How to Stop Procrastinating

Regardless of how many productivity books we've bought and haven't read or how many Matt and Tom videos we've watched, we all struggle with procrastination, but procrastination is nothing new. Ten thousand years ago, ancient Greek philosophers even had a word for It is a crazier meaning to act against our better judgment by doing one thing even though we know we should be doing something else, but despite its ancient history, we probably It is even more common today, since we live in a world full of distractions and perfect temptations to procrastinate. Are we over it? Hello friends, welcome back to the channel if you are new here.

My name is Ali. I am a doctor and work in the UK. On this channel we explore the strategies and tools that help us live healthier, happier and more productive lives. Even for a self-proclaimed productivity guru like me, one of my biggest struggles in life is overcoming procrastination, so why do we procrastinate? Well, I'm glad you asked because procrastination is the perfect example of something called present bias. The present bias is this idea. that I can set any goal I want for my future self, but it's my present self sitting here right now that really has to do the action to get there and when it comes to choosing between doing some exercise or watching some episodes of Hunter x Hunter , we can I always say well, I'll do the workout tomorrow and our present self will always prefer the short-term instant gratification of watching random anime over the long-term goal of becoming a Gymshark athlete.

A 2013 study by famous researcher in the field of procrastination. Dr. Tim Pitchell called procrastination the primacy of short-term mood repair over the long-term pursuit of planned actions; In other words, procrastination is more about focusing on the immediate urgency of managing negative moods and pushing the problem away rather than moving forward with the problem. task in the present moment the strange thing is that at certain times we can't afford to postpone things, like when I'm at work at the hospital, I can't just postpone someone's treatment until tomorrow, the idea of ​​delaying it because it doesn't Ni It doesn't even cross my mind to want to put in a cannula, or so I tell people, but when I have the space and freedom to manage my own time at home, I can always keep putting things off until the next day and think rationally.

We all know that procrastination is objectively bad for us, as for me, one of my biggest fears in life is being chained to a job that I may not enjoy and I know that now I am of the age and I have the opportunity. Don't procrastinate and build towards the future, where I have the freedom to do what I want and procrastination actively prevents me from doing it, but the good news is that we can do something about it and there is a simple formula to overcome it. procrastination that I discovered in the last few years and that really helped me personally fight the battle of procrastination.

Firstly, let's talk about motivation and there was a blog post I came across a few years ago that was a real paradigm shift. In my opinion, in terms of how I think about motivation, I used to think that you need motivation to do something, but it's actually the other way around, you do things and then the motivation follows naturally and this is something that Jeff Hayden talks about. In his book, the motivation myth talks about whether we have this idea of ​​motivation or it is wrong, he says that motivation is not something you have, it is something you get, he says that motivation is not the cause of action, it is the result of the action.

It's like action comes first, motivation comes later, so the way I think about it is I try to erase the word motivation from my vocabulary and instead think about it in terms of discipline or in terms of habits. Discipline is energy that we have put into the system, we are using our willpower, we are being disciplined, we are doing what we do, but once we do it often enough, it becomes a habit and we don't need willpower. to make habits like I don't need to. willpower to brush my teeth every night for the most part, but I need a supplement to get up and go to the gym because going to the gym hasn't become a habit yet, so the first part of this formula to overcome procrastination was understanding the motivation, the second.

Part of it is about understanding momentum, and the key idea here is that most of the resistance we feel when performing a task is right in the act of starting. Steven Pressfield analyzes this idea of ​​resistance in his book The War of Art, where he describes resistance as a universal force that has the sole mission of keeping things the way they are, preventing action, creativity and progress; In other words, resistance provides the beating heart of procrastination, but as soon as we cross this line of action, the pain of procrastination begins to subside and therefore the idea is that the difficult thing is not doing the work. , but starting the work, that is the problem.

It's like you have a ball at the top of a hill and you can't get the ball to move unless you physically push it, but once you've pushed it, it starts rolling down the hill and then the momentum carries it forward, so if I feel like I'm struggling with procrastination, I know the real problem is in that initial push, it's just getting started and I have three rules that I try to use if I'm having a hard time getting started doing something. First, we have the two-minute rule. The two-minute rule is a concept proposed by productivity guru David Allen in his book Getting Things Done and The main idea is that if you have a pending task that can be done in less than two minutes, then you should do it immediate, so if I'm

procrastinating

on something that I know will take less than two minutes, I'll try.

I'm going to do my best to do it and I'm going to have this mantra that no, no, I have to follow David Allen's two minute rule, so if it comes down to I don't know how to refill my water bottle or, you know, save a coffee cup or mug. in the kitchen and washing it, I know that all of that will take less than two minutes so I forced myself to do it, it's a two minute rule, but if it takes longer I'll write it down, but clearly there are things. what we have to do, that's obviously going to take longer than two minutes, so we can't trick our brain into thinking okay, it's only going to be two minutes and that's where the five minute rule comes in.

The rule is simple: if I'm

procrastinating

on something I have to do, I tell myself I'm only going to do it for five minutes. Some people call this the thirty minute rule. The twenty minute rule. The ten minute rule. It doesn't really matter, the point is that we are tricking our brain into thinking that all we want to do is do the thing, do the work for a small period of time, so when I was procrastinating filming this video, what made me I said to myself that's all. all you have to do is record the intro, it will take five minutes and then you can

stop

if you want, but here I am, three hours later, still struggling to film the video because the problem is not starting or continuing to do it. work aside from the two minute rule and the five minute rule, the third rule that I like to follow is the mental activation rule and that is if I feel like I'm in a depression, which usually happens right after lunch or At night when I get home from work and I can't really be bothered to do anything, I'm putting off filming the videos or whatever I have to do and the mental activation rule is that when I recognize that feeling, A kind of fog in my mind that's like oh, I can't do anything at that moment.

I need to do something to stimulate my mind. If it's before 2pm, then I'll make myself a cup of caffeinated coffee, but. if they are after 2 p.m. m., I like to use a non-pharmacological method and that is by doing an online course on shiny, which very kindly sponsors this video. If you haven't heard, shiny is a fantastic platform for math and computer science courses. The courses are super interactive and have a lot of problems along the way, so the idea is that they teach you a little bit of something and then solve some type of interactive problem to help activate your mind and get you out of that procrastination.

It falls apart and you learn something along the way. I really enjoyed working on the computer science courses at Brilliant. They have a fantastic introduction to computer science, introduction to algorithms and also more complicated topics like neural network machine learning and they also have a good course on Python basics and also an advanced Python. Python, being the most popular programming language in the world, works brilliantly on all platforms and is the perfect way to boost your mind to learn something useful and at the same time overcome the productivity slump, so if that sums up your street then head over to shiny.org slash ali and the first 200 people to click that link in the video description will get 20 off the annual premium subscription so we've talked about the simple formula to overcome procrastination first of all it's understand motivation, secondly.

It is understanding the impulse and then we have talked about three rules to get out of depression: the two-minute rule, the five-minute rule and the rule of mental activation. If you want to hear more, you should definitely check out my book club video on The Motivation Myth, it's pretty good and will be linked in the playlist here along with some other videos that you might find helpful. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. Bye bye.