainty about where to begin.

Your working memory calculates: "This will require more buffer than I currently have available."

So it doesn't start. Not because you don't want to—but because the estimated cognitive load exceeds available resources. Your brain protects itself by redirecting to lower-load activities that won't crash the system.

The kitchen gets cleaned because cleaning requires minimal working memory. Social media gets scrolled because each post is a self-contained micro-context.

You're not avoiding the project. Your system is avoiding a buffer overflow. Lower the entry cost: open the file. Just look at it. Reduce the first step until it fits in available memory.