About six months ago, I moved house in Belgium.
Moving sounds simple until you start changing everything that needs to know where you live. My bank needed the new address, as did my social insurance office, hospital, insurance company, my son's school, subscriptions, registrations, and several other places I had to deal with.
I wanted to get the whole thing out of the way, so I worked through the list and updated one address after another. I thought I had finished, but I hadn't.
There was one address I never changed: my address with the post office.
I remember seeing it on my list. Nothing was stopping me from doing it, but I looked at it and thought I could take care of it the next day. Then I got busy, the next day became another day, and eventually the task disappeared from my attention completely.
At the time, it didn't feel like procrastination. I wasn't deliberately avoiding something difficult. I had already dealt with most of the paperwork, and this last task seemed too small to worry about.
I was wrong about that.
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| Moving house brings a long trail of administrative changes that are easy to lose track of. |
The Phone Call I Didn't Expect
Some time later, I received a phone call from the embassy in Brussels.
My son's passport had arrived, but they hadn't been able to reach me, and the passport had already been sent back.
I was confused at first, but then I remembered the address I had forgotten to change. The passport had been sent through a system that still had my old address, which meant that a task I had barely thought about had turned into a lesson I hadn't expected to learn.
I ended up travelling from Bruges to Brussels in person to deal with the situation.
It was frustrating, especially because the original task would have taken very little time. But the trip itself wasn't the part that stayed with me. What stayed with me was the reason I had postponed the task in the first place.
Why I Ignored It
I think I understand my decision better now.
When I looked at everything I had to do after moving, certain tasks immediately felt more serious. Changing an address with a hospital felt serious, updating my bank details felt serious, and making sure my son's school had the correct information felt serious.
The post office didn't create the same feeling. There was no obvious deadline attached to it, it was just an address, so I mentally placed it near the bottom of the list.
We often put something off because we don't see a compelling reason to deal with it today. The task may be easy, but without an obvious consequence attached to it, tomorrow feels perfectly reasonable.
The problem is that we don't always know what is waiting on the other side of a small unfinished task.
Living Abroad Means More Small Tasks Than You Expect
I don't think this would have happened in quite the same way if I were still living in Nepal.
Moving within your own country can involve plenty of paperwork too, but moving as a foreigner living in Belgium brought a much longer trail of places that needed my new address. There was the commune, health insurance fund, bank, school, social security office, insurance, subscriptions, and, apparently, the post office too.
After a few years here, I've noticed that almost everything important still arrives by post: appointment letters, tax notices, school forms, and other official documents that might have been an email back home.
For me, official communication has often meant paying close attention to letters, registrations, appointments, and documents arriving at the correct address. A missed letter isn't necessarily just an inconvenience. It can mean missing an appointment, overlooking a deadline, or failing to receive something you were expecting.
In my case, it meant a passport that had travelled from Brussels and then gone straight back because the address connected to the delivery was still the old one.
Nobody explains every one of these little lessons when you first move abroad. You learn them gradually, usually when something goes wrong.
I learned this one through a forgotten address.
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| Official communication abroad often relies heavily on physical mail reaching the correct address. |
A Small Task Can Sit Inside a Bigger System
Since that experience, I've become more careful about how I judge the value of a task.
I used to look mostly at the task itself. I would ask how long something would take, how difficult it was, or whether someone was waiting on me, but sometimes those questions aren't enough.
Now I also think about what might depend on it.
Changing an address looks like a small administrative job, but that information can sit behind a much larger chain of communication. A document, appointment, letter, delivery, or official notification may rely on the details being correct.
I only saw the five-minute task, not what was tied to it.
I Stopped Assuming That "Not Urgent" Means "Can Wait"
There is another thing I have become more careful about.
I used to make a quick connection between urgency and importance. If something wasn't urgent, I assumed I could safely leave it for later.
But those aren't always the same thing.
Some things genuinely can wait, and there is no problem with that. The difficulty comes when a task looks harmless simply because its consequences haven't appeared yet.
When something is part of a larger process, its significance may not become obvious until the next step arrives. By then, postponing the original task may have created extra work that could have been avoided.
The address itself wasn't an emergency, the passport situation was, and I'd confused the two.
What I Think About Now
I still have unfinished tasks, and I still tell myself I'll do something tomorrow. I'm not going to pretend that one trip to Brussels permanently cured my procrastination.
What changed is much simpler.
When I notice a small task that I keep pushing aside, I try to understand why. If my only reason is that it feels too small to matter, I pay a little more attention to it.
A task may genuinely be something I can leave until later. But if I realise that another person, document, appointment, or process is waiting on it, I look at it differently.
I also find this useful when I have a long list of administrative jobs. The boring ones are often the easiest to keep moving to tomorrow because there is no immediate reward for finishing them.
And sometimes tomorrow is perfectly fine.
But sometimes tomorrow becomes a problem.
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| A small, forgotten task can sometimes turn a quiet day into an unexpected trip. |
What Moving House Taught Me About Productivity
Moving house taught me something I hadn't expected to learn about productivity.
Being productive isn't only about finishing difficult tasks or getting through a long to-do list. It is also about noticing which small things may have consequences beyond the task itself.
I don't think I needed a complicated productivity system after my experience in Brussels. I needed to look a little further ahead.
The question that stayed with me was simple: What does this lead to that I haven't thought about yet?
I find that question useful whenever something seems so minor that I'm tempted to dismiss it without thinking. Not every five-minute task needs immediate attention, and not everything needs to become urgent. But a small task can deserve another look when something else relies on it.
My mistake wasn't that I couldn't complete the address change. I simply underestimated where that one piece of unfinished paperwork could matter.
That is probably the part of the experience I will remember.
I had been trying to finish everything after moving house, and I thought the final small task could wait. A few months later, I was travelling from Bruges to Brussels because it hadn't.
Now, when I look at a task and think, "I'll do it tomorrow," I sometimes stop for a second and wonder whether tomorrow really is the best place for it.
With love and gratitude, thank you for reading.
Bitty
Brugge, Belgium 🇧🇪
9th October 2026
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