Coming back to something you abandoned is harder than starting it was, and the reason is worth knowing. You are not just facing the task again. You are facing the task, plus the work of reconstructing where you got to, plus whatever you have decided your abandoning it says about you.
Only one of those three is actually the task. The other two are what make the second attempt feel heavier than the first, and both can be reduced.
The reconstruction is the real cost
Most of the resistance to picking something up is not laziness. It is the accurate expectation that you will spend twenty minutes working out what you already did before you can do anything new.
Which forms were filled in. Whether you sent the email. What the person said. Where the reference number went. That work is genuinely tedious, your brain knows it is coming, and it is a large part of why the thing has sat for a month.
What to leave behind when you stop
Three lines when you put something down, which turn a twenty minute restart into a two minute one.
3 things to do
Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.
Do not restart from the beginning
The instinct on returning is to go back to the start and re-read everything, which feels responsible and is usually a way of not resuming. It also makes the whole thing feel larger than it is.
Go straight to the next action instead. If it turns out you needed context, you will find that out in about a minute, which is much cheaper than reviewing everything first.
The story about yourself is optional
There is a version of this where abandoning something becomes evidence about what sort of person you are, and that version makes returning much harder, because now picking it up means admitting to something.
Nothing was lost by stopping. The task is exactly where you left it, indifferent to how long it sat. A month of not doing something is not a month of failing at it, whatever a productivity app with a streak counter has implied.