- Tweaking your PC, comparing apps and following tutorials look exactly like work. Very often, they are a comfortable way to avoid the work that matters.
- This article explains why the habit sticks so well, what MJ DeMarco's train thought experiment reveals about motivation, and why hunting for the perfect tool looks a lot like hunting for your passion.
- You leave with a one-line test to run before every install, to tell whether a tweak moves you forward or just keeps you busy.
Sunday, 3 p.m. You install your third task manager of the year. While you are at it, you switch the terminal to a dark theme, tidy the taskbar, set up two keyboard shortcuts and watch a video about a launcher faster than yours. By 7 p.m., your PC has never looked better. Monday morning, the task you have been dodging for three weeks is still there, exactly where you left it.
The sneaky part is that Sunday felt like a workday. You focused, you solved problems, you are tired. Yet nothing you did moved your project closer to a result. I am not saying tweaking your PC is pointless: CommandGlows is built on the opposite idea. I am saying a tweak that answers no problem is a hobby in disguise, and you can spend years in it.
Below: why this reflex holds so well, what a brutal thought experiment from MJ DeMarco reveals about motivation, and the test I suggest you run before every install.
The tweak that looks like work
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, separates two things people constantly confuse: being in motion and taking action. Motion is planning, researching, preparing. Action is the behavior that produces an outcome. Outlining twenty article ideas is motion. Publishing one is action. Motion has a huge advantage: it feels like progress without ever exposing you to failure. Nobody judges a terminal theme.
Windows is the perfect playground for motion. The settings are endless, nearly all reversible, and each one rewards you instantly: you click, something changes, you see progress. Important work runs the other way. It is slow, uncertain, and it does not tell you right away whether you got it right. Between the two, your brain does not hesitate for long.
[ANECDOTE DIANE: the last time you spent an evening polishing your setup instead of moving a project that mattered, and what made you notice]
DeMarco’s train
MJ DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane, posted a thought experiment on his forum in 2024 that I find hard to argue with, the Problem/Purpose Paradigm. Picture yourself tied to the rails, a train whistle in the distance, and a padlock whose code is engraved in Latin. Within reach sits a stack of books: a guide to building offers, a history of 19th-century railways, a Latin primer.
Nobody in that spot takes a nap. Nobody combs their hair, whistles a tune or starts on the railway history because it looks fascinating. Everyone grabs the Latin primer, even though it is the dullest book in the stack. DeMarco’s conclusion: when the problem is as clear as that whistle, hesitation vanishes. He has a name for what we do the rest of the time, action-faking. And he notes that the most common problem on his entrepreneur forum is having no problem at all, so people read, listen to podcasts, and nothing changes.
Bring that back to your PC. Without a precise problem, every app looks equally good, so you try them all. Task manager number three is not better than number two: it is just new, and novelty feels like a fresh start. With a precise problem, the question changes. If what really costs you is reopening and rearranging your windows every morning, the right fix lives in how you manage your windows, not in your note-taking app. To pick the level that suits you, read Windows tiling: the right level is not the most automatic one. The next tool to install is the one that unblocks today’s problem. The rest can wait, however brilliant.
Hunting for the perfect tool is hunting for your passion
There is a belief behind the search for the right tool: the idea that some system out there will make the work easy, and you only have to find it. That is exactly the logic behind “find your passion.”
Three researchers, Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton, put that logic to the test in five studies published in 2018. When you believe an interest exists ready-made and you just have to stumble on it, you count on boundless drive once you find the right activity. In the fifth study, as soon as the new activity got demanding, interest in that group dropped markedly more than among participants convinced that interests are cultivated. The authors sum up the risk with an image: you put all your eggs in one basket, then drop the basket as soon as it gets heavy.
Swap “passion” for “tool” and you get the productive procrastination loop. You find the perfect app, the excitement lasts ten days, then the work gets hard again, because the work is hard. You conclude it was not the right app, and off you go looking for another.
DeMarco sets purpose against passion, and that is the distinction I keep. Passion waits for the task to feel good. Purpose has no prerequisites: you do not need to love Latin to decode it, you only need the padlock around your ankle. Kant would have called it duty. I would call it a problem worth the effort.
The test to run before every install
Here is what I suggest you set up today. It takes five minutes, and it changes how you open your next download page.
- Write three sentences that start with “I’m tired of…”. It is DeMarco’s prompt for surfacing a real problem. Keep the one that costs you the most this week, in time or energy.
- Create a “Later” note in the note-taking tool you already use.
- Before installing an app or an extension, or starting a tutorial, finish this line: “This fixes my problem of…”. If the answer is not your sentence from step 1, paste the link into “Later” and close the tab.
- On Friday, reread the “Later” note. Most links will look pointless. The ones that survive may deserve a try next week, one at a time.
This test forbids nothing. It simply moves the decision from the moment you want to escape to the moment you have a clear head.
What this changes for you
Once your problem is sharp, most tweaks stop being tempting, because you can see they move nothing. The ones that remain become highly profitable, because they hit the real friction. Start with the “I’m tired of…” sentence now, before you close this page.
To turn that frustration into direction, the free lesson Finding Your Why helps you write your problem x purpose sentence and choose a purpose that holds when motivation fades. If you just installed everything at once, the quick start rebuilds you from a minimal base, one action a day. And for the Windows settings that are actually worth the time they cost, the free guide to 10 Windows settings goes straight to the essentials.
Sources
Sources checked on October 22, 2026.
See the 3 sources for this article
- James Clear, 2013, The Mistake Smart People Make: Being in Motion vs. Taking Action
- MJ DeMarco, The Fastlane Forum, July 11, 2024, The Problem/Purpose Paradigm: Fire Unlimited Motivation and Laser Focus
- Paul A. O’Keefe, Carol S. Dweck and Gregory M. Walton, Psychological Science, 2018, Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?