How to Stop Procrastinating

Welcome to solved, this self-help podcast for smart people. My name is Mark, Manson three-time number one New York Times bestselling author. And this is my co-host and longtime lead researcher Drew. Bernie now, Drew and I have been in the personal growth and mental health space for a combined 30 years now. And we've had enough, we've had enough of the bullshit empty promises and fake Solutions every episode of solved.

Our goal is to create the most comprehensive evidence-based value delivering podcast on Earth on that specific topic. And today's topic is procrastination. Now the catch of solved is that whatever topic we cover our goal is that it is the last time you will ever feel a need to listen to a podcast on that topic. And this is the last time we can make an episode covering this topic.

Therefore, our promise to you is that if you make the commitment to get through the entire episode and implement the advice, your procrastination will be solved. Drew. I have two things to say before we get started. Okay? Before we solve procrastination for the entire world. You're welcome everybody. First thing is so listeners,

don't know this. But this is the second episode that's going out of this podcast but it this is actually the first one we're recording and ironically we procrastinated this episode like three months. How many months did it take us to shoot the streets? So be confident listener that you're you're hosts are experts up there with the topic here about to discuss. Yes, exactly.

And then the second thing I want to say is is just I want to get in before all of the comments from people who are gonna say, oh, I'll listen to this later. You're not funny. You're not same joke. I've been doing this for 15 years every time I create any content around procrastination. The first comment is always, I'll get to this later. And I'm like, yeah, you're very cute. Those people haven't even made it that far yet, know this far yet. So, yeah, that's true.

So, all right, so today Is procrastination. We are solving procrastination. Just a reminder to The Listener, the whole premise of this podcast is that this is the last podcast that you should ever have to listen to on this topic. Drew, and I, and our research team have gone. Just absurdly in-depth researching trying to understand this topic. It is this episode is absolutely

comprehensive. It is everything you need to know about procrastination and then some you are probably going to want to vomit when you hear the word procrastination, by the end of this. But the goal is that you don't have to ever listen anything about procrastination ever again. You don't have to read another book. You don't have to take another seminar, it's all here. So first, some statistics procrastination is something that pretty much everybody

struggles with. This is not surprising 95% of adults report procrastinating at least some of the time to me the most surprising part of that is. Who the fuck are the five percent? Yeah, show me. These superhuman robots that never procrastinate. Yeah, I think 5% of people are liars 42% of adults report, procrastinating regularly and then 25% of adults. Report being chronic procrastinators, which is essentially means that you are just literally procrastinating

everything all the time, right? Anything you try to do. You end up procrastinating, which that is, that's a shocking amount. 25% of people. So this is a huge problem. This is like This is a massive Affliction that you know, gets to us all. So some of the things that we're going to go through Procrastination as a topic is really interesting because it is it is such a common human occurrence that there is thought on it going back, 2500 years.

So we went back 2500 Years and we're going to cover basically the entire Corpus of human thought and approach towards procrastination, since the beginning of civilization.

And it's actually kind of surprising because a lot of things that we take to be true or a lot of our assumptions of what procrastination is. Our relatively modern, they're not, they're pretty recent and and, you know, people in the agent world or people times wouldn't necessarily agree with us and how we approach the topic of progress, the nation. Ultimately, we're going to get to the bottom of what is procrastination? What like fundamentally like,

what is happening in your brain? What is happening? Psychologically, when you're procrastinating something, when you're not doing the thing, you know, you should be doing. And why does it happen? Why does it even possible, Right? Like if I know something is good for me. Like, Why is It possible that I can choose not to do that. That like kind of doesn't make sense in a certain philosophical way. Of course, we're going to cover all the latest research on

procrastination. We're actually going to cover the entire history of research on procrastination and because a lot of it got it wrong and a lot of the conventional wisdom and typical self-help advice today. Is based on that old research that got it wrong and the new research is says some things quite different than maybe what you're expecting.

And, of course, we are going to go through, at least a dozen different tactics and strategies that the listener can Implement to help lessen procrastination in their lives. I think if there's one thing that I've learned preparing for this episode, Drew is that I don't think procrastinations ever something that we just like, completely get rid of, I think it is. It just seems to be kind of a side effect or a cost of being humans who have agency and have

complex brains. We'll get more into that but I do think it is incumbent on all of us to do all the things that we can to lessen or mitigate the procrastination in our lives. And I do think that is very much attainable for most people relatively quickly. So, before we get into it, anything you want to add Drew. Um, what are you most excited for? I mean this you procrastinating? Oh God. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. This is a very common, very

pervasive problem. And we all struggle with it. And I think there's just there's a tragedy kind of a tragic side to it as well, because you know what, what else is there to do, but do the things you want to do in life, right? And then we put those things, those very things off. So I think a lot of people are going to find. There's just going to be a big nod fest going on while you're listening to this. And yeah, I'm excited to get into it because it's something I struggle with quite a bit.

I don't know if I'm a chronic procrastinator but I've there's chronic strains of procrastination that I sometimes. Run into for sure sure. I have a lot of experience with this, just being an author of person for my entire career so we'll we'll get into that.

And you mentioned something which is like kind of the tragedy of it. Is that what will actually discover later on the episode is that the proportion of procrastination is actually Directly correlated to how important we see a task being in our lives. So it's like the more important. The task is, the more likely we are to procrastinate it, which is So screwed up, right? Yeah, like what? Like, that's so unfair.

Why does that happen? Yeah, I'm digging into why that is. But yeah, it's fascinating. But before we dive in, there's gonna be a lot of information in this podcast in between me and you and our research team. I think we went through like what 13 14 books and 100

research articles. So the help everyone get through this, we put together a companion, PDF guide, it's 65 Pages. Includes a full summary of the show, all of our citations and references has book recommendations, and it includes some practical takeaways and lessons as well. So if you're listening to this you can get the PDF guide for free by going to solved. Podcast.com slash procrastination that's solved. Podcast.com slash procrastination.

The link is all in the description if you want to get through there. All right let's get started. Okay so let's start off with a couple definitions for us because it I was actually surprised how hard it was to actually pin down a technical definition of procrastination.

And even the one that I chose as we'll see, there's a little bit of wiggle room with it. So there's a researcher named Pierce Steel in up in Canada. He did a big meaty analysis in 2007 which is basically what A meta-analysis is for Listeners is that it's when a researcher takes all of the relevant studies or data and then kind of like, finds a way to combine

them into like a super study. So this guy steals did this in 2007. And he crafted this definition of procrastination, based on all the research at the time, which is this Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily, delaying something, despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so. And when I look at this, I kind of like break it down in the three factors. So the first factor is an unnecessary delay, right? I think this is important because prioritization is not

procrastination. Like, if my plan is to write a script this morning but then my wife gets in a car accident and I go to the hospital. Like, that's not procrastination because something more important has now interfered. It's only when the delays completely unnecessary in fabricated, the second one is that there are negative consequences. So, a lot of times we need to delay, something that are actually are not negative consequences. There are plenty of things that

you can delay. And There's actually nothing that immediately. There's no immediate feedback, that makes you feel bad for that. I think this is why so many people. Procrastinate things like working out or eating well because the that feedback loop is so insanely long.

You know, it's like 10, 20, 30 years before you actually experience the repercussion for that decision, it's very easy to convince yourself that like there is no downside to eating the pizza tonight and sit on the couch for another day. And then finally, the third factor is despite knowing and

this is where it gets tricky. Like I actually found this whole definition very interesting because all three of these factors are ultimately subjective, like who says a delay is unnecessary who's to decide what's necessary and what's not necessary, right? Who's to say, what a negative consequences like you say potato, I say potato and who says that you're aware or that you know my personal experience is that most of my procrastination is.

I'm I'm usually bullshiting myself on all three of these factors. I've convinced myself that there is no any Of consequence that's going to happen or the negative consequences, very minor. It's not a big deal. I've convinced myself that the delay is actually extremely necessary like like when else. Am I going to be able to watch this Netflix show if not for right now? And and then of course, I I bulshit myself of saying that

like I'm aware. I I know that this is gonna cost a day it's like well who knows, right? Like maybe you know a book will write itself. Yeah. Right. It happens all the time. I definitely ran into this too and talking with people about this and can I prepping with this? And just talk with people around my life too, I definitely ran into this. They're like well is it so bad that you put this off, is there? Yes a lot of that that goes into it. So yeah, it's very subjective. It's yeah.

And it is there's a whole question around this of awareness and knowledge which is actually very much. What we'll get into that, we're getting a little bit ahead of

myself. So the other thing that kind of surprised me and I guess well I guess it makes sense is that there is a cultural element to this that I think is worth I seen at least just for a few minutes especially because I know the audience for this podcast is extremely International. So it turns out the procrastination is to a certain extent, culturally defined or

culturally relative. There are some cultures where showing up late, it's not a huge deal, turning something in late is not really judged or viewed as something negative. It actually reminded me. So I lived in Brazil for a few years. My wife is Brazilian, and it's one of the things that drove me crazy, as an American down there, said, if you, if you ever do a business meeting with a Brazilian first of all, they show up like 20 minutes late.

Then they spend the first 20 minutes like talking about their weekend and telling you about like their kids soccer game and you know, asking you what kind of beer you like and then it's like not until like minute 45 that you actually get to the thing that you're supposed to be talking about. And what's interesting down there is that if you ever like try to cut that time down, They see it as impolite and rude that they see you as doing something wrong.

Whereas, coming from American culture, where I'm like, dude, I was here at 10 a.m. it's 10:45. We still haven't even like talked about the business thing, I see it as rude, that they're like, wasting my time. So this concept of time and punctuality is very culturally dependent. And what I found interesting, there's a social psychologist from from the Netherlands named gear. Hofstead who did a bunch of work on just, like, cultural factors.

He I think he called it. I think it's called cultural Dimensions Theory, or something like that. And He talked about how. certain cultures have different orientations towards time and they have different understandings of like What is something that's done on time or not. So some cultures, very much prioritize like Western cultures or like English and cultures very much prioritize, like following the clock.

Like, if I say we're going to do a thing at 11:30 and you show up at 11:35 to me, you've now delayed things on necessarily it's causing negative consequences so on and so on,

it's procrastination. Some cultures, if you say 11:30 and they show up at 11:40, as long as they show up in a way that's like, feels Justified or is like emotionally consistent with the people around them, it's not seen as being late, you know, it's like oh well yeah, we're gonna be here 15 minutes ago but like I was hanging out with my, my brother and my cousin and we were having a great conversation and so it just took longer and like that scene as a completely Justified

response. And so, it's interesting that I guess coming back to the subjectivity of procrastination, some cultures, see it, very strictly in terms of task getting completed on time and some cultures, see it more in terms of like emotions and relationships like in Brazil. If I don't sit there and kind of chit chat for 20 minutes, that is seen as some sort of productive failure because I'm not doing the work to maintain the relationship with that person. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, it's just very

interesting. We're not going to spend a ton of time on this, but I like I said, I'm bringing it up simply because we do have a big International audience.

They're going to be people listening to this and Latin America and the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, and some of these places that are not so rigid with the clock itself, they're more kind of emotional social, and emotionally based, and it's just worth considering, and I think it really just comes back to I think probably a more effective way to just frame this entire discussion is Why do we consistently fail at? Doing the things, we wish we could do right?

Like we have things that we know are good for us. And we want to do them yet. We don't do them. Let's go back. I think the best way, I decided the best way to do this is to just go start at the beginning. So the first recorded discussion of procrastination and what what it is, and why it happens does start with Plato. He is a few dialogues that get into it.

The first one is called protagoras, there's a quote from Socrates in there, he says, surely no one goes willingly towards the bad or what he believes to be bad. Neither is it in human nature. So it seems to want to go toward what One Believes to be bad in the good. Plato puts for us, like a really interesting argument. He kind of argues a procrastination like doesn't actually exist. They'll like, if you're not doing the thing, it's because deep down you actually don't

think it's worth doing that. If you thought it was worth doing, then you would just go do it. And it's kind of interesting that the earliest take ever on procrastination is like super spicy like Like that, I wouldn't expect that. I would expect something like, you know, I don't know. Start small or, you know, like, Give yourself a little reward, a piece of candy.

If you, like, if you do something that that you've been putting off, and it's played, it was like, no, no. It's it's impossible to do something that you don't think, is the best thing to do, which I think just into like our gut intuition. Everybody's got into it and it's just like, that doesn't feel true. Does that feel true to you? Absolutely not like definition. You brought up early and we'll get into that a little more too. But right, despite knowing part, right?

I just, I feel like anybody, you talk to they've probably got at least a handful of things in our life that like, they know or good for them and they don't do it. So Plato's full shit. No, that's so. Okay, I'm being I'm being facetious. The interesting thing about Plato is. So all almost all of his work is written in the forms of dialogues and those dialogues revolve around.

It's usually soccer tees, having a debate, a philosophical debate with some other prominent person and in most of the dialogue, Socrates just kind of like clowns the the person and there's a lot of ambiguity around Plato's work for a couple reasons. One is it's sometimes unclear, because Socrates was a real person and Plato was somebody who like followed and learned from Socrates. So, in the early dialogues, it is hard to differentiate between

what Socrates thought. And what in Plato is just reporting what he thought versus like, what Plato actually thinks. And he's just putting his words in the Socrates as mouth. So, there's a lot of ambiguity around that and talk to tease. Had a reputation for being a bit of a troll. The second piece of ambiguity is that sometimes Plato would just create a dialogue to just kind of raise points and play with those ideas. And because they, it was a conversation between two

historical figures. It's sometimes unclear if he actually believes what, he's right. So later on in the Republic, which was actually seems to be very clearly. Plato's thoughts and ideas, he kind of backtracked, a little bit and and the Republicans the first place that you see this idea of what he called the tripartite soul. And its he basically says that the the mind is divided up into three different parts and it's actually pretty incredible because this idea still persists

today. Like, you still see it all over psychology and philosophy today. So the three parts of the mind is he called the rational, the spirit and appetite of One way to think about that is that there's like the animalistic self, the part of you that has hunger and impulses and Cravings. There's the emotional part of yourself, that's the spirit right? It's the anger. It's the love.

It's the passion, it's the joy, it's the sadness, and then you have the rationale, which is like the calculating and the logic and all that stuff. Plato's argument, is that He used the metaphor of a chariot which is that the rational Part of Yourself is like the driver and a chariot, and he has two horses in front of him. One horse is the animalistic. Appetite of Part of Yourself. The other one is the spirit emotional part of yourself, and it is your job to guide those

horses in the right direction. but, They're wild horses and so sometimes they're going to Buck and they're gonna run and they're gonna go try to go in different directions and it's gonna be chaotic, right? And in the Republic, Plato said that it is Essentially what procrastination is or back, then they called it a crazy. This experience of not doing the thing that you know you should do is when Essentially your horses, don't go where you want them to go.

It's like, Hey, we should go to the gym and the horses just start going towards the fridge for another piece of gold Pizza in your, like, wait, no. The next thing you know, you're there and so I feel like that is a little bit more relatable and a little bit more understandable. But I think the takeaway from Plato is that He ultimately saw a crazier. or procrastination, as a knowledge problem, it was Your problem isn't that you don't have willpower.

The problem isn't that you don't have discipline. The problem is that you just aren't aware enough of the repercussions of your choices. He kind of puts forth this argument that like if people were just more knowledgeable and educated on what their choices were causing in their life, they wouldn't make those choices. And I personally think this is a very idealistic view. I think it's, it feels nice. I mean, there's something to it clearly like knowledge.

Certainly does help probably at the margins, but I also just think it's, it's, I don't know. It's too, Like Roses and Rainbows. It doesn't match my personal experience and I don't think it matches. Most of the people that I know who really struggle with procrastination and not doing the right thing, But it is. It's a nice. it feels good to believe, it feels good to believe like, oh, if I just understood what I was doing when I was going back to the fridge and set of the gym, then I

wouldn't do it right? And you actually like you still see this a lot, it's funny. I'm gonna I'm not gonna name names but I was on social media the other day. And I see this stuff all the time. So this is a very prominent person in our space posted this. They said your entire life will change. When you realize that you have to sacrifice short-term freedom in order to earn long-term instant gratification will kill

your dreams. It has over a quarter of a million views and 7,000 likes, right? No shit Sherlock, right? Like everybody knows that the information, we all know that. Like it, it's not you're not moving the needle by telling us that. But I think there is a part of ourselves a very idealistic part of ourselves that just feels like if we were reminded of that, then it wouldn't be so hard.

It would be a little bit easier to get up early in the morning and, you know, put on your workout shoes and, you know, start with the hardest task of your day. And, you know, all those things that we wish we could do. So that's kind of the first school thought. We're gonna return to it quite a bit, it like most of Plato's ideas. They never really go away.

It's interesting. We actually you and I talked to Pretty much the most prominent researcher on procrastination in the world, fuchsia, Sora. And even talking to her, she brought this up multiple times, this never really disappears, but it starts, it starts with Play-Doh.

Yeah, the second School thought. I want to bring up so around the same time the Buddha was doing his thing and Buddhism has an interesting kind of spin-off of the the platonic idea that I think is worth talking about just briefly, simply because I think when towards the end of the episode, when we talk about interventions and tactics and strategies, there is a little bit of the Buddhist Approach that I think makes sense.

So Buddhism saw procrastination is ignorance of oneself you know Plato saw it is like an ignorance of the consequences of your action. The Buddha saw it as an ignorance of your own cravings and desires, not understanding what your own motivations were which I think is a really interesting twists. And I, I actually think there's probably a lot more value in the Buddhist approach, like, I just

know from my own life. You know, I like, as you know, I went through this huge weight loss Journey over many years and a big component of that was like really understanding where my food cravings were coming from, what was causing my distractions when I couldn't focus or get any work done. And sure enough usually there's like some emotion underneath the

surface. That's like driving things and becoming aware of that or mindful of that, and then learning how to how to deal or negotiate with that emotion is super useful. So I I thought like the Buddhist Twist on the ignorance as on the procrastination, as a knowledge issue, I actually think there's It carries some water sticking with Eastern philosophy. Just want to touch really quick on Confucianism from. I'm not.

I'm by no means an expert on Confucianism but by the little bit of research I did it didn't seem like there was a whole lot directly written about it. But the interesting thing about Confucianism, Is that there's so much emphasis put on accountability and social pressure. Everything in Confucianism is kind of written in such a way of like, you have to do the right thing to honor your family, your Society, your your country, your Emperor, whatever. There's a nugget in there as well.

That's actually really important and useful that we will come back to much later, but that social pressure and accountability is like a legit thing. This finally brings us to Aristotle, so, Aristotle in the nickel Mackie, in that ethics, wrote quite a bit about equation or procrastination. He wrote quite a bit about why people don't do the things that they, they should be doing. And I have to say, dude like as somebody who Has studied the psychology around this for a decade.

Going back and reading Aristotle's. Take I'm like, Oh, he nailed it. Mmm like the dude. Just nailed it over like 2300 years ago. You just like In one chapter just like here's why we don't do the things that we know we should do. So Aristotle essentially. Here's like the super condensed version of what he says, Aristotle essentially saw procrastination as a skill issue. He said, like any other skill. We all are born terrible at it.

And then as we grow older, we develop and practice and habituate ourselves to it. And anybody can learn to do it. Anybody can practice it. Anybody can develop the skill or discipline and like any skill or discipline, some people are naturally gifted at it and some people are naturally not gifted at it, right? What's also interesting about this view is that he kind of puts his middle finger up to Play-Doh? He's just like dude, we all don't do the things. We know we should do.

Like we all know we should do certain things and we just fail to do that around you. Yeah seriously like it's like

wake up, man. But what I like about Aristotle as well, is that it's there was no moral judgment or shame attached to it. This is actually what super unique and interesting and like way ahead of his time, with Plato, it was there was a little bit of like, well, They're not doing the right thing just because they're they're ignorant, they're uneducated, they're not as privileged as you and I are right, they're not as enlightened as us, you know, in

the Buddhist view. There's if you're not doing the right thing, like you got to get right with yourself dude, like, you know, sit on a mat and meditate for. A few years and and like, figure out what the hell is going on in your head and, you know, the Confucius system. It's like, you're just honoring your family and you're screwing up Society, like get your shit together. Aristotle's. Like hey, man, We all struggle

with this. This is a journey for all of us and it's something that any of us can get better. At any of us can practice it, we can develop the right habits, we can develop the right skills and you can, and you can improve upon it. And so I think, The first

takeaway around. All of this, is that ultimately there are like there's a little bit of Truth in everything that each of those schools of thought said they're you know, some of it is knowledge of the repercussions that are going to happen if you I don't know stay up to 4 a.m. on a Tuesday night. Some of it is understanding your own internal. Awareness and emotions and you know what's motivating?

You, what's driving you? Some of it is finding good accountability systems and social pressure to like nudge, you in the right direction. But ultimately This is a skill issue, it's something that you can learn. It's something you can get better at and It's something that you have to to try to get better at. So I'm curious Drew Have you seen your procrastination as a skill issue? Because I certainly have it most of my life. I'm curious what your

experience. Yeah, I think there is just a lot of that self-judgment that goes into it and I've always thought. Yeah, if I just knew a little bit more, had the right information at the right time, then I would be a better person so, you know, morally corrupt. Yeah, and and bankrupt in my ways but um, yeah, it's it's interesting that each one of these kind of schools of thought took one angle at it and it's like yeah you got that right? But you got this completely wrong.

Yeah. And I feel that Within Myself even too today, so yeah, yeah. I think I started seeing it as a skill issue. Relatively late.

Yeah in my life. Yeah I would say like well into adulthood like I vague I have vague memories in my 20s of like starting my first business and just being like incredibly upset at myself, for playing too many video games or not being able to finish a work task in the amount of time that I allotted for myself, like just really chastising myself and beating myself up over it. And I feel like that's That's the default for most people like there is a shame and there's a

moral judgment. And what I found super fascinating and surprising is that that moral judgment is is for the most part, didn't exist in the ancient world you know, Aristotle saw saw A crazier or doing the right action. He saw, he had, he had a whole ethical system around virtue, right? The virtues were like the right way to live, but Aristotle was very aware that, like, nobody is virtuous all the time. The virtues are never achieved.

They're just something that you work towards and you get better at over time and everybody's gonna screw it up. Everybody's gonna fail to a certain extent. And so, the only thing you can do is just try to fail less. And if you look at the stoics, there's there's a very similar vein there, right? It's like you should try to be virtuous. The Stokes were a little bit more platonic and that they saw it as more of a like, a

knowledge problem. But it's still the same attitude of, like, Nobody's virtuous all the time. Nobody gets it right all the time. Just get up each day and try to do your best and try not to dwell on your failures and things like that. And it's it's so fascinating like going back and looking at those takes Because that doesn't feel like anything I heard

growing, right? I, I heard that you were, you are a immoral piece of shit who's irresponsible and his failing yourself and failing, your future and failing, your family and like it is. There's so much moral judgment especially, I guess in Western culture, but I think Eastern culture as well. There's so much moral judgment wrapped up in your ability to be disciplined, you know, like I think about people who are obese or overweight like one of the

huge judgments against them. It's not about the unhealthiness it's about the apparent, lack of discipline, right? Like I've been around people who have Said really mean things about overweight people and it's it's it's never about the weight. It's about the like why can't they control themselves? Why can't they like, Keep food out of the right? How could you let yourself go to

that extent, right? Yeah, and and we have similar judgments like if somebody loses their job or if somebody doesn't make a lot of money, It's there's like a moral judgment it's and we just we joked about it earlier, right? It's like if I showed up an hour late for this shoot, You would judge me? Yes, yes, I would. Yes, you so, it's interesting that that didn't always exist like that, that is it started somewhere along the line and drum roll, do you want to guess where it started?

I have a good idea. Why don't you go ahead? I'll give you one. It starts with a Chris and it ends with a January. Yeah. One of the seven. Deadly sins. Exactly, exactly. so interestingly there's actually kind of a particular moment in time that I think you can point to where you can, you can actually say this is the moment that Procrastination in a failure, to act became a moral problem. It became a shame ridden failure, that that signals that you are a piece of scum,

essentially, right? So, the story actually starts in in the late, fourth Century, Saint Augustine of Hippo was born in, what his present day Tunisia and he would go on and become basically the most important theologian. Of pretty much anybody who didn't live during Christ's time. And, but it's interesting because Augustine. He was born Pagan, he grew up. He was a rich kid. His parents were like Aristocrats. He was kind of like that douchebag with a Ferrari in high school.

Like he just not a care in the world. Screwed around partied. All the time was drinking a lot seeing a bit bunch of different girls. Just life was on easy mode. But the interesting thing about August was that he was very smart and he was very

philosophical. And so he was, he became curious about a bunch of different religions and I guess you call him Colts throughout his early adult life, he kind of dabbled in a bunch of different schools of thought, Now, the interesting thing is that the Roman Empire had just converted to Christianity, maybe 50 years prior and you have this gigantic Empire. And what essentially was kind of this Fringe cult religion, which was Christianity, suddenly

becomes the state religion and is now expected to be followed by like tens of millions of people. So there was kind of this vacuum of Strong theological knowledge that didn't exist. At the time, there was like an early opportunity to fill that void that theological void. Like they, they needed like very smart people to kind of like create Frameworks and philosophical ideas that the masses could understand and Implement to their lives and so

Augustine. would end up filling that void to a great extent and he would be the one who would take Christian thought and combine it with Plato and Kind of turn it into. Early. Christian theology in the Catholic theology as we understand it today. But the way he went about that is super fascinating. So he was this Playboy, he screwing around all the time and he's like drifting, you know, from this religious sect to this religious sect and by the time he gets his late 20s, he's he

becomes pretty self-loathing. Like I think he he's at this point, he's self-aware that he's a very smart, talented guy who's been handed every privilege and advantage in the world. And he's done nothing with it. He's like absolutely wasted everything. So this goes on for a number of years and he's just, he's really looking for something to commit himself to and all the while he's like, Kind of discussed it with himself. He's like why do I keep doing that? Why do I keep drinking?

Why do I keep hooking up with all these women that I don't care about and like why can't I just get my shit together and One day, he's sitting in a garden and he's reading. And he hears a child singing outside saying, pick up the paper and read it, pick up the paper and read it singing, this like little lullaby or something. And so he happens to look down and he sees a parchment paper He's like, huh? So he picks it up and he starts

reading it and it's Paul's letter to the Romans. verse 13, 13 and it says, Let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in the sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. And Augustine claims that he converted the Christianity right there on the spot. He was like This is it. This is a sign. Drops.

Everything immediately goes to Seminary. trains to become a priest and then within a couple years goes on to become The most prolific and successful Christian preacher. In the Roman Empire, he gave I think 2,500 sermons or something like that of which like half are still around today. He was just like a prodigy of preaching, I guess. Yeah. But what's super interesting is that he has this personal history of like he was kind of

this. He's like this Playboy wasting his life and then he finds God and God Saves him, right? Like he isn't drinking anymore. He doesn't fornicate anymore. He doesn't Screw around anymore, he's like very diligent and disciplined, and he's working his ass off, and he's like, achieving his potential and he attributes all of this to God. So, in his book, The confessions, he talks about a

crazier, he talks about. He gives an example of when he was a boy of stealing fruit from a local market, and he talks about how He stole the fruit. He didn't need the fruit. He wasn't hungry, he didn't need the money. He wasn't going to sell it. Anybody else? He stole it for the thrill of it? He stole it because it was something exciting to do to kind of impress. The other boys that he was

hanging out with and, He looked at that. and with the very platonic lens, he said, There was a lower desire, they're the lower values of the excitement, the thrill impressing, the the people around him, but then there's this higher level value of fairness and Justice and, you know, not being selfish.

And his argument was that any time we sacrifice that higher level value for the lower level value that we succumb to our animalistic, impulses, or urges, or desires at the cost of Kind of the higher level rational intellectual spiritual values. Not only is that a failure, that's a sin that is You're not, it's not, you're not violating yourself, you're not violating your family, you're violating God, because God's Wills that you do these other things. And you are.

Failing God's will. To indulge your animalistic. Behaviors, and impulses and cravings. And as soon as God enters the picture, Shit gets moral really quick, right? Like, it's, it's if you're Suddenly, It's like you're procrastination or your failure to do the right thing for yourself. It's not about failing yourself. Like now, you are actually sinning and becoming a corrupt individual and that is shameful

and you should repent. And you the only path the Salvation is to surrender yourself even further to God, and to Jesus, and to give even more of your life over to the church. And so, this is where you see the shame and doctrination really begin. and, Without getting into like two, extensive of a commentary on Christianity

itself. It was interesting, reading Augustine, In this context because I couldn't help but but view it as like it's like a multi-level marketing scheme or something, where like it's basically like you create the problem for for people and then you sell them the solution,

right? So it's it really felt like, you know, Augustine is basically going around and taking this experience that we all have and we all already kind of feel bad about in our little bit sensitive about and he's like, hey that thing that you feel bad about that means you're a piece of shit and God, God hates you. And the only way he's going to stop hating you is if you come to church and confess all your sense? I don't like, man, that is

that's like That's aggressive. Let's say the least and and look we're not here to comment on religion or or make any sort of like theological arguments but Let's just say from a mental health point of view, not operate not optimal from a productivity point of view, also not optimal. Okay, yeah. So we can't, we get into the shame stuff then, yeah. I mean some of that right now because like I said, I think it's a big misconception that

most people have most people. What I found is that a lot of people are afraid to relinquish that self-judgment, right? Because they're afraid. If they go easy on themselves quote, unquote, then they they won't do the thing, right? Right. And it's like, actually the research says the opposite, the exact opposite. So what happens a lot? Yeah. So I I think this is like a useful place to make this point and kind of discuss like, why this happens or what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, they do find that exactly that people who experience a lot of Shame around things like procrastination or any things that they deem to be character flaws. They actually end up putting things off more, they don't end up. Doing them more and it's because that shame creates this kind of motivation, for avoidance around these things, you don't want. To feel that shame. And so, you just avoid doing it all together in the first place.

And you get this very, very vicious cycle that goes along with it. So you there's this self-judgment cycle that comes with it, right? You feel ashamed for delaying that this shame makes you uncomfortable and to escape that shame that you feel. Now you further procrastinate, you delay, more you, distract yourself, you you give into those lower values that Augustine talked about. So that's the studies around. This have really found that it's the exact opposite.

This doesn't happen all the time but a lot of times it will be. Yeah, we have these intuitions around. Oh, I need to feel this way in order to get things done or I think my brain works this way. And so I'm just going to keep doing this when it's like, step back. There's actually a kind of deeper issue going on. Yeah, avoidance is really what what comes from that self-loathing and that shame? Yeah, well, at least to me some of the most interesting research that I saw around.

This was actually workplace research so they actually there are a number of studies that they like looked at how shame-based the feedback is in certain workplaces and then they tracked employee productivity and also absenteeism how many people stuck around basically looking at like who like who has the asshole boss and like how how do employees respond to that asshole boss and Surprise surprise shame-based workplaces.

They did one study on nurses in a hospital and they looked at supervisors, who would like shame the nurses for their mistakes and for for not completing, all their tasks or whatever. And sure enough those nurses Showed up less often the work. They got through fewer rounds. They spent less time with the patients and they quit more often. So yeah, I think some researchers too interpret that as you are violating. Your sense. Someone's sense of autonomy too.

Right? If you shame them you're saying you're a bad person. You don't have any control over whether or not you can do something about this. Yeah. Whereas if you're much more, gentle and much more compassionate about it, okay, this is how we fix it, goes back to the skills thing. Right. I was just gonna say we're gonna come back to seeing procrastination as a skill issue, a little bit later and it is Mind-boggling to me though. That like that. Got lost. Yeah. For thousands of years.

Yeah. When it was the norm before. Yeah, that was just how people thought yes. And then it completely got destroyed, right? Because it's it is what you do, see in this whole kind of Christian era. Through the medieval period and everything is just like if you don't do the right thing, it's because you're a bad person. If you if you can't get your work done you're a bad person and you screwed up and I don't I don't want to be around you, right again.

I still feel the residue of this, you know, like growing up in a western culture like and I, I know People who grew up in Confucian cultures experience this a lot too because that is all very shame. Yes, it's less about God, it's more about family when you grow up in that. It's so hard to escape it and and it is like I still catch myself like judging people 100%. Yeah. Just be like oh look at that guy like can't even get his shit together. You know.

Like what a joke. Yeah you judging other people or judging yourself, too again going back to the same thing and and this isn't just applicable to procrastination but anything where you kind of have this kind of self-loathing yourself crisis criticism. That's very loud. Yeah. Inside your head, it will create a voice and it's not approach, right? And so that's something to keep in mind all throughout this. So, what is the opposite of self-judgment or self?

Shaming, I self-acceptance, right? Yeah, self-compassion. Okay, what is that look like? Well, I hate myself. True right, how do I stop? Make make the self-loathing stop pretend I'm your friend, okay. If you heard me saying that you would be like, whoa, dude, yeah, cat take it easy on yourself, right?

And totally. This is kind of the standard advice to. A lot of people is when you're when you want to be more self-compassionate and kinder to yourself treat yourself like a friend step back, detach yourself a little bit from the whole situation and be like, okay, what's really going on here? How can I be a little bit more understanding of my own actions?

Yeah, and knowing some of these reasons having some self-awareness around these reasons why I'm doing this and being like, okay, I need to address these. Let's move forward, which I think is kind of the way things were even with Plato and his maybe a little bit muddy of thinking around procrastination. I still think there was a lot of that prior to this whole injection of Shame into the culture. Yeah, doing getting things done, that would be an interesting exercise.

I mean if if you're listening to this and this is something that you really struggle with like that could potentially be a really Useful exercise of like, write down your self-talk around this stuff and then go back later and read it and just probably be horrified by it. It's been there but it's it's a It's one of those things that we don't notice it when we do it to ourselves and that self-compassion does that creates that space for approach? Like saying instead of

avoidance? So if you're if you know you're you're in a safe space you know, in your own mind that opens up a space for exploring what's actually going on and then taking action, whereas again, the shame just creates a lot of avoidance. Yeah, the thing I like about self-compassion too, is that it's not and this is a point I

made in subtle art. Is that, you know, it's the flaw was self-esteem as a as a metric in my opinion is like it's It became through a lot of the research, it became a measurement of how people felt about themselves when they did good things, right? Whereas like, what you really want to measure is like, how do people feel about themselves

when things go bad, right? And that's so that's where the self-compassion comes in. It's like, okay, let's let's actually measure how you treat yourself when nothing is going, right? Because that's actually a probably a better or more accurate metric of your mental health, in your well-being, and your life satisfaction and all that stuff. So the other thing that's interesting with the self-compassion research is that a big component of it? A big step in.

It is a finding shared Humanity. It's funny because it's just Again thinking about this 95% of people so we opened with right like literally a survey asking people do you struggle with procrastination 95% of people said they do? Like I don't I'm not aware of any other problem that that scores that high know. Yeah, I in surveys. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. And I think it's about 5% of the population is considered to, so maybe that's where the 5% are.

I don't know. They're just or they're like Androids that are secretly walking Among Us. It was so interesting though, that when we were talking to to fuchsia Syrah like I actually asked asked her. I was like, lose 5%, actually exists and she said, absolutely. Can you imagine What the most feel like I wonder what like there's some downsides that too, right? Like sometimes you need to prioritize and sometimes you need to delay. Like what if you're jumping into

things a little too much. So maybe it's I don't know, maybe it's on a bell curve or something? I don't, I don't know. But It to me. Okay, getting off on a little bit of a tangent here but like to me a certain amount of progress. Yeah. Like an optimal level procrastination is probably not zero, right?

Because there is a certain weight That comes with like really, really important tasks in your life and that, that weight is intimidating and ensure as a human, you find ways to delay it, or put it off or avoid it and this way, or that kind of like that, I don't know. Maybe, maybe I'm being irrational here and like, kind of playing the same game with the, with the shame stuff where it's like, I'm afraid that. If I don't progress innate something, it means it doesn't

have weight or important. But like, I don't know. I kind of like that there are certain things in my life that intimidate me a little bit that make me anxious because it signifies to me that I'm doing something very worthwhile and I don't know. Yeah, I worry that. If I had zero progress in nation that I would just kind of see everything and like you said, a cycle path, I would just see

everything in my life. It's just another task to be done and you just get on with it and you don't, you know, what's the point and stressing over it? I, I would be curious any listeners out there who I don't know why they'd be listening to this. But like, if, for some reason, you are one of these freaks who does not procrastinate, I'd be very curious to hear ya from them, like, what their

experience is or why? Like what, what is your thought process, when, when there's a really important task in front of you? What is the emotional experience of that task? I'd be very curious. I actually just thought of something related to the self-compassion as well. Something else like it's funny when we're judging ourselves, I think we we get very skewed perceptions of what's actually normal.

Like I remember, I used to feel this back when I was writing all the time, which is like, I would set a goal for myself, right? Like I'm gonna publish three articles a week of at least 2000 words a piece, right? So 6000 words a week. Which is a really good clip of right app. And then if I didn't hit that expectation, I would judge myself. But then I go talk to other writers and they're like, man, I'm lucky if I get like 300

words in an entire day, right? So, it's like our understanding of like what is normal and expected and and like reasonable can often get completely warped in our own heads. It's when we're judging ourselves and so it's again kind of comes back to that subjectivity thing. Like the same way we can kind of bullshit ourselves in One Direction and tell ourselves that oh yeah I can you know I'll do it tomorrow it's not gonna be a big deal.

We can also bulshit ourselves in the other direction by saying, like oh you're you're absolutely horrible person, you know, you only worked out for 90 minutes, you should be working out for two hours because you're just lazy if you don't do that. So it's just It's useful to understand. I guess that our minds are just crazy and wrong and in all sorts of different directions and I can, it can screw us up especially when looking at ourselves.

Yeah, I have to say in prepping for both this episode and the last episode, I'm like, dude, aerosol got everything, right? Yeah, like, that guy nailed. Everything is a lot of credit. But yeah, it'll actually yeah, between happiness values and virtues and, and this stuff self-discipline and a crazy and procrastination and everything, like Aristotle nailed like half of psychology before there was such a thing as psychology. So Shout out their saddle. So like the 12th century.

There was a are an Arab scholar, living in present-day, Spain named avarice and he translated, he was the first person to translate Aristotle into lat back into Latin, which gave Europeans access to Aristotle. Again for the first time in almost 1000 years, which is mind blowing and sure enough quietly Aristotle started to go viral within European universities in among European scholars. It was just, it was mind-blowing

stuff to them. Keep in mind too that it wasn't just the psychology and the happiness and The Virtue stuff Aristotle. Like, literally invented the scientific method, he like, basically all of what is modern science. Started with Aristotle as well. So you start to see the the scientific method Begin the show up in around this time. People are thinking about empirical observation, experimentation, Documenting. What they see trying to measure understand things.

I mean I don't think it's any coincidence that Galileo and Copernicus show up within a generation or two after Aristotle is translated back in the Latin of course predictably the church has this horrible reaction, they try to ban it. They say it's heresy but there's a young student at the University of Paris at the time, the name of Thomas Aquinas and Thomas has like a very unique and interesting Talent which is he became famous very, very early in his life.

He was, he was a prodigy, I think he would end up going to University when he was like 15 or something and he studied theology became very successful very quickly. And he became famous for being very good at taking people who Were on two opposite ends of an argument and finding a way to synthesize them, finding like the common threads and finding a way to like make things make sense for everybody. so, he

studies Aristotle. His mind is blown. but the Rumblings going on around, is that the church is, like, not okay with this, but in his mind, he's like this stuff is so Powerful. It's so world changing. There's got to be a way to make this synthesized with Christian thought in theology. And so that became his life's work and eventually he published Summa theologica, which was his magnum opus, which is was essentially that it was bringing Aristotle and philosophy into the Christian.

Umbrella in a way that people can understand and that was acceptable to the church brought essentially brought Europe out of its its medieval period, intellectually into kind of what would eventually become the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and everything. So I can't over a state how important it is to bring back the idea that this is a skill issue. This is not a character issue, this is not a theological issue, it's a skill issue.

Procrastination is the skill issue and and it's interesting. There's there's this concept in psychology. a cold self-efficacy, which is basically a belief, That you can get better at something. and it's fascinating, because self-efficacy, Strongly correlates with success and almost anything you do. Essentially, the more you believe, you can get better at something, the more likely you are to get better at that thing. And I don't know, I just like everything I know about psychology.

I don't think it can be overstated the importance in the impact of bringing self-efficacy back. To the public that belief of like, we can be better. We can do things in this life that are better, right? Like I really do think kind of old school. Catholic theology is, is like. It's fatalism it's like God decides. There's this kind of Cosmological war going on between Heaven and Hell. We're all caught in the middle. All we can do is just ask for

forgiveness, right? Like, there's nothing we're all Sinners. We're all. We're all doomed. But like if we pray enough and ask for enough forgiveness and like, things are going to turn out. All right, in the next life, not in this life, this life is gonna be shit. It is shit, it's Gotta determined. Yeah, so I think just reintroducing self-efficacy back

into the population. It's just like, I can't I can't overstate how impactful that probably was, and then sure enough, like, Century or two later, you get the Reformation, you know, when Luther hammered the 95 Theses to the to the door. He was essentially saying they're like, we have control over the outcome, we can decide, we can improve our relationship with God, we can improve our lot in this life. We don't have to depend on the clergy. We don't have to depend on on

the church. There shouldn't be an intermediary between us, right? And sure, enough as protestantism arises, this is what they become known for, right. It's the old Protestant work ethic like because the idea is, is that if our Salvation is up to us in this life, and we have control over it, Then whoever works. The hardest is the most likely to be saved, right? Like God. God gives Fortune to people who work hard and deserve it.

And so, you see, you see these, these kind of philosophies emerge like Calvinism. Where it's there's a huge amount of moral value attached to industriousness that if you are diligent and hardworking, and you know, do all the right things in this world, you will be rewarded in this world, and in the next World by God and you deserve it. So, if you have nice things, awesome, you worked for it. You deserve it. So, on the one hand, we've brought self-efficacy back in the equation.

We've brought, you know, procrastination is a skill problem, back into the equation, that's good. But on the other hand, we still have the shame right? Because now it's like if you work your ass off and things aren't going well for you. Well God still is displeased with you. God, God does not look on you with with favor or Fortune. You, you must be doing something

wrong. There's still there's still moral attachment to material success, to your ability to do what you say you're going to do. Or accomplish things in the real world. So and in fact because there is so much moral and Theological weight placed on, I guess worldly outcomes, these early Protestants. You get this kind of insane perfectionism. And I think the group that really illustrates this is like the Puritans who came to America.

They were hardworking, they were diligent, they believe that, you know, if you did the right things and if you worked really hard you would get what you deserve and God would smile on you with Good Fortune but holy crap. They like judge the shit out of each other. Like there was an insane amount of perfectionism self-induced right onto those communities, right?

And it and it makes sense because it's like, if you if you're worldly, status is now being attached to your moral superiority or inferiority, it just adds that much extra pressure to everything you do. And so I think this is actually appropriate because I think as well, talk about later, like, a huge component of procrastination is perfectionism, is this feeling that you're not allowed to fail

that? You if things don't work out the way you want them to then, that is some sort of moral reflection on you as a terrible person. And so I'm curious, like, I know you are a Recovering perfectionist side. Yes, I'm curious how this is like, come up in your own life and what the research says around this. Yeah, yeah, definitely perfectionism. It feeds into procrastination. What? They find the research and I can vouch for that very much.

So in my life again the research shows that perfectionism. It's just it's another form of Shame. Basically, that causes you to avoid the things you need to do, it's an avoidance mechanism. Yeah, of sorts, it creates a lot of anxiety around certain tasks, so you end up avoiding them that way you are. So afraid of failing that you just don't even want to approach the tasks to begin with or you come up with all sorts of mental, gymnastics ways to, to

avoid those. So I need to wait, I need to have more information before I do this and you need to be better at this. So we're into the skills set now. Yeah, I need to be better at this and I need to have the skills in order to do this. And for that, I need to step back and develop these skills. That that's a evil Loop that I've gotten caught up in before I'm like oh I need to be better at this before I go do the thing

right? And so then I spend all my time trying to be better and set of doing like actually like doing the thing is what will make you better at it, right? But instead of actually just doing the thing, I try to do all this other stuff to prepare for. Exactly do research, this goes right up into today. This this happens in all sorts

of productivity systems people. You know like oh you need to just have the right system in place or have the right information in place and you'll you'll get there and very much feed into the very common problem of perfectionism. So what I'm hearing so far, it sounds like the story so far is that If I was to really simplify this is that we avoid things that are unpleasant. No duh often the mechanisms by which we judge ourselves or the expectations.

We place on ourselves around that avoidance. Only makes us feel worse and therefore avoid even more yes. Right. And so shame is one component of that, like, that's one form of it. It's like the more ashamed. I feel of my inability to do the things that I set out to do the worst.

I feel about doing them. Therefore the more I avoid them and you get in this downward spiral similarly with perfectionism The unrealistic expectations that you set on yourself, are make the task so intimidating and unpleasant that you find ways to avoid it. Which then makes you feel even worse and expect even more of yourself and then you end up in another kind of shit spiral. Let's transition in the Freud. Yeah, I actually have a cool little tidbit to, like, swing

into this and check it off. Okay, yeah, it's actually really fascinating. So, Freud Freud went to University in Vienna in mid-19th Century. And at the time, like, psychology didn't really exist, right? Wasn't really a thing. So Freud had a professor. His name was Franz Brinton Tano. and Professor, brentano, his kind of obsession and the thing that he would have eventually become most known for He was really in the Aristotle. Okay? And he loved the Kind of subjective.

What we would call today, the psychological side of aerosol but he also loved the scientific side as well. And at the time, most mostly Aristotle scientific stuff was studied and it was like The Virtue stuff was I guess, less prominent. But brentano had had a theory which is he believed that you could take Aristotle's scientific method and you could potentially apply it to human happiness and he called it and an empiricism of the psychology.

He taught the, he taught this idea in his courses and Freud was one of his students. I did not know that. So interesting. There you go. So this would have been late 1800s, so it was 1860 1870. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I did not know that. Yeah, yeah. Freud is a fascinating, the least. And yeah whenever you bring him up there's going to be a lot of a lot of dicks. A lot of dicks. Come out, right? A lot of dicks and mothers. That's right. That's right. To say he was controversial as

an understatement. He got a lot of things, right? He got a lot of things wrong. Some Fascinatingly wrong. Yeah, and just spectacularly wrong. But the mark he left on Western thought and on psychology is undeniable. You can't, you can't deny that. So we would be remiss if we did not bring up for it. Yes. Yeah there's a few ideas that Freud introduced into the larger kind of intellectual culture at the time that we need to be aware of for to better pertinent

to procrastination. Okay, so first we want to talk about the pleasure principal versus the reality principle, right, okay. So Freud He thought that we are basically just driven by these two principles one. He called the Pleasure Principle which is we seek we seek out pleasure and we want to avoid pain. This is from birth, this is just part of our nature. Anything that's pleasurable. We gravitate towards it, anything painful. We avoid it very basic, okay?

They said as we mature though, we mature into what he calls reality principle, where we realized that just indulging in whatever pleasure comes, our way is can be, can be detrimental to us as special in the long run. So we start to realize this as we mature and actually one of the marks of maturity that he saw or that he outlined was that we live more by the reality principle. Yeah, right.

So again, it goes back to this, you know, our Evolution, like I mentioned previously was such that we will prioritise pleasure in the immediate term over long-term benefits that if we delay gratification, right? So that's the first one. Destination. Then can kind of be seen as giving into the Pleasure Principle over the reality principle and this can happen chronically or it can happen just in the moment like that. Okay, so that's the first first

idea. We need to think we need to be aware of when it comes to Freud. And then he also has, if you go back to your cycle 101 is the the model of the psyche, too. The three part, the three parts. Yeah. Very platonic of him, right? You have the id ego and superego okay I'm gonna go through each one of those sure for everybody. Okay. So we have the ID right? And it is like this. That's some people about the

lizard brain. I guess that's probably an oversimplification but it's basically your drives for a lot of it is for the pleasures that we have eating sex you know whatever but joyful experience you might want to indulge in Hedonism basically yeah you have the super ego then no too. Which is kind of the opposite of the ID which is all these moral standards that we obtained through socialization in our childhoods through the people around, us are teachers.

Or parents or siblings. We start to form. As we as we mature, we start to form this idea of what it's means to be a good person to do. Right to be morally, Superior to others or just act Morey out in the world. That's the superego. And then for I had this other idea of the ego which is kind of the mediator between the two like you need to satisfy some of your base, urges right?

You need to eat and drink and have sex and all of those things in order for the species to Survive and Thrive and, and propagate. But we also need to temper that in some way, with our moral understanding of the world. Yeah. And that's the ego comes in and says, okay, I have a plan. How we're going to get satisfied, both of these. And the whole Freud said, when these things were imbalanced in, the ego is doing its job. Then we had mental health, and whenever it's out of balance for

screwed, right. Feels very similar to The Chariot. Very, very much Cherry driver with the two horses. Like you said Plato, he'll come up all throughout Western thought he's everywhere and he's everywhere. Yeah, procrastination. Then kind of threw a Freudian lands is giving into. Like I said, giving into the ID when it can overpower the superego and the ego I guess and the superego is kind of left out

to dry. That is, you know, Freud never specifically address procrastination, but a lot of his people after him did a lot of his students did the psychoanalysts who were the, the Freudian psychologist. They address procrastination through this lens. Another thing he brought up to and brought to our awareness. I think more was the defense mechanisms. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I was gonna say because it doesn't the ego isn't part of the ego, when the ego is mediating between his two

things, right? That the social obligations and the cultural values and versus the animalistic, urges doesn't the ego kind of, because like, when people talk about an ego, we usually think of some sort of like, Self-identity or self-image. Yes, right. So isn't is the mechanism for mediating those two things like it? Is it kind of this mental construction that happens? Like, how does that all map out you mean in terms of like, how the ego mediates that really

relationship or well? I, I'm imagining that the, the mediation between those two things that happens through the construction of this self-image, right? It's like this is the type of person I am. This is what I how I act in these situations and then Once we've constructed that identity, we need to protect it, right? Right. So the ego does it very much forms our basis of self-identity? And how we navigate those that poll. Yeah. Between the two horses, right?

The ego is sitting in between and Freud's view. The ego sits in between those the polls to to be morally, Superior, and good, and pure versus, you know, a base creature of nature, right? So, yes, the ego very much navigates and say, this is how I act in these certain situations. These are here are my morals here, how I get what I need out of life and want to yeah. So, absolutely.

So I want to make a quick Point here, quick interjection, because I always find this super interesting like in conventional wisdom or typical parlance. Like, if you're just hanging out with a bunch of random people, and somebody's being an asshole. Yeah, like man, I guys got too much money go, right. He's gonna get rid of his ego man or if you go to like a

meditation group, okay? You know, go to some, woo, you know, incense burning Temple here in Malibu like They'll tell like oh we're here to dissolve our ego. Get rid of our ego it's interesting. If you actually go back to Freud You don't want to get rid of your not. What you like your ego is actually really important. It's pragmatic. Yeah, it's like actually, you just want to have a good ego, right? Like you want to have a

functional eat, right? Instead of A Dysfunctional ego because a dysfunctional ego is probably giving in way too much to either the social pressures or the animalistic urges, whereas a functional ego is able to balance everything effectively and manage itself, right? Right. And it can manage shame, for example, two. So yes, you can. There's good ego to have it. Ego is not a bad word in the 40. Yeah. Parlance, right.

Yeah. Okay, but it does what happens is when the ego comes under threat? Yes that can be a problem. So this is where the defense mechanisms defense mechanisms come in. Okay? Right so if you if there is any sort of threat to the ego threat to yourself identity and these are threat to your your your view of yourself. I'm a good person. I this is how I act in these. Situations. Then these defense mechanisms can kick in and protect your ego, right?

And that's where some problems can come just as they relate to procrastination. A couple of common ones are which we've already mentioned rationalization, right, rationalize. Well, one of them is I work best Under Pressure, which I want to really talk about that one. Okay. Um, or I need the adrenaline of a looming deadline or something like that, right? That that we rationalize our way out of actually taking action towards our goals. Yeah. Okay. Another one is

intellectualization one. I'm very fond of which is we've already mentioned this one too. You research. I need to research this more. I need to just I need more information AKA this entire podcast. Yes yes. Absolutely. I need to listen to more podcasts. A five-hour podcast before I can do this. So yeah, that one's very much in our wheelhouse where you, you think you just need More information, or you need to stop and understand it more in some way, right?

So that's a very common that that's I mean, as you know, like one of one of my favorite things to say is is that learning more is a smart person's. Favorite way to procrastinate 100%. And I mean, I think a lot of people listening to this will, I don't really, I do. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, they'll relate to that. Another really common one too, is just denial which we've already mentioned this one seriously. It's like it's not bad important. Yeah, I'm just gonna put it off. It's fine.

You know what's one more day? What's not more day? What's what's one? Workout? What's? You know, that's sort of thing. So those are some common ones. What those are designed to do. And the Freudian school of thought is to protect this ego. The self-identity that we've constructed over time. Yeah. So the ecosystem in the middle trying to balance all these polls that we have and then all of a sudden something comes along to threaten that we need

to protect that. That's what the idea of the of defense mechanisms are. And that's, I mean, you know, for all Freud's flaws. I think defense mechanism are definitely one of those things that he brought to the cultural conscience that. Yeah, we absolutely needed the Anything about Freud to me is, is that it's he got the big stuff, right? Yeah. He got the details horribly. Yeah. And the details are horrible. Yeah. And and not only horribly wrong but like hilariously, right?

So it it's because they're hilariously wrong. That's what everybody focuses on and remembers. But like the ego is just, it is such like everything you just described is so profound and tracks, right? And it is like it is such an incredible insight into the human nature. And, and not only like, you know, talking about these defense mechanisms and protecting ego. Like, not only do we protect the ego. We protect our ego as if it is our physical body. Yes. Oh yeah. You like Revolt back in

yourself. You you will have function. You have physiological responses to Ego threat. The same way you would have responses to a physical threat. You will have emotional responses to an ego threat that are track exactly as the emotional responses, you would have to a physical threat, right? It is So incredible like such an incredible realization. Yeah. Because we all need, we all need a sense, a self-identity to navigate the world.

And so it is very threatening. You have this kind of humans have this need to explain things and make sense of the world and one way we do that is through a self-identity and when that gets threatened, that's very, very scary. Like you said, so I do think that that's one of Freud's biggest contributions. Definitely just in Psychology in general, but around procrastination, especially is when we get defensive. And like you said, you'll feel

that in your body. Yeah, you'll feel your yourself recoil. Whenever you're ego is, is threatened in any way. So, yeah. So I think this raises an interesting point of self-definition as a component of procrastinating. Yes. And I've noticed this, I mean, I've noticed this in my own life quite a bit where it's like, as soon as I decide that I am something. Suddenly the emotional valence around that thing. Becomes way more intense. Right?

The surface. Yeah, so like before I wrote subtle art, I didn't really see myself as an author and So, I just wrote a book. It was just kind of like, oh, this is just another thing I'm gonna do is like one of like five things I'm gonna do over the next few years. But then all sudden it takes off and I become socially known as an offer which then affects my self-perception of myself of like, oh, I guess I'm an author now. And as soon as I am, quote unquote, an author.

Now, writing is a completely different experience for me. Because now this is the thing that I'm supposed to be good at this is the thing that I'm most known for. This is the thing that I'm most respected for I've been most rewarded for and so that is a much more intimidating experience and it actually took me a number of years to like revise. That self-definition and remember like yeah, do you work always an author like you?

You just kind of like decided one day that like, oh I guess I'm an author now and then like that added a mountain of fucking stressed in my life and like I can just as easily decide on author. It's just like one of many things I do and suddenly as soon as I that, that self-definition switched. A lot of that stress went away.

James Clear talks about this a little bit and atomic habits about how like the ultimately, the only thing that makes a habit, stick over a lot like over the long term is when it's adopted as an identity identity. Yeah, and it's that adoption as an identity. That is that the ego, right? It's like when you go from a person who Uh, is happens to be running three times a week to a runner. Or you go from a person who is taking a painting class, too a painter, right? It's like once you define

yourself as I'm a painter. Then suddenly you don't need willpower discipline or to overcome procrastination to paint because that's just the thing you do, right? So, um, anyway, I fucking love this stuff, but there's a you're saying they're Stakes attached to that as well too. Yes, their Stakes when you attach your identity to that. And so, would you say from your transition to being? Well, I'm just somebody who's going to write a book too.

I'm an author, you haven't written a book in a few years. Mark, you've been procrastinating on this because it's threatens, your identity now, or I think, well it's funny because it's it's I let go of okay, I like go because it's like I let go of that. I did it did cause me a lot. An immense amount of stress. And this isn't the say, I don't like the books that I wrote, It's just that like I wouldn't

have necessarily written them. When I did, or are the way I did, if I had had a different self-identity at the time and by freeing myself of that identity. Part of freeing myself is realizing that, like, I don't have to write a book, like I'm not just an author. So, I can write a book if I want and I'm sure I will write a book again soon, but I don't have to it's not the thing I do, okay? It's like if you and I decided to like we're podcasters now. Yeah, right, right.

Like, this is who we are and what we do. I got caught up in that for a little while. I'm sure I'm sure it's it's it's it's it's it's tough like it's it draws you in and I guess this is kind of coming back to the like the the ego intermediate between, you know, the social pressures and the moral values and then all, so kind of like the animalistic instincts like We have a fundamental drive for social acceptance and social approval, right?

And so its like our, our egos part of our egos role is to, like take that social acceptance and be like, yeah, I'll be that. This is what rewards me socially. This is what gets me respect from the tribe. I'm gonna be that person, right? And so, it is a natural reaction, but When you decide that, that's who you are. it, it adds a whole another layer of I guess of stakes, you know, like I'll say this. I think adopting the coming back to the James Clear thing of like adopting a habit, as an

identity. he is correct that, like, if the goal is to just do the thing, Then adopting it as an identity. Essentially solves that problem. Yes, because it's like if that's who you are that's just what you're going to do and it's gonna feel like it's gonna feel weird to not do it. The trade-off of that that I think is not mentioned in that book. Is that when you adopt a habit as an identity You are now adding a whole layer of social

pressure. Judgment. Validation To that, right? So it's like if we if we decide now like we are a podcasters. Like now that's that's the yardstick. We're going to start measuring ourselves with, right? If you decide, I am a runner. Well, yeah. Now it's not going to be hard to get up and run in the morning. Now, you're going to be judging Yourself by how you run went every morning. So it's like you You trade. It never ends. It never ends you trade one problem for another essentially.

Okay, well okay. Yes. I do think Again Freud and his conceptualization of this Ikea, the three parts and the defense mechanisms and all that. That's that's useful in terms of yeah. Tying yourself identity to what you do. How you behave in the world. Obviously, that is that that's now in the Zeitgeist and now very much a part of our culture, too. I think the other thing though too is Freud, was one of the first people to really emphasize

childhood. Yeah. How our childhoods affect the way we develop into adulthood. It's funny when I was in college and I was taking psychology, I think I was either a freshman or sophomore at the time so it's taking pretty low level psychology classes and was talking with somebody in my dorm who wasn't a Psychology major and they're like, oh, you're Psychology. Major, major. Tell me about that. And I was like, oh, we're going over for Freud right now, you

know, that's all about this. And I get to the part about childhood and I'm like, oh yeah. And Freud, you know, he's the one who kind of came up with this idea of Love childhood, you know, affecting us as we get older and she goes it doesn't everybody know. Know that and I didn't have a good answer at the time. I was like, well, yeah, it's

really obvious, isn't it? And I didn't have a good answer at the time but no actually, before, Freud, nobody thought that like it was just, you were just a bad person period. Like you are, what you are, you are, what you are. There was nothing that from your childhood or the way you were raised. That was necessarily like indicative of why you are the way you are at this point. Even the concept of parenting. Yes, is like less than 100 years old. Yeah. Yeah. Which is mind blowing.

Yeah. Well I think yeah, probably a lot of that was parenting and well, it was probably more of a collective effort than it is now. So, yeah, it was a collective effort. Also like half of your kids died before age of seven. So there's just like, well, like obviously obviously God had something yeah. But but Freud, did he introduced the the idea of parenting style and experiences we had in childhood how they affect our development throughout our lives all the way. Into adulthood right?

A few of these. Now, this was this came from some of his contemporaries. It wasn't directly from Freud, but they took these like analysts psychoanalysis principles and they applied them to Parenting and procrastination. There are kind of these three big ideas that I came across. Anyway, one of them being when your parents kind of equate love with achievement. Mmm. So this gets into the perfectionism thing. Yeah, definitely. This can kind of encourage someone to develop a more

perfectionist personality. Well, in this, this ties into the confusion stop that but parents who set these unrealistically high expectations on their children. You'll often get children who are perfectionist and Big Time, procrastinators at some point. At least, if they don't manage it. Well anyway, the child feels fear around taking any sort of action around the failure and procrastination and as an adult It'll manifest in a way as to

just avoid that emotional pain. Flew the Freudian lens, what you're doing when you're procrastinating. If you have these types of parents is that you're avoiding those memories of being chastised for not doing the right thing, or for not for not doing a good enough job, right? Another one is kind of internalizing.

Parental anger. So if you grew up around very reactive parents, who got angry, whenever you did something wrong, you know, you spell the milk or whatever it was and they immediately got on you about that. That a child. According to the Freudian school of thought would internalize those that anger from those parents and they would feel directed towards themselves. So again, the procrastination is avoiding any situation which you

could fail. And so you you've already internalized that anger and you just want to avoid it all together, you're gonna go back to comes back to the avoidance a lot with these And then the last one I came across with parenting. Anyways, two different parenting style. So you have permissive parents

or authoritarian ones? Yeah. And on the permissive side, if you grew up in a very kind of like Rule's free environment, more or less, You according to the freudians again, they this produces that nervous underachiever, right? They feel Overwhelmed by self-imposed deadlines or work or whatever it is. They so they just, they're like, wow, that's just, that's too many rules. Too much structure. I'm just not, I'm just gonna avoid it all together.

Yeah, the flip side being authoritarian, where you, you grew up in a very strict household with lots and lots of rules and to the cycle analyst, they think that there's like a rebellion against that. Right? For some children. Yeah. So Whether these are, you know, whether that's actually what's going on or not. That's obviously the topic of debate and we'll go over some of this.

But again, the idea that the way, we were raised affects the way that we developed throughout our lives and specifically around procrastination. It does have, it could have an effect this way. Now was it, was it? Because we were like, avoiding those emotional memories like, deep, emotional memories that we want to avoid. I don't know. It's funny because the parents thing I mean there's definitely something to it.

It's so hard to know where that line begins and ends, you know how much of that is just Personality natural disposition. How much of that is? Like, how Mom? And Dad treated you? Like it's such a fuzzy area. Like the the boundary between those two things is very fuzzy. It is funny. I have never I had never heard that permissive parent thing. Yeah. In the what did you say? It was the timid underachiever nervous under nervous, underachiever do that?

That fucking I feel called out. Oh really my parents were super permissive. Yeah, like grew up no structure. No rules which, you know, was a real double-edged sword? Like there's a lot of things that I think it forced my brother and I to develop a lot of traits. Self-reliance, right and dependents comfort with autonomy, Comfort being alone. So there are a lot of things that I developed at an early age that I'm like, actually very

grateful for, but it is funny. I both my brother and I were spectacular. Underachievers. I, you know, pretty much up until maybe my second year of college. I was very much an underachiever and It's funny. I had a really good friend in high school, who Called me out on my bulshit once. And it was like, very uncomfortable. It was one of those moments where like somebody says something to you and like Because it hurts so bad, you know, it must be true. But like, I, you know, I used to

be a pretty arrogant teenager. You know, I was a smart kid who never did his homework. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's so it. I think it was like just talking shit once and I said something I was like I was like, you know, I if I really cared, I, you know, I could easily get an A in that class and then I think my friend was like, well, why don't you do

it? And I was like, it's not worth my time and he was like, he said, no. I, I think you don't do it because I think you're afraid of trying and not actually getting that, and he said, you'd rather not try it. All, and I kicking the stomach. Dude, it was like, fucking getting stabbed in the chest and I was like, whoa, no comeback for it, you know, but I think it

really was something to that. Like I very much there was something about the permissive environment that maybe as a defense mechanism, at a very inflated perception of my own ability and potential. and, Actually doing anything threatening that. Ah, yeah. So if I actually did try in a class and didn't get the, ah, I had to reevaluate my ego and after Rio evaluate how I see myself and that was just too scary and too so it's just easier to smoke pot and not do your homework?

Yes, which is interesting. Like, you know, you mentioned the the Pleasure Principle Segwaying, into the reality principle. I imagine I'm not aware of Freud talking about it in these terms but I imagine like part of that process, it part of it looks like Almost the ego flexibility like developing an ego flexibility. Like when I think about my younger self, and I think about young people in general or immature people in general, they

are very rigid egos. They have very like, I think, what people mean when they say you have a big ego or you need to get rid of your ego, what they mean, is that your ego is rigid, which is that you have a self perception that is not open to new information, right? Like if you If you fail at something or something doesn't go well instead of re-evaluating how you see yourself you blame everybody else, right?

And double down and double down on how you yeah on your your self-image and so I think That that ego flexibility is actually. what we should be going for and I think that is also a skill that we naturally develop as we get older like III, find that I'm much better, you know, at 40 a much better at kind of looking at myself and being like, Oh, Yeah, maybe I wasn't as good at that thing as I thought I was whereas like you know when I was 20 that felt cataclysmic to have that

thought, right? So super interesting. Yeah yeah, super interesting. One thing to about the whole parenting thing and Freud's view I think sometimes they get a little bit pigeonholed when they think about this. Because when you were telling your story about permissive parenting and how it affected you, I had a friend who had a very permissive, she was the daughter of a single mother. Yeah. And her mother, just let her do whatever she wanted and she resented her for it.

She wanted this structure. Yeah. And she became a very high achiever actually. So I was the other way. So I just don't think. Like, a lot of times with Freud. I think they have these neat little like just stories. Yeah. So there's that. Again, though. The larger takeaway I think, is that he did? Find these kind of big categories of influences on our behavior that nobody had really thought about before and brought them to to the surface, the surface and the cultural

conscience for sure. Yeah, so just a quick reminder before we move on, if you're starting to get a little bit of information overload, we do have a PDF guide for all of this and all the solved episodes, you just go to solved, podcast.com slash procrastination to get a full episode guide with a company notes, takeaways references and citations. We break everything down. Helps summarize all the most

important information and offer. Next steps if you want to start implementing what you're hearing and of course it's free. So just go to solved. Podcast.com slash procrastination, the link is also in the description. All right. Anyway so yeah speaking of other Frameworks behaviorism. This is the big cycle break through the comes right after Freud. Yeah, kind of during for even too. Oh, a bit of a backlash, I would say so 1930.

John B, Watson kind of regarded. It as the father of behaviorism. Although there were some people performed but he comes out with a paper called psychology as the behaviorist views it, okay? And right from the get-go, like, the opening line is psychology as the behavioral. As the behaviorist views, it is a purely objective experimental branch of Natural Science. Kind of like a slap in the face to the Freudian college.

At the time, it really is kind of a backlash that's going on the they Watson and the other behaviors at the time, they see all of this like oh you know, dreams your childhood your internal states that you want to like really navel gaze at, right? They saw this as wishy-washy, it wasn't useful, it wasn't helpful. Also keep in mind at the time, too of what was going on. Like, Einstein is, like, kind of. Yes, starting to, like, become a name, that's known and physics.

And there's all these breakthroughs in the Material Sciences at this time, too. And the behavior is wanted to take that kind of philosophy, which was kind of rigorous scientific method and apply it to the psychology very much in contrast to the the Freudian psychologist, which is just sit and talk for hours. Sit on couch, talk. Let's get on these unconscious motives that you have. The behaviorists were very much the opposite actually, like

almost exactly the opposite. They said, no, we should not be studying mental. Internal, mental States at all. We should only be concerned with what's observable. What's observable is behavior? So, that's why it's called behaviorism. Watson? Also went on to say in that in that same paper is that the behaviorist? Recognizes no, dividing line,

between, man, and brute. So this is where it's, because what was going on, is what all these studies with animals were starting to be incorporated into the body of literature that was going on and the behavior assault. All these parallels between even, you know, a rat or a mouse and a human being and how They can be very similar in a lot of

ways, I feel so objectified. Well, that was that is exactly what the Beavers try to do that was to make this an objective justify rigorous science, they wanted, they wanted to really get at the heart of things and they thought if we could only just study things like a physicist studies atoms and particles then we could get to some underlying truth around behavior in Psychology and human nature even.

Yeah, so that kind of puts it in the historical context of what's going on. You know, there's Watson was very much influenced by Pavlov and the Pavlov's dogs, you know, you ring a bell. Give the dog food after a little while the Dockers the belt just starts salivating. Yeah, that was kind of the the Forerunner two, this strict behaviorism that that came in the early 20th century.

That kind of conditioning. The pavlovian conditioning was called classical conditioning, by the behaviorist, they saw that as you're pairing, this neutral stimulus, which in this case was the Bell to a natural stimulus which was the food and then you get this on this kind of innate response, which was the salivating, yeah. Okay. With this, be like the behavioral manifestation of the neuroscientific idea of like, what fires together wires together? I know those different things.

Well, I mean later on. That's how it would be explained. Okay, yes, and that was the, that was the classical conditioning side though. Yeah, I think what you're starting to get a little bit more, was the operant conditioning? Okay. Which is what the behavior is really like. That was their big kind of breakthrough was. Okay. You have these classical conditioning experiments where you can make a dog celebrate at the ringing of the Bell.

So yeah. But actually, when you introduced learning, which is relevant to the Procrastination story. When you introduced learning into the equation, then it becomes what they call Operating Conditioning. Okay. Okay. And this was really, this really took hold Watson kind of was dancing around it, but it wasn't until Skinner came along. BF Skinner Burris Frederic Skinner. What's his name? I did not know his real name of it. I'm I was a Psychology major. I did not know.

I would go by BF, too. That was my name. Yeah, it's kind of a dorky name for sure. He grew up in rural, Pennsylvania. Yeah, but this was the idea of operant conditioning where you learned through a series of rewards and punishments. Yeah. Okay. Now, Skinner, I don't know how much we want to get into. How much do you want to get into this again? He's a fascinating dude. Okay. Okay. From a young age, he was very

inventive. He was always trying to come up with like new little inventions and Contraptions. And he had a very Mechanical Mind, which would later produce the, the Skinner box. What we know is the Skinner box, right? You put the rat in the Box. It pushes the lever. It gets a tree, it learns very quickly. That pushing the lever. It's a tree. Yeah, Skinner Actually found that you could get rested to do all sorts of things.

He just rats used pigeons. Those were his two main animals, but he, he found that you could get them to do all sorts of different complex. Very complex behaviors, which just simple rewards and punishments. Okay? Now, he so he invented the Skinner box, he It taught them to he, he introduced the idea of shaping Behavior as well. So just little increments of, you know, get the rat to press the bar. Okay? Now get the right to press, press the wall and then press the bar that kind of thing.

And you could get these complex behaviors out of all of that. This is what again was called operant conditioning. Yeah, skin or even got to a point where he coined the term radical behaviorism, which he thought even, like, internal States. Could be the result of rewards and punishments. Okay, we're gonna hear a little bit, but one of the reasons he thought that was because you could do some pretty complex behaviors with these simple animals and get just through a series of rewards and

punishments, right? So for instance, he taught He taught pigeons how to play ping pong. He taught them how to quote, and quote read. It was more like a word recognition thing, but they could still, it was kind of like reading. He's like, you know, now this is if I can teach a pigeon.

How to do these simple word, recognitions and taking a brain from a human, you could do the same thing, just reward and Punishment. This is what this word says you're rewarded through that through a little dopamine in your brain or whatever it is and then you learn how to read. So he's like all these complex behaviors can be reduced down to this very, very simple idea. Which is you like the wire together. Fire together. Sure. You repeat? What? You were awarded for and you

don't repeat what you're punished for. so to a behaviorist procrastination, really does just come down to what you are rewarded or punished for And in the case of procrastination, they would say something along the lines of, you know, you are one year rewarded for the delay. You you're anxious about whatever task this is and then. So in order to remove that anxiety, you just don't engage in it whatsoever. So there's your reward or the punishments are grave enough for you.

We've kind of already touched on this too, right. Like it's the the consequences so far down the line that you're not even it's not even registered. Yeah, you've discounted yeah discounted it completely so it's really just a series of they just see it as a series of rewards and punishments and that's what all animals not just humans. But all of us are subjected to do. That's like the law of nature for a behaviorist. Yeah, yeah. So the solution for a behaviorist would be.

Give yourself a worse punishment for not doing the thing, I think so. A lot of reward yourself for doing the thing. Well both, okay, it's using punishments and rewards in your life. Strategically, right? And this as definitely influenced a lot of like the modern-day productivity space. Yeah, there's even a law called Skinner's Law. So like make make the thing so unpleasant, not to do it that you just do it. Yes. Like, that's very much used in a lot of modern day, productivity

schemes, and and systems. I mean, there is something to that 100% again. Yeah, there's something to it. Yeah, yeah. It's it's I think about it a lot in terms of friction like adding and removing friction to certain behaviors. Yes. Right and my environment making it easier to do good. You know it's like if you don't want to eat junk food like just don't bring it in the house. Right.

Right. So you don't have to make those decisions in the first place, or If you want to do something, like, if you want to pick up a new habit, like, sign up for classes and get that accountability and convince a friend to go with you or whatever. So, that like not doing it becomes way more painful than doing it. It's funny because it is, it sounds so simple. But this is like, for me, personally, this is one of the strongest levers that I've ever pulled. Definitely for my own behavior.

Yeah, the environmental design is very much influenced by the behaviorist school of thought. The modern day environmentalist, design. Even go back to James, Clear, setting up your environment and in such a way that rewards and punishes certain behaviors that you want. That's very much comes from the behavioral school.

Yeah, for sure. And also there is even though, you know, they were a reaction to for audience psychology, there is still kind of that pleasure training principle totally carried over into behaviorism. They acknowledge that but they say that's it. We don't have to go any further than yeah. And we can just we can shape our lives and even Society through a series of Rewards. And punishments.

Yeah, and yeah. So procrastination to them is really again it's in terms of rewards and punishment but there's you know, there's kind of like there's a reinforcement of delay. Like I already said you immediate indulgences that are in your room and are just easier to reach for. So we will reach for them. There's an effective punishments. It's either distant or it's not a strong enough punishment for us to not procrastinate On Any Given task. Previous conditioning though, too.

They also bring that in. So there is a little bit of, you know, if you were If previous experiences of procrastination went unpunished, then you're just more likely to do it, right? So, if you're in a job and you don't really face a lot of consequences for not getting something done. Well, you're just gonna continue doing that. That's a behaviorist View and then there's an also, they have this negative reinforcement Loop, which there's greater anxiety as a deadline

approaches, right? And it can make finishing that task more relieving. Like, the more pressure you put on yourself the greater the relief you experience. Once you do finally do that. Well, it's funny because one of the one of the people I talked to in preparation for the podcast was Tim Urban. Who is the most watched? Ted Talk of all time about procrastinating procrastinating.

And it's funny, because I've been friends with Tim for over 10 years and and I know him very well and he is, he's a chronic procrastinator, but he's also like I don't know. I've known a number of people like him where it's they get in this pattern where you kind of mentioned this earlier that, that they They? Feel like they Thrive under pressure and they need that pressure cooker. Experience going on around them, right?

Like that's that's what actually gets them to perform and so they continuously throw themselves into that situation over and over again. And you know doing the work weeks ahead of time and not stressing or worrying about it at all. Like that's not a very interesting emotional experience.

That's kind of boring and requires, you know, a lot of forethought whereas waiting to the night before having this super extremely stressful event and then like you said the relief of accomplishing that stressful event that can easily be something that you condition in 95% of college students. That's what it is. That was, that was a lot of my college experience is thought, probably. Just, yeah, it's like I I would get.

Assignment. I'd be like, oh, the all-nighter for this is gonna be interesting. Yeah, yeah. And you could pull it off. So, you did. Yeah. Like you again, you were awarded in in these ways that you won't don't even realize you're being rewarded. Yeah. Which is a good example. Is the relief of that stress that you put yourself under, but it's a self. Self-reinforcing stress. There was just self-imposed stress.

Yeah, I should say, this might be a good time to talk a little bit about that thriving Under Pressure. Yeah, a little bit about. I know, I know you, you have a bone to pick with. I have a bone to pick with this because I feel like, I'm one of these people, right? And in talking to people around this, like, I would say, oh yeah, we're doing this, this big long podcast on procrastination. Yeah. And it was, oh, I need this. But almost all the time. A good number of people

immediately would say. Oh, but I thrive Under Pressure. I need the dead. I need that the pressure of the deadline. and I thought a lot about that, and I think that's just bulshit I just say to say that you drive under pressure you're calling out our entire audience. I understand that it's motivated. I understand I'm sure it's motivating. You don't need it. This is the more common thing about I do my best work under pressure and that I think is

total bulshit. Okay. There are people who drive under pressure, I get it. Like, like a situation comes up that like that something needs to get done and people, boom. They just snap into that. Get shit done mode. Yeah, I that I totally believe in. That's, that's not that's something that I'm talking about.

When people say, I do my best work under pressure I'm always my immediate question is compared to what right compared to not doing anything at all because that's the only work you do. Sure it's your best work but it's the only word. I I don't I don't agree with that at all. I feel so attacked right now. I get it. And look, I get it. You just have to sometimes. Like there's just so much going on and most people's lives that they use that pressure to get things done. I get that.

Like, there's just, there's only so many hours. Yeah, that's fine. Don't tell me. That's your best work. When you're fearing the negative consequences of not getting something done. That's your best work. Yeah. Are you really gonna tell me? That's your best work that you can produce. Well let's back up the truck just a couple a couple a couple feet. Okay I hear what you're saying. Yeah I I don't think you're

wrong. I so here I'll kind of delineate what I think you're right about which is that the people who say that they have probably not had a healthy working experience because what you're saying is like okay these people budgeted their time, Let's say they have an assignment due in two weeks,

right? Okay. If they were diligent, they budgeted their time, they're like, okay, I'm gonna spend an hour to two hours a day every single day and then the last day, you know, I'll have most of it done or whatever and they'll have time to rethink things and go back and change things and do further research and like dig in the other stuff. Yes, they will probably have a much better result with much less stress.

I guess, maybe this is the funny thing is that budgeting of time and following that schedule and following that plan, they don't see that as part of the work, they see that as something different and so that it's, it's All they experience is. Maybe they try to work on it a week ahead of time and they're like, this is boring. This sucks. Yeah, there's no emotional stimulus, happening.

And so they lose interest, or they don't try very hard and then they get two days out and they start freaking out and panicking. And then that forces them to like really focus and put in a lot of effort. And so they get that emotional stimulation, which then gets channeled into the work itself. And then yeah, sure the work that they do then is much Superior to like the half-ass the temp that they had. Okay. So I grew up with that. Yes. I can see how that is probably their experience.

And I can also see your point that, like, if they were very diligent budgeted out their time, like, say, two weeks in advance and did a little bit every day. And really thought were thoughtful and considerate about like, the work, they're doing. Yes, they would produce a much better outcome, but they've never had that experience. They've never that's my point. Yeah, but what yeah, no, yeah,

you are correct in that regard. But I I think you, I think the point that you're kind of like subtly raising here is that a lot of people I guess maybe mistake the emotional stimulus. For. The work, hmm. Right? Like It is it is that anxiety? Fuelled Frenzy Where they get a ton of stuff done, and they are super focused. That they associate that with good work because it is enlivening. It's, it's exciting, it's stimulating, right? And they are way more focused on on a task or a goal.

Then they usually are and most circumstances, so in their mind they're like, yeah, this is I'm doing great work right now. so, it I guess what I'm saying is it's more of a skill issue, like If they knew how to budget things out, well in advance and do a little bit every day and like thoughtfully look at their work every day. They would agree with you. Yeah. But it's it's like I guess I'm just agreeing with you but I'm like softening. There's a new ones too. I like so I'm like I feel so

attacked that. I'm like you're now recording your ego is being exactly. My ego is being threatened. So no I think it's just I think you are. I think you are directionally correct. I do think it's a little bit more nuanced than I guess. I'm kind of like Diplomat as somebody who Was that person? Yeah, for A lot of his life and I have been to that. I'm including myself. Yes too.

I get that. I mean okay, if you're if you're saying I do my best work under pressure Again, what I think you're saying is I do my best work when only the threat of the negative consequences are on the line. And not only that but I'm limiting myself to such a small time window that you're going to tell me that, like all your first if creative work is specialty, all your first ideas are going to be your best ideas because that's all the time. You have to put down. Yeah.

Or to work out and whatever creative work you're doing. I don't think so. Some of those might come down to, I agree with that. Some of this might come down to the type of work as well. I mean here's the counter argument. Is that is that pressure? A lot of pressure is derived from high expectation, right? So when the caliber of the work is not expected to be that high,

you don't feel the pressure. And so you don't try very hard, but when the caliber of work is expected to be extremely high, that's a lot of pressure. And so you try a lot harder. I mean, I think most people have had a I mean maybe this gets it a little bit into a discussion of expectation and procrastination, but like I think most of most of us have had an experience at some point in our lives were like, somebody has come to you and be like, hey Drew, I need you to do this

thing in the first time. You hear it, you're like that's impossible. And they're like, oh, and by the way, I need it in like four days and then you do it and you're like, holy shit, I could actually do that, right? So it like, Okay, I'm just gonna throw that element out there. I'm not saying it's not motivating, I'm not saying you shouldn't like Leverage that when it does happen. I, I just don't think you should rely on that. I agree. Best work 100% saying it. 100%

agree. Thank you for bringing in the Nuance. I was very angry you now you softened it. You agree with that. You were on your soapbox and I managed to kind of kick it out from under you, from the behaviorist point of view though. Too again, going back to those, what you're hearing is a negative consequences. Well, they've, I mean, a lot of Studies have shown that, you know, punishments aren't really as effective. At least not their effective. In the short term, they're not

effective in the long. Yeah, right. Rewards are more effective. I think in the long term part of that I do think goes back to something I mentioned earlier was about agency. We think we when we're just being punished for something, we don't feel like we have the agency to actually make decisions but when there's a rewards on the line we can choose whether or not we like that world. Yeah I think that's that's something that came out of the behaviorist well and interpret.

Creation of the behavior anyway that I I think is actually very useful for people. So where do you think, behaviorism, went wrong? What did they miss? Because everything you're describing at least in the context of procrastination. I'm like, yeah, that works. Oh yeah, that works. Yeah, that works. So again what what did they fall short on? Yeah, I mean all the environmental design stuff.

I think they nailed definitely I think Though, even though Skinner later in his life, came to this, what he called behavioral radical behaviorism, which was that even our mental processes and cognitions could be reduced to rewards and punishments. I don't think they ever fully showed that and I think they ignore a lot of the emotional states and cognitive internal processes. Not only do they ignore them? They explicitly ignore.

Yeah, so we're not going to worry about those kind of things because some method will come along, where we can explain it in terms of rewards and punishments. Yeah, so they ignore that. We can also, we can override our sensibilities around rewards and punishments too, to which I think is a cognitive again and internal cognitive process that happens. Yeah, that gets overridden by these principles of just simple rewards and punishments. I wonder what Skinner would think of David Goggins.

That's a thought experiment. God, what would you say about David goggin? Yeah. Where he's just constantly self flagellated. Just like punishing himself. Yeah. Putting himself through the most pain that he possibly can. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, maybe they would say that it's a kind of a higher order of operate, operant conditioning, where you get some sort of reward out of it

eventually. And he's just conditioned himself to to experience that reward over time c. I in the, in the context of Goggins, I see the Freudian ego explanation is more effective and and I mean, I mean, ego strictly in the 40 and since not as like, oh God has an ego, but it's like, Goggins has built an identity around doing incredibly hard and painful things. And so, two maintain and preserve that ego that he's built for himself which is served him extremely well in his life.

And he's like rewarded him in many ways. But to maintain that ego, he'd like needs to get out in front of fucking punish himself. It's kind of what we were. Saying that it's like when the Habit becomes the identity, you have to do the action, it feels. It feels more painful to not do the action to do it, right? And so it's like Goggins is built an identity around. Doing incredibly difficult

painful things. And so he has reached this fucking crazy place where he probably feels weird, not doing painful things rather than doing them. Well, he was also socially rewarded for doing those things so too. Right? The culture he grew, he kind of forged all that was Navy. Seals. Yeah, that was socially rewarded, totally. So the behaviorist would say, ah know there's actually a big behaviorist lens. We could put this here so it doesn't have to be reduced

identities. And so, is the behavior. I mean, I like to maybe I'm naive, but I like to try to see everything as like a puzzle and see where everything fits together. You know, you I guess. Are we seeing the behavior or the behaviorist perspective is Kind of the interaction between the superego and the ego like the rewards. It's like how the world is rewarding, you and punishing you and how like I suppose you could

see it that way. Yeah, I mean I, I would think I would say that the behavior is saw human nature as finely tuned to social rewards. Yeah. And so those are big, big rewards that have a very high valence, very high salience when you think about them. Those, you will approach those a lot more readily. Yeah. so, I mean, Anything just and with operant conditioning, anything can be turned into a reward almost, right?

You the operant part is that you're learning about these Rewards or punishments so almost anything can like, with the Goggins exactly punishment can be its own form of reward. It's at some level. And so I think the even the behaviors would go so far as to say that, yeah, it's all just comes down to this. Seeking pleasure of waiting pain. You know, I think really, though the big takeaway from the behaviorist was these practical tools that we've kind of stuff, the environmental stuff.

So you setting up, teaching yourself about the rewards and punishments that you're being aware of the and how it rewards and punishes you in different ways. The refrigerator example, with the junk food is a good example of that. Yeah, I think that's the biggest takeaway. And, you know, even today all of like the productivity systems and and gurus, who preached, the kind of environmental and only environmental side, they draw from a lot of this but they're not wrong.

They're just not, they're just right, it's incomplete. Yeah. So I think we're getting closer. This is part of the puzzle. Yeah, the rewards and the punishments along with the identity stuff from Freud. Yeah, sure that's all there. The skill stuff we got from from Aristotle. We're starting to build a little bit of a picture where, okay, these things fit together, it doesn't have to be a war between all of these things.

And we can take the best parts of it and I think that's, I think that's where we're headed with it. Yeah, cool. Awesome. Well, let's move on to the next thing then. Which is time management. Ah, yes. So as we move into the mid-20th century, it's actually interesting to me that there's there is so much Credence to what the behavior is. We're saying like all this environmental design stuff, it actually does work for productivity. Yet, what we got?

It was a bunch of Time Management Consultant bulshit. So how did how did that happen? Well, okay, put it, let's put it a little bit in historical context. Okay, so yeah, the earliest early 20th century, you you have the freudians in the behaviorist battling it out. What changes though as we start to get into the middle of the century. So starting the 40s, 50 60s is, there's a big shift in the economy, right? The post-war economy shifts, much more towards kind of the

knowledge work. The beginning of the knowledge work, especially getting into the 60s, think, like Mad Men, you know, the age of corporate drones, all of that starts. So people start going from the farms and the factories we have been urbanizing for, you know, several decades, since the Industrial Revolution started in the 1800s slowly urbanizing. And we're getting a new economy out of this knowledge.

Work becomes a thing. Yeah, so yeah, the Ad Agency is the design designing products for Consumer products for The masses, all of that. Start to crop up, right? So, If you think about that, that's a very different work environment, right? You go from a factory or a farm you know exactly what you need to do. What's right in front of you. It's very tangible. You're in a factory to somebody else's telling you exactly what to do, you don't have to think about it.

Whereas, if you're getting into more creative work in the new knowledge economy, now you have all of this There's all these tasks that are nebulous kind of and they're even the end goals. A lot of times are nebulous. It's creative work. They're not really sure what you're producing. You're giving a little bit more autonomy, too, in those spaces. And so now, you have to manage your own time, okay?

Up until this point, too. Like I said, a lot of the things you were supposed to do, had kind of been outlined for you. Somebody else told you what to do for the most part, for the, the average worker. Now, you're, you're managing your own time and you need a way to organize all this and decide. What do I need to be working on right now? And so, for a lot of the the industry I don't know if they're really gurus around this time, but this is kind of their

predecessors. They thought oh well these people just need to be taught how to organize their time, how to manage their time. So this is where the kind of the time management philosophy really starts to take hold and and rise to the collective conscious. Yeah. There's a lot of the like techniques that come out of this to at least started here. Even the ones we used today, Pomodoro techniques, time boxing and all that we can get into those here in a little bit but

that's kind of that sets. The stage with the historical stage for the time management crowd. Okay. So you, you had your bone to pick like 20 minutes ago. Okay. This this section is going to be my bone. Yeah, because I just think most of this is nonsense. I'll pile on with you. I think. Okay. For the next part. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a few observations. Yeah. First of all. Is this is a very subtle. Play-Doh back with a vengeance type situation which is like we

have all these office workers. We have all these worker bees. They're they're it at their desk, they're doing they're typing, they're doing things, but like the output is completely unpredictable and a lot of people are underperforming. What's the problem? Oh, they must not know the right things, right? And I find it so interesting that repeatedly throughout

history, that is our default. Like, it's like, if I just knew the right system, if I just knew how to organize my time, if I just knew how to use my calendar, if I just knew how to time box my week, you know, like it, then everything is going to be fine and I don't know. It's like what is so seductive about that? It's simple, it's simple. It's a you can point to one thing and say, oh I just need to

know how to organize better. I just need to know how to manage my time more effectively and box this little bit of time over here for this little thing and this little thing over here. Yeah, it's a simple story. It's also I would say it's unemotional. Yes. Like very rational very, very rational.

And you know, we just talked about, you know, with Freud and Skinner like we just spent 45 minutes talking about how Defense mechanisms and resistance and rationalization and like, all these excuses that you come up with and how does uncomfortable it is and it's exhausting. It is exhausting like a motion is a fucking exhausted, but it

there is something alleviating. There's something relieving about just being like, well, I just need to get the right calendar system or if I, if I get the right morning, like these days, it's the morning routine, right? Because everybody self employed so it's like, I just need the right morning routine and then and then my days gonna be great, I'm gonna get so much done. I I think here's the spicy take. I think 90% of the time. This is just another subtle form

of procrastination. 100% agree with that. It is. It is let me study the techniques and systems that are gonna make me more productive. So I don't actually have to go be more productive because being productive is actually uncomfortable and scary and all these emotions start happening. And I don't want to deal with those. So let me let me study this calendar system and try to get it down. Absolutely. And exhibit, a look at how many

productivity apps are out there. Those are all come from the time management kind of philosophy. They start there at least in me if I'm wrong because you did more research on on this section than I did but like Most of the research around this stuff is like not. There's not a whole lot of there. Oh yeah. No, they they tried to do some research. I think kind of in the 70s is when they're just like we're not

finding anything here. Yeah and just anecdotally to look at it, there's people who are highly organized professionally personally whatever. They still procrastinate so it isn't it is not just about the system and that's speaking from somebody who's tried every system. Everyone, but I'm trying to a lot of different systems. I have my little system, I do have a time management system. Don't get me wrong, right?

I think too, if you go from somebody who's never had, it's just been told what to do at all times. And then you just tell them, okay? Now, go do whatever you need to do without any structure. Yeah, they probably need some time management skills, right? Absolutely. It is nowhere near the, the underlying cause of what's causes people to not get things done. Yeah, some of the tenants of time management, you know, setting clear priorities and goals. Well, sure.

Okay. Yeah. People often, they underestimated how long tasks would take. So getting better at managing your time. Sure. Yeah. Going you struggle to structure your day and so, you end up working on less important tasks over more important. So prioritizing sure all of these things, obviously, you need to have those skills but it's not getting at the root cause right at all, you know there, but there are still going to your point too. Just recently. Actually I tried a new system.

Yeah. A new way of kind of capturing my to-do lists and organizing my time and even time boxing and stuff like that. And it was AI enabled. So of course I was really excited to try it when I tried. It was very disappointing because I'm like, oh, this is just the same the same shit. I've already tried, just packaged and they put AI in front of the, the name of it. Yeah. And so I got on a forum and asked him about a couple of things.

I'm like, what about you know, XYZ And somebody immediately jumped in and they're like, they're like, look this community and the, the team for this app are just so dedicated and devoted. And they had, this long, long response to my thing that had nothing to do with x-ray getting shit. But that's where that's where this leads though, too. You're right that people. It's it's another form of procrastination. Like, I learned so much from this app, that was one of the

lines that I've learned so much. I don't want to learn about an app. I just want to get shit done. Right? Right. So that I think that is the big risk with this, these apps, and other systems, and people wrote books on this. They've made a lot of money, and we still haven't found the time management solution because they're they're feeding that seduction that that that Plato seduction of.

Like if I just knew the right thing, I mean, this kind of dovetails into just the self-help in the street in general. I'm sure this is going to come up on a lot more episodes of like People thinking knowledge is the solution when it's really like it's an emotional problem. I'm kind of spoiling the the ending here but like procrastination is an emotional problem and Sure.

Knowledge can like nudge you slightly in this direction or that a framework a time management framework, you know, a certain system that you build for yourself can nudge you in this direction or that your environment nudges you in this direction or that ultimately, it's an emotional problem. I, I have a couple thoughts, one came up, just while you were talking which is like, yes, you're correct. Like I think every productive person develops, some sort of

system for themselves. What people mistake is that, that system is not the cause of their productivity. It's the effect. Yes. Right. You like you learn what your personality is, what your proclivities are, what you're emotional. Pitfalls are the things that you get anxious about and that you worry about and that you stress about and the way you like to get things done and the sorts of things you like to do first thing in the morning versus last

thing in the afternoon. And you build your own system around that to optimize for yourself and eventually, once you spend enough time doing it you know you get 10-15 years into your work life, you figure it out pretty well. What works for yourself and what doesn't and That does make you very effective on a day-to-day basis but then other people show up and they're like oh what, what system do you use?

And they just assume that like if they just adopt your system, that it's going to work perfectly for them yet, you know, a lot of people have built multi-million dollar businesses around that so that's that's the first thought the second thought I thought what you said, you know you, well, you were

describing knowledge, work. You raised a really good point that I hadn't really thought about before, which is, you know, in the kind of the industrial economy or agrarian economy, the measurement of the output is like predetermined, right? Like if you're a factory worker, you go in your boss is like, hey, I need 50. Widgets per day, it's very tangible.

Yeah, super tangible. And it's very measurable and you know what your progress is. So it's like, you know, if you break for lunch and you only have 22 widgets down and set a 25, you know you're behind schedule and so, you know, to like catch up in the afternoon. When you go into knowledge work, as you pointed out, a lot of its creative, a lot of its intangible, a lot of it is like in Negotiation, it involves

like. You know, discussing committees and meetings and dealing with clients and, you know, taking somebody to the golf course and like all this stuff that is completely unmeasurable. What I know about human nature is that The things that are not legible or measurable or uncertain, they generate anxiety. And I imagine that there are lots of people in the knowledge Work World. I know, I experienced this all the time. In my own work.

I'm sure you do too. Where it's like you want to feel like you're making progress on something? Yes. You know you can like spend days or weeks on something. It is not necessarily clear to you that you've made any progress whatsoever. And so I've noticed it That on projects like that. I start measuring my time, you know, it's like books are perfect example because books, like, literally take two years,

the right? So there are whole stretches in the middle of a book where you actually don't know if you're making any progress or not like you, you're like this entire chapter could end up deleted, right? You know, like, everything I've worked on this month. Might be for nothing, so that doesn't feel good. So what do you start doing? You start measuring the hours you put in eat, you know, you start measuring like. Okay, I did, I've done 11 days in a row of at least three hours

a day, right? So it's like I'm doing a good job. I'm a good author. Right. Are you like same thing with to-do lists two, right? Yeah. I keep it to do list until I love checking things off and sometimes I'll keep their completed that task list there so I can see it. And it's looks tangible. I'm making progress on something. But am I? I don't know. Or am I just checking boxes? Yeah. And it can get to that. Just that that box. Checking can become its own little task of your a

conditioning, right? Yeah. There are, you know, a number of things like I mentioned a few of these that already came out of this era or at least, we're inspired by this era that we still even use today. One of the kind of famous ones amongst the kind of productivity crowd. Anyway like the Eisenhower Matrix? Yeah, Dwight Eisenhower was president after World War Two is this, this time?

Frame is very popular. So we had this quadrant right on one side, you had what was an importance and on the other side was urgency so it could be highly important and highly urgent low on each. Yeah, you get these four four quadrants and he said the quadrant two which was important but not urgent. Are the tasks that typically got procrastinated on so his advice was to do those first had advice, don't get me wrong but it's still off the problem.

Know why is it not urgent? Why is it not important, right? I was just gonna say like that's just the 1950s, Eisenhower version of that, that tweet. I read at the top of the show which is like, you know, you have to give up short-term the game, long term. Freedom, like all of your dreams are behind sacrifices. It was like, well, no shit Sherlock. Like, this is, I know this. This is not helping me, so I don't want to dog pile on this stuff because like, It is useful information.

Absolutely, it's just not sufficient whatsoever, right? It is not the solution, right? You shouldn't start there. I think a lot of people wear, when they're like, okay, I need to get a system together. I need to get something together where I can get stuff done. They'll start here and I don't think this is no start. This is when you're optimizing what's already working, right? Right. Yeah. And something that works first. And then that go to this kind of stuff.

Like I said, I've tried all the different systems, all the big ones and you made this point already but it does ring. True for me too is that I took the one good thing from doing all that is. I took the things that worked from each one of those and made it my own in my own personal way. I just don't think there's any one system out there know, because every time again like this, this one, I just tried to use recently, I'm like, oh, this

is it, this is the one. Yeah, I found myself already like falling into that trap and it's like, oh no, there's no single system out there. That's perfect for everybody. Yeah. And even, even if you find a system that works for you today, like Three years from now. Slightly different three weeks from now I can almost guarantee you that. Yeah, once you think you found the solution it's yeah. There's something hiding around the corner that you didn't plan for.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay. But there are okay. I mean, there are some good things. Like we said, there are some things that did come out of this. So providing structure and Clarity around what you need to do. That is a useful step. Yes. Obviously I think another thing that came out of look kind of the behaviorist view but also the time management crowd was breaking. Things up into smaller chunks and we'll talk about maybe a little bit later, why that's useful.

It's not it's not because it just manages your time better. It's because it gives you a better emotional container for it, right. Yes, correct, yeah. Yeah, I also think too. One thing, one benefit I got out of all these different time. Management systems is the ability to accurately assess, how much work I can get done in a day. I think that did actually come from trying and failing over and over and over. Because for instance, you know, I timed box or yeah.

And I am by no means perfect at it. And I change it constantly throughout the day even too. So I'm not a rigid time boxer but I've gotten a lot better about, okay. It used to be like I'd have 10 things on my to-do list and I try to time box them all, and it's like I'm on Thing Two by three o'clock in the afternoon and I'm like, okay, I gotta be realistic about this. So there is kind of even though you're approaching it from the more cognitive quote, unquote, rational side of your brain.

I think there's some benefit in the time boxing systems and methods that you can get out of that. They're not again it's not the base underlying cause but yeah yeah I mean again I think a lot of this stuff is useful at the margins, right? Like what you just described like gaining an accurate assessment of Which part what parts of your job? Take, what amounts of time? Like, that's something that is just, it's good to learn that over time. Like ultimately procrastination.

Is an issue of going from doing nothing to doing something. Yes, even if that's something is completely imperfect, whereas I feel like time management is just is taking somebody who's already doing something and just helping them do it. Slightly better or more efficiently or in a slightly shorter amount of time. And And so yeah, I it comes back to what you said earlier. It's like this is not the place

to start. This is, this is not even the place to like go. Second or third like this is the place to go. you know, when you are When you're you're moving along and you're doing a lot of things really well, but you're just kind of wondering like, how can I fit more stuff in or like, how can I be more efficient with my time? Then you start taking a look at this stuff? Yeah, for sure. Do we want to risk going into some of the things we do? Do we want to throw those out

there? I might be a useful exercise for somebody with all of the caveats in the mornings. We've already issued. But sure. Yeah. What, why don't you go first? Because I'm weird. Yeah. And already know but it actually it might be it might be a useful segue as well. It just because you know as someone with ADHD that my productivity function is like strange, right? Right.

So people other people people who are listening who maybe have ADHD and because I know progress the nation Disproportionately people with adhs struggle with it so it might be useful to get into that. Okay. Okay. So why don't you go first? Yeah sure. So I mean for me I try to keep it as simple as I can. That's one gripe I have with. So many of these apps is that they get complicated way too

quickly. They usually start out fairly simple and then I think what happens is it kind of get a like a audience capture a little bit. Like yeah, give me this feature, give me this feature and then just keep adding things so. So my one of my principles is to keep it as simple as possible. Have something have a to do list of some kind, I use notion. That's what we use on the team. So I put all my tasks into a personal database that I have and there's a way to organize it

that on a date on a daily basis. When I'm trying to decide what to do. I do time box. Okay, for me, this works. Yeah, because again, I the most useful exercise out of all of this isn't like, okay, this is what I need to get done. Now, I'm going to go get it. It's thinking about, okay, realistically, what can I get done in this amount of time? And after you time box for a while, again, like a I was saying you get you get better at this and you get better at estimating.

How much time any given task is going to take you just described really quick, what time boxing is, right case? People don't know. Yeah, sure. So time boxing is, you you use some sort of system. In my case, I just use pencil and paper actually use Kyle Newports time boxing. Okay. Journal that he has. You could you could use any general to do this. I just, I like his at this weight format and everything like that.

Essentially, the way I do it is I will write down, you know, 8:00 9:00 10:00 down, one side of the side of the paper and then I make a box around any given its a one or two hour time box from 8 to 10:00, let's say every morning and I put down whatever task I need to get done and I'm saying I'm allotting two hours to this task or whatever it is. And so I give myself those two hours and I'm only going to work on that during those two hours now.

Life happens and this it's not a perfect system. And so, like I already mentioned, I will revise this throughout the day. I'm like, okay, this test took longer or something came up, that was urgent that I needed to do address. Why? I like house Notebook 2 is because there's different columns for that you can, you can change it as you go. Essentially though what the the goal is is to plan out your day ahead of time so that you have something to aim at and say you

know, I'm working on this. I'm am I doing what I said I was going to do. Yeah it's kind of like a internal account. System a little bit. and again, it also just keeps you very realistic like, you know, you have An eight to ten hour work day every day. What can you honestly get done in that and then it also for me anyway, too, it does give me that. Okay, I actually did get something done. This is what I can look back at it. And say, I use this time block, to, to actually get done.

When I said I was going to get done. Okay, so I use a combination of to-do, lists and time boxing. I use a calendar to obviously we have a shared calendar with the team. I also have my own personal calendar I look at that pretty much every day. What do I got going on in events? I got dinner with friends. I'll put that in there, that kind of thing. Just kind of keep me. These are the things that I know I have to get done today.

That that's what I put in the calendar, but to do, this is more just like these need to be done at some point. A time box is what am I doing right now? Just kind of my system. Do you have any sort of like rules or principles you like do the hardest thing first in the morning? Like do easy things in the morning? Like so I try to, I am a big fan of Cal of Rapport and I do try to get, I get deep work in every

day. He calls deep work, if you don't know, go read his book d. Work, it's fantastic. I try to get that done. And for me, it's mornings for most people. It's going to be mornings. So usually I try to schedule about two hours of deep work in in the mornings where I'm getting like, okay, this is something that's gonna require a lot of my attention and focus. So I'm going to sit down and for two hours usually from like 8 to 10 or something like that. I usually get up around 6:30 or

7, do you know? I'll read all kind of get warmed up for the day and then I start working around. 8 ish. Okay, 7:38 ish, okay, try to give my two hours a deep work and and that is usually the hardest. The hardest thing that I have to do for the day and honestly if I get those done, that's like a win for the day too. You know what I mean? Like, if I get two solid hours of deep work and I mean, there's all sorts of other tests that are important that I need to do that.

I will get done but if I get those two hours in I feel pretty accomplished. Yes. Yeah. So I again that's a realistic expectation. You can get about two to three to maybe four hours of real deep solid work in if you're in a knowledge, work industry. Yeah, yeah. And for those listening, Who haven't read the book like deep work. It's generally something that requires intensive, creativity or problem-solving, right?

So something that takes, like a lot of mental energy and effort, like, you know, writing an article or programming, or, you know, whatever, design, something like that. Like generally, we kind of max out at three to four hours a day, right? Intense research, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, that sounds very, I think that's it. Like I said though, what? Yeah, the other principle I have is just keep it as simple as

possible. Yeah. That's as soon as I add any sort of complexity to it and I just I don't so no like break times know. I mean, I I will schedule in with my time boxing. I'll schedule in breaks. What's, sometimes, what I call Flex? I'm just like, I just, I know I just need a bunch of stuff I need to get done and I'll put like, a 30 minute box just called Flex. Okay. Do whatever you need to get done

in that time. Yeah, but I don't do no. I don't get a hardcore on the Pomodoro or the Puma Jordan, never worked for me. I never quite got that one. Yeah. And so I wonder if somebody just made that up. I wonder that with a lot of things. Yeah, if it works for you great. But yeah, try it, whatever. What's your ADHD? Ritalin system look like Mark if you could call it that.

So, okay. I would divide it up into two kind of classes of work, so, For deep work, I would say it's not very different, which is I try to block off x a number of hours. Eliminate as many distractions as possible. You know, I used to use software that would block things like social media and, you know, Sports websites and stuff like that. I, I did that for a number of years and it was very helpful, especially when I was writing a bunch of books. These days, I don't do it as much.

I kind of, I'll let myself if I kind of feel need to get distracted for a little bit mentally, I'll let myself do that. The biggest difference. So this is where the ADHD comes in this is and this is what's going to sound crazy to people and all. So I think is a good case study of like how productivity is just very personal and what works for you may be something that like does not work for any productivity Guru out there. That should be the highlight of the section actually going

through these details. Absolutely, so action as somebody with ADHD my brain kind of has a disproportionate need for novelty actually. I wouldn't say need, I would say a disproportionate to set the ability to novelty like it gets bored extremely easily and it gets excited by something shiny very quickly and very like very strongly what I noticed. I noticed this as far back as when I was in university, is

that To a certain extent. And if it's not deep work, task switching actually works in my favor, I wouldn't call it multitasking because I don't, I never do two things at the same time, but I'll give it a simple example, which is I had a university lecture that I used to go to and without fail, I would fall asleep every single time and I would have to like end up asking my friend for her notes and I would like scramble and freak out and have to like go read the textbook, you know,

two days before the the exam and It was a disaster and then at some point, I don't remember when or how I started picking up sudokus and crossword puzzles. From the Student Union, and I'd take him to the lecture. And I found that if I like sat there and did sudokus, while the guy was lecturing, I not only did I stay awake the entire time, but I paid attention to the entire lecture, which I mean, I know, that makes no sense. That makes no sense.

I didn't understand this for a longest time and it's true to this day. So like sometimes, when I'm like listening to somebody, give a talk or even if I like pull up a podcast or something like I can't just sit and listen to a podcast. I have like open up like a game on my phone and if I have the game going on my phone, then I can pay attention to the podcast. I know. Yeah. You are weird man but it's you know what it is.

So this is what I figured out. Yeah it took me a long time to figure this out but it's so it's not multitasking. I thought it was that for a long time. What it is is it's task switching or it's like, I guess cognitive switching. Let's go back to the crossword in the college lecture. So, I'm in I'm in the classroom, I'm listening to the professor. Lecture, I pay attention, let's say I make it five six minutes, my brain starts getting bored and as an eight person with ADHD.

When I started to get bored it's like I'm really fucking bored and when I have the Sudoku there, I'm like cool switch to doku and I started doing this to do Sudoku. And while I'm doing this Sudoku I'm like kind of passively listening and hearing him in the background. And then after a few minutes, when he says something interesting, I'm like, oh, that's shiny and new. Hey, look, novelty, go back to the lecture. Okay? And so now I'm back in the lecture for another five or six minutes.

And then when the lectures starts to get boring again, I can like use the Sudoku to keep the novelty. Engine going in my brain so that I never just shut down and go to sleep. And I bring all of this up because I do this every day. Yeah, in my actual data watch to do this. Yes. And as you know I'm I am strangely somehow extremely productive. Yeah. So anything that is not deep work. I will very intentionally do this. Like we took a break between shooting.

This, we were out in the office. We're talking about this podcast while we're talking about it. I am looking at the design for podcast covers and fonts for the website and thinking about feedback that I'm going to give for on all that and I'm doing the exact same thing. So it's like, you know, while you ingest or talking as soon as that's that conversation starts to get boring. I look at the designs and start thinking about the designs and then as soon as I hear, one of

you say something interesting. I like stopped looking at the designs and I go back to the conversation and it keeps the novelty engine going in my brain. So, anybody listening to this with ADHD, the thing to know is that you, you have this kind of constant disproportionate craving for novelty for new stimulus. And if you don't feed your brain that stimulus, you you shut down essentially, like you just lose interest completely and In my

case, go to sleep. If you can find Productive ways to feed yourself that stimulus if you can. And in my case it's kind of task pairing things. So it's like if I have to do something extremely boring, like check, like go through my inbox and clear it out. Then I will just pair that with something else I need to do, right? Which is like I don't know. Have a meeting about like a production meeting for the

YouTube channel, right? And I'll just kind of casually like flick through the emails while people are talking. And I'm not being rude. Yeah, I'm like, okay, I am paying attention but it gets it helps me get everything done because it's like if I just tried to do the email and nothing but the email it would never get done. I would get bored. And I'd start watching YouTube

after 10 emails. And if I just did the meeting and I tried to pay attention to the meeting, I would get bored and I would like zone out and probably start watching YouTube videos, so, it's okay, my pairing them together and this is so we have not talked about something yet. Which you and I I think it's like the main thing on this episode that you and I disagree on. Okay. And it's probably because of this it which is the active procrastination.

There is something in the research, Called active procrastination. Big debate over it. Actually yes. Which I personally call my wife and I we lovingly call it productive procrastination. That's common. Yeah. Which is essentially this. It's like, let's say you have a big hairy task, that's really intimidating and scary and so you're putting it off. Well, one way to get it, done is to go find an even bigger. Hairier task. That's even more scary than that, one and then procrastinate

by doing the less scary task. Okay, putting off, right? So it's like, simple example is, you've been meaning the clean, the garage for months, and You know, you just keep putting it off, but then suddenly, it's, you know, you need to go buy a new car and that's terrifying and you're really anxious about it. So you put it off like, so it's Saturday. You're supposed to go to a lot. You're supposed to go look at the cars and instead of doing

that you decide, you know what? It's time to clean the girl. Okay, so you spend the entire Saturday cleaning the garage. Now, on the one hand, you just put off a really important tasks. On the other hand, you finally cleaned the damn girl, it is somebody with ADHD. I feel like my entire life is this is just like Finding like here's the task. I'm supposed to do. Here's my level of intimidation with it. What is something I can find that is is more or less

intimidating than this. To either do instead or to force me to do this, right? And it's just like this constant negotiation with my own brain. Like you, I do have a to-do list. I don't timebox because as you can imagine. Yeah, that's my life is chaos and the time boxes are completely if you're gonna be tasks with switching, there's yeah that's useless. It's and it's not just that but it's also like giving you know my role in the business like my days are Crazy.

Yes. Like it's there's so much unexpected stuff that happens throughout the day so the time boxing just goes out the window but I do do to-do lists. And tasks lists. And I I'm actually like quite religious about it because I think it's the only thing that keeps me like tethered and like streamlined because otherwise I just forget stuff. But outside of that, I don't do a whole lot else. The other thing that I do that Is strange about me? That's different.

You know, the conventional wisdom is always like knockout the most difficult task of the day. First goes all the way back to Ben Franklin. There was the best selling book in the 80s called eat that frog that frog Tracy which was basically it's one of those like books that should have been a blog post. Like the entire book is just like do the most important thing, eat the Frog first thing in the morning, and then you like, like you said, you, if you feels like a win for the rest of

the day, I can't do that. Yeah, like, I gotta get some warm up, or yeah, my brain. It feels like my brain needs warm up. So I I usually actually do the the least important stuff. First thing in the morning, I love mornings. It's funny. My my morning routine is literally wake up grabbing energy, drink and sit down on my desk and start working like within 100 seconds of waking up. Wow. So it's really I don't do anything. I don't I don't stretch, I don't meditate, I don't walk.

I don't I literally wake up walk to my desk start working okay. But I need to start with like low impact work. So it's like usually first thing in the morning is email. And then I catch up on slack messages. And then usually by then it's been like 30 40 minutes and my brains like functioning I can start kind of doing creative

stuff. And then I'll in, if anything is kind of intensive and creative and I need to like dedicate more in a couple hours to it, then I'll like do the Deep work thing, where I'm like, okay, close all the windows close, all the tabs but the phone on the other side of the room and like now we're locked in, we're writing the script or we're writing an email or whatever. That's kind of it.

Yeah. Okay, that's it well, okay, what it sounds like is you have figured out a way to leverage your impulsivity, yes, which I think is. It's probably useful for people even if they don't have ADHD. If they're just an impulsive person and I consider myself to be impulsive at times too. And I've heard you talk about that before where your tasks switching cognitive, switching,

whatever. And I've experimented with it and recent weeks as well and yeah, every now and then like if I am getting bored with something I'm like okay I need I just need a jolt of novelty and I don't have any ADHD. Yeah so I think that could be useful for for a lot of people. The important thing I think is going back like yes, when I talk to ADHD people who Who are dysfunctional, they do the task switching thing, but then they'll just leave six things,

half completed. Yes. And they never go back and complete it and so, like, And this is where the to-do list come in that I'm like religious with my to-do list, because it's like, I, yeah, you have to go back. Okay, you have to go back. So that's what when you talk about the productive procrastination. And that's the point where I get a little sticky with it because it's so easy for me.

Like, if my, if my house is a disaster, I've been procrastinating putting off, but I got some work tasks. I need to do like that. Time to clean the house. Now, do that. And then two hours go by, and I got a hell of a clean house. But I, I'm nowhere close to working on what I want to work on. I think this is one. You just have to be very, very careful with. Yes. If the task should probably be in the same domain. Ideally, right. Can you use like I'm just

exactly. It's like if I was supposed to prepare for this podcast and instead I like decide to go mow my lawn like that useless, right. Okay. Where is it? If it's like, you know, I should be preparing for the podcast. But maybe instead what I'll do is I'll like start doing research for the next podcast. Like that's what I try to do because then it's like, okay, at least that's like a Jason. What? I should be working on even emails at that point. Yeah, right.

Okay. In the idea too, that the whole the importance of coming back to the thing and finishing it, it's like let's say I start You know, prepping for this podcast, I get bored halfway through. So I started doing another thing. what I do is I wait for the moment that the initial task starts to feel novel again, it's like, oh yeah, I was prepping for the podcast this morning and now it's six hours later, and Yeah, I should go finish that. That sounds kind of interesting.

Actually, I was in like I was at a really interesting place with that so it's like tricking your brain into finding old things to feel new again. Yeah, that makes sense. That does make sense. No, I found the same thing too, because we've been working on this particularly so, for so long, I got crusty, I'm just like, oh my God, I cannot with

procrastination anymore. I've read these studies or whatever, it's a time or whatever and if I just put it away for a week or whatever and came back to my boom there's all this novelty to it. It feels novel.

Yeah. Yeah, the big takeaway here though, is not a good caught up on what we do because you and I have very different systems we have except for the to do this, I think we have pretty different systems and I try not to work on too many things at once where you leverage that in your favorite, I need to work on a lot of things at once. Yeah, the key takeaway here is you can try these things out. Figure out what works for you pick choose borrow. That's great. Yeah, but this is not going to

solve your professional problem. This is only after yourself aware enough right? Of why you procrastinating in the first place that these things actually will work. Yeah. Yeah, let's move on to another mid-century School fought. This one that went completely under the radar. In the productivity space and is actually one of the most effective things when it comes to dealing with procrastination and productivity. And that is purpose, this doesn't get talked about it.

In fact, we almost missed this. Yeah, this was a late addition to our our guide and our outline. I was I was I was embarrassed actually. Yeah Friday. You're like why aren't we talking about purpose? I'm like oh God it was a huge face palm for me. Yeah. This is the fascinating thing is like So much has been written on time management. There's not a single person in the corporate world that is like, you know, walking around cubicles like reminding people of their purpose.

Yet, when you look at the research, this is like one of the most important things. Yes. Is that people feel a sense of meaning and purpose in the work that they're doing, right? Like if if you feel like you're work is Meaningful. You're much less likely to delay doing it, right? Because it aligns with your values. It feels important if it feels useful, so This actually comes out.

I'm like a harp on it for too long but like, It comes out of the mid-century existentialist movement, right? Which is just wonderful and and Bleak and French, and that they, they basically said, like, you know, they start with nihilism which is like nothing means anything.

After a great start, we're all just a bunch of dirt and Adams and we're all gonna die and there's nothing you can do to stop it. But from there, they make a very important leap which is that You know, meaning and purpose not preordained so Jean-Paul. Start had this great saying where he said, existence precedes essence, which is actually taking Plato and flipping it on his head because Plato said productivity is a a form a concept that we try to

live up to and whether we are exist or not, productivity always is always there and it's just a question of whether you embody it or not starts like no dude. Fuck that. Like you get to decide what productivity is you get the decided if it's even worth pursuing at all, you get the decide if it's meaningful.

Existence, precedes essence that basically meaning is constructed, after the fact that essentially, like, we're all riding our own stories and we are all deciding what is useful and meaningful and what is not and It's a simple idea. It's incredibly profound. I think it's, it's most popularized from the experience of Viktor Frankl and his book man searched for me. Meaning, he wrote about his experiences surviving the Holocaust.

And he talks about how, you know, it's a sense of hope and purpose for the future, that Not only drove him to survival but like he noticed among the other prisoners was kind of the deciding factor of their Fates as well.

And so you get kind of this this whole philosophical movement through the 60s and 70s of just really Thinking and paying attention to the meaning, that's being described to certain behaviors or functions or or groups or relationships and strangely it's funny because existentialism, I mean, it was everywhere, it was in culture, it was an art, it was in film, it was in politics. It never made its way into the

business World, which is funny. Because when you look at the research on Productivity and procrastination as an extension people who feel a sense of meaning and purpose in their work. They're more productive. They're more resilient to setbacks, they're more willing to take risks, they're more willing to hear feedback and they they procrastinate less and so it's just like It's so stupidly simple. But it is worth considering. Why am I doing this, right? Why do I care?

Well, do you think it didn't make its way into say corporate culture? Because it's almost it's almost antithetical to a lot of corporate culture because it's kind of hard, I think, most people Would kind of see what's going on there. If you brought a consultant in to say, okay, we're here today. And from 8 to noon, we're going to talk about your purpose here in this corporate setting and people would be like, wait a second. What? Oh, okay, let me back.

Where's that too? Cynical, I guess. Yeah, that is pretty cynical. Yeah, I would also say that it did make its way into the corporate world.

It just took about 50 years, I would say with our generation, ah, okay with it. I would say really just in the last 20, 25 years, like really the Millennials and gen Z, like if you and I remember seeing survey data around this years ago of, like, One of the big things about the millennial generation is like they like Millennials really gave a shit right purpose, what they did for a living, like they needed to feel like their job was contributing value to the world

in some way and they were not, they were not satisfied. Just you know getting the paycheck and that's a relatively new thing throughout history. Like it's a I would say it's actually a very privileged thing in history but it's also I mean it is purpose is is productive, right?

Like it's and if you look at all of the businesses and companies over the last 20 years, like they really push some sort of social value or cause or Mission behind whatever they're doing, you know, everything from like, like then Nike commercial folk, like focusing on female athletes, or apple being the first to Pioneer, like recycling, electronics, and there's just so many examples from the last 20 years of large corporations who have like adopted specific missions.

Certain means aligning themselves with certain political causes, right? And it's like very much like it's on an accident. It's more profitable, right? Like it's it's like we want to, we want our employees to feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile, and because when you feel like you're doing something important and whereas Wild, You work harder?

Yeah and you fuck around less and you're willing to make mistakes and and embarrass yourself because it's for some higher cause you know who's the master of this. Fucking Elon Musk. Oh, like, think about it, dude. Like if you're an engineer interested in space, what feels more important than taking Humanity to Mars. Right, right. Like if you're an aeronautical engineer and you hear that like you're 25 and you hear that. You're like, whatever dude. I'm all in.

Like, tell me what to do, I will grind all day. All night. I will work my ass off, you know, Tesla, you know, climate change and bringing bringing the renewable economy, you know, into America. It is, it really is a superpower, right? And it is a real, I think it's an overlooked Talent of elon's of, like, finding these kind of almost like, Civilizational. Important causes to align his companies with You're seeing it

now with with the AI stuff. Like he's he's pushing this Narrative of like we need an AI That's aligned with with valuing human life or else like we could all go extinct. It is absolutely existential. It is existentialism, you know, just incorporate form. So it is okay. It is a super overlooked thing. Yeah. And and I understand why. It feels hand wavy and cliche. There's like there are a lot of cliches around it, but it is a

thing. And I think to bring it back home to people listening to this who are struggling just to like, you know, eat healthy or Apply for that job that they want or whatever. Like really ask yourself, why do you want it? I'd say what I noticed the most often is that people who are primarily motivated to do things, Not because they actually care about the thing but because they care about the attention or the result, the thing will get them. Those are the people who lose

motivation very quickly, right? Like if you're doing something for the approval of others, that is not a sticky motivation, like that is a very short term motivation. So you're not going to stick through all the challenges and setbacks and failures and you know, false starts. Where is if you actually really believe in in a high like a higher meaning or purpose around something. Then you will have that patience.

You will have that resilience and you will stick with it even if you don't get it right the first or second time. What do you think? who though about you you're talking about purpose kind of in a grander sense and a this higher Grand purpose that aiming for whether it is somebody like Elon Musk and their his Grand designs that he Is that over complicating it? So to though, for somebody because we can't all have those jobs, right? So what I'm thinking of is I think a lot more.

Jobs and work in general. How did just an inherent purpose tied to them and it is usually taken care of your family. Yes. Like so a miserable job you could be shoveling shit. Yeah. And you could say ah, this is a meaningless job. I'm Shoveling shit where you can say this job allows me to put food on the table for my family or you know, whatever it is.

Another example, I had a friend who wanted to start his own business, he was he had a, you know, pretty decent corporate job that he had and didn't really like it though and there was no purpose behind it but he wanted to start this business and as soon as he decided, I'm going to start this business, The job that is corporate job actually took on a new meeting because he needed the money from that corporate job and they needed the connections and he needed.

So he started to like his job more because there was a new purpose around that's awesome which is insane. And it wasn't some high pie in the sky purpose that he had, it was more just like, I mean, it is treating it as a means to an end, but there was a bigger purpose behind that means to an end if that makes sense. So yeah, I think there's just a

way to, you know, not. We don't all have to be Engineers for whenever to find that purpose and to motivate us and to not procrastinate on these things. Yeah, they're you don't need these civilizational cataclysmic existential reasons. It's interesting. I was talking to a guy recently, you know, we did a Podcast, an old podcast episode last year on my my health journey.

And I in that episode, I talked about how it was really important for me to find a way to make exercise fun like that was one of my big challenges that I just, I hated doing it. And so I, I really had to find like, game application or groups, or, you know, Competitions or whatever, just like keep it interesting for myself. It's like it's funny. I've worked out religiously for 20 years and I've always hated it. Never enjoyed it. I was like, wow, that's actually

sad. Yeah, well first of all, sorry, I'm sorry. I feel a little bad for you. But I was like, wow. That's actually that, that's atypical. Yeah, generally when you meet somebody who's like, exercise religiously for forever, it's, it's because they enjoy it in some way or they found a thing that they enjoyed. And so, I asked them, I was like, well, what drives you like? Why do you keep doing it? And he said, oh well, you know, everybody everybody, my family dies, super early.

And as soon as my kids were born, I was absolutely determined that. I was not going to die early. I was gonna, I was gonna live to an old age and I was going to see him grow up, and I was going to see my grandkids. I was like There you go. There you go. Yeah. So you don't need to actually did probably exactly deeper level he did. Right? And I think that's That is the power of finding some sort of purpose and something.

Is that it it makes like the suffering in anything is going to be in, you know, we've talked a lot in this episode about the Pleasure Principle and avoiding pain. To me, it's like the purpose is the one. If there is a hack it's the one hack there is because its purpose is the only thing that can take pain. And make it. Feel worthwhile, right? Yeah, right. And like, it can make you feel like, okay, that sucked, but I'm glad I did it. Go back to the Goggins thing, too.

I think. Yes, that's I think that's actually what's going on. Yeah, with him. Is it there's just a higher purpose to his pain? Totally. What do you think too about though? If you if you do start out kind of at a Not very good reason or not very good, purpose for something. I give you an example. Like I've always been fairly healthy but you know, like you over the last few years I've focused more on my health and I started out was I just I just want to look good that I was as

vanity purely. It's, it's switched to a bigger purpose though. I like I was just telling you a little while ago about a great uncle, that I had who in his 80s, was able to like, spread his legs and bend down, and get put his head on the floor. Like he could stretch insanely and he was skiing and his 80s and all of that I'm like, well, I want to be able to do that. I and I want to be able to live

a healthy life. When I'm older not, it's very much switched to that but it started out as a, a very vain purpose. Yeah, I some jobs can start out that way, too. This is a, just, a means to an end. Yeah. Pay my rent and then it turns into something bigger later on, too. I are there examples of that, that you can think of in your own life, or What's going on when that happens? I don't know. I mean this career started out that way.

Yeah I I was I read Tim Ferriss as for our work week and I was like I just want to make some money on the internet so I can go party in Argentina. Like that's that's like literally the my entire bar, like 2000, man, they're awesome. You just so I just started I just started a bunch of website like I didn't really think about it, I didn't care about it.

And you know eventually as you know one of those websites was a dating advice website and that started to take off and do pretty well and And then people start asking me for advice. This was 2007 to 2008. And I was like, well shit, if people can ask me for advice, I should probably like know what I'm talking about. So I started researching all this stuff. I sure, you know, buying a bunch of books and downloading psychology papers and reading journals. And And pretty soon.

Next thing I know I'm like this is I could do this forever. Yeah. Like this is it. I'm I'm so in on this, and I I just feel like that that actually is probably the more common story. Yes, I think this is people's biggest mistake with this too, and I am 100% sure we will do an episode of purpose. That's right. But it People mistakenly assume

that you find the purpose. And then you become super motivated to do all this stuff where it's like, no you do the stuff and as you do it you find the things that feel very meaningful and impactful. And then that's what the purpose is, right? And you know so again I guess this might be a little bit like the time management thing where it's like if you're trying to go from 0 to 1 then purpose is probably less of a factor and less.

There's I don't know there's like some major external Force like a kid's born or something like that. Generally speaking though it's like you need to have actually be doing something and then you look for the purpose and the things that you're doing and like because that's the thing that's going to sustain you over the long run like that the purpose The thing that the purpose solves is going from short term to long term. Yeah, it won't get you from 0 to short term. Okay?

Yeah, that makes sense to me and and checks out where I have found purpose and all sorts of places, I never thought I would have so 100% that that checks out.

Yeah, yeah, so just really quick, before we get into the takeaways, I just want to remind listeners that we do have the free downloadable guide that goes along with this episode most podcasts put their show notes on the website are show notes are so freaking long and thorough, we actually had to turn them into a PDF, the show notes for this episode is over

65 pages long. So if you want to see those show notes including full summary of the episode, all the takeaways, all the research, book recommendations, all the above, go to solve podcast.com slash procrastination to get it all. So, if you want some help implementing the advice from this episode into your life, you should check out the momentum Community. We are launching a 30-day.

Nation challenge based on this episode where we take all of the best ideas and Concepts that we're discussing here and turn them into daily actions that you can Implement into your life. So if you're wondering how to apply everything that you've been learning, then the momentum Community is the best way to do that. You can go to find momentum.com slash procrastination. Link is in the description below. All right, let's let's get back

to the theory and the research. So like we're at this point we're pushing into the 80s and 90s. Everybody realizes the time management stuff doesn't really work. Where are we? At here? Right? What? What's next?

Well, a group of researchers were very observant that time management was not working and so they said out to figure out, okay, what is it about procrastination motivation in general, that gets people to actually do what they want to do and say what they want to do. One researcher in particular, his name is Peter Steele who you've already brought up, and he gave us the definition, our modern deaf Venetian of

procrastination. He also formulated What's called the temporal motivation Theory, okay. TNT, for short, I might refer to it as team to every now and that is temporal motivation Theory. The essentially what he tried to marry a few different areas around things like motivation, there was this idea about temporal discounting and hyperbolic discounting that he kind of developed to throughout this that he borrowed from which we've talked about and just for

for listeners. Its temporal discounting is we tend to devalue things far in the future, right? So if there's a consequence 20 years from now we tend to not really right that will factor in really big into. Temporal motivation Theory as we go through this but his the big innovation through his theory. Was this equation that he came up with okay and I'll go through, quick won't bore you

with the details. And, you know, there's no obviously you're not going to be able to have to plug in numbers for this or anything like that, but oh, I know I brought my calculator and everything. He came up with this this equation, which is motivation, equals expectancy times, value divided by one, plus and pulsive. Times delay. Okay, that's all right. So if you're not mathematically inclined, no big deal.

The important thing to take away is there's kind of four big factors that go into this equation on whether or not you are going to procrastinate around if you're motivated enough to not procrastinate, right? Yeah. So expectancy, we have this first variable which is the perceived likelihood that you think you can actually achieve, what you're trying to achieve goes back to the self-efficacy, right?

We already talked about that. So the he's already bringing in stuff that we know if you expect your gonna be successful, you're more likely to be successful. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's, that's one of the first factors that up in the numerator of the equation, right? Then you have the value. It's your perceived how rewarding the perceived outcome is to you. And there's a subjective component to that.

But essentially, if it's something that you actually value highly, you're going to be more motivated, right? It's total sense. Yeah. Okay, multiply that By your expectancy if you think you can achieve it and it's highly valuable to you. Then you're going to have the synergistic effect, where motivation goes up. You're going to not procrastinate on it. But then we have some things that might detract from your motivation as well impulsiveness. Okay?

So here we're kind of getting at some of the emotional side of things, right? And we've talked already about our own impulsiveness and how that's factored into our procrastination. So, impulsiveness is how prone you are to seek out and succumb to distractions or immediate gratification to, right? So your ability to postpone gratification or gratification and then that last one is delay.

How far away is the outcome of whatever is associated with the tasks that you're about to perform, right? Right. So the further a task is or the further, the reward, the reward, or the result of the behavior that you're going to engage in the last motivation you, right? And that's the temporal discounting that you talked about. Yeah, that was one of the big Innovations of temporal motivation.

Theory was including that, in our, our calculus, literally the equation to procrastination know I'm going to guess. Just From my experience with. Other psychologists who have tried the creative equations is that this equation is just not going to work and every situation.

So that's fine. What I like about what I really like about TMT is that it finally breaks down and acknowledges a lot of these Emotional factors the expectancy we've already talked about that, not just in terms of the self-efficacy but also the perfectionism, right? Like if you're expectation is that, you know, That it needs to be perfect, right to be accomplished. Then that is going to be far more intimidating than if you

your expectation. Is that like, oh, I just need to do. Yeah, a decent job at it. I like the temporal discounting and then I like the, it's amazing that we've gotten this far, not talked about distraction yet. That's actually giving this day and age. Like, I mean, young girl, listeners will probably will have trouble believing this but like Procrastination and distraction we're not too things that you really people really related to each other until like

maybe 15 20 years ago. Like when we were kids it was never like the issue with doing our homework was never because like we couldn't get off our phones. It was just we just didn't want to do it maybe TV but even that was yeah yeah like it's Dad was probably watching TV anyway so you my memory of childhood is is long periods of boredom and but I still didn't do my homework so it's it's this idea that

procrastination is is directly. Proportional to distraction is a relatively new concept and I I know we're going to get in the distraction. Deeply at some point here soon, but it's interesting to me that it's really only coming up now. Yeah, well look at it in the historical context again. Like you just said, pure steel was doing a most of his, the book of his research was and then 90s and 2000s, and he's

continued since then. But that is, when Information, Technology really started to take off take off and get like embedded into the culture to where we see it today. And so the impulsiveness part of that, as you're right, it captures that distraction element. Yeah. That the it's a simple equation

but it is pretty flexible. So, it's the same time because that impulsiveness One of the benefits, and the strength of the equation is that it can these, these terms can capture a lot, but those terms can also become imprecise, then too, we can get into that in a little bit. But yeah, so like just some examples of this, like, you're expectancy, it could be really high like you.

Like, yes I can do this, but your impulsiveness, my override that and you're the deadline might be a long ways away. So you can start to see all these different really complicated. Kind of calculations that happens with just these four variables, which is really pretty interesting. And again, it was a an innovation at that time, that to marry all these different things and start putting these things together in a way that's more

interactive. Because we, when we started out, we were talking about the ancient world. Yes. One school of thought that this thing and then the psychologists come along like no it's this thing. This is finally we're starting to get a more integrated Approach at this point and I think that's what another big innovation of TMT was that it started looking at it in a kind of multidisciplinary way that we just hadn't seen up until this point.

Yeah, yeah. if we may take a quick detour, okay, I think the Assumption up until this point, is that to be productive or to defeat procrastination. It is about summoning willpower about just mustering up enough energy or motivation to just brute force your way through it. And I definitely like especially in the ancient times and and throughout you know, in my second book I called it the classical assumption.

Like if you look at all of the discussions around a crazy and like why people don't do the things that they should do and why people fail at things like it is very much seen as like it is the job of the higher level of your mind. The, The Chariot driver to whip the horses into shape until they do the right thing. And so you, you're just expected to like, brute force your way through it.

I think it's really only in the last few decades that are understanding of psychology has gotten developed enough, that we've realized that it's like, a, that doesn't really work in the long term, like, you can brute force yourself into. I mean, everybody's had this experience. You can brute force your way into the gym once maybe, twice, maybe even a couple weeks, but, like, by week, three or four, you're done, you're just taped out, you don't care anymore.

So you really do have to negotiate these other factors. Like you have, you really have to look at like what is, how are you measuring yourself? Like, when are the benefits coming? How do you feel about it? How do you feel about your ability to accomplish the thing? What sort of Standards or expectations? Are you holding yourself to are those reasonable? Or not? Like it's kind of negotiating

these other factors within your mind that help you. you know, when you combine that with the environmental stuff, Like that. That's what you almost just like, Grease the skids. For the behavior to happen naturally, as a byproduct of these things. Yeah. And I think maybe you're kind of getting at too is that you're not denying that part of you, that part of your nature to your working with it. Yes, more.

So this these more recent theories start to really acknowledge that and incorporate that incorporate that into their their Frameworks. Yeah. And I think, you know, yeah, for the longest time it was very much like the reasoning, the writer, you know, on The Chariot, the reasoning part of your brain developed so you can overcome all of these terrible nasty brutish things about you and well, yes, it can be used for that but it's also those

things. Probably evolved in our minds as well, in order to serve those two Cherry driving horses, right? There's there's a an acceptance of who we are in a lot of these. It's like, okay, look there is your, there's some pulsee, we're impulsive by our nature. How does that factor in to getting things done and our procrastination? We you know there's we have this weird kind of temporal discounting where we we put off things that are further that are due for their, in advance, for

whatever reason. Yeah. It this starts to incorporate that and like really acknowledge human nature on a more realistic level. Yeah, my view. It's a much healthier view of. How to actually get yourself to take the action that you want to take, right? You know, because it is coming back to the shame piece. I was just gonna say, shame is gone. Shame is out of the equation, right? You're not judging yourself. You're not like, oh God, why am I not?

Why am I discounting things that happen in the future? You know, like, you know, it's it's like you're human. This is we all do this and and coming back to Aristotle. This is the skill, right? The skill. You could, you could almost look at each of these four factors and and see the skill in each one of them. Right? Is like managing your expectancy managing, like like being mindful of the value that you're

going to get out of something. And there are ways I love to talk to like there are ways of manipulating that value as well. Like you can gamify things, you can create social accountability around things, you can reward yourself for things. You can create things in your environment that make it more enjoyable, right? So it's like learning to manipulate the value aspect of the equation, learning to

implement. I think the purpose stuff that we talked about really factors into the time, discounting right? Like it's it's like when you remember, what is the cause or Mission? That is driving my motivation to do this thing. That helps you counterbalance that time discounting like, it's like I'm doing this for my kids. I'm doing this so that when I'm a grandfather, I can play with my grandchildren, that's why I'm

going to the gym today, right? It's like that counterbalances that time discounting that naturally happens in everybody's brain. So It's we're finally starting to see everything come together. Right, right, yeah. And you can you can look at each one of these, like, the expectancy thing you can work on things around self-efficacy or break the task down. To a point where it is you do feel like you have some agency and some ability to where did that start like the the breaking down tasks.

Yeah. Actually that a lot of, that kind of came from time management. So there was there was glimmers within that whereas like oh you don't know how to one of their one of the big kind of I don't know, not a revelation or even an innovation, but they were like, oh yeah, people need to be able to see a big task and break it down into this component parts and it's just a lot more explicit in something like TMT. Okay. Where, yeah, they, they found that breaking that down into.

You've talked about this so many times. This this is my case. Yeah, this is one of the first piece is advice. You are saying, yeah. If you have this huge daunting task, no. Start with the most dead. Simple obvious thing that you can do. Yeah. And that gets your momentum going and then onto the next one on the next one. Yeah, that's the other thing about the equation, it's very Dynamic. If you really apply it, you will see that these factors can

change over time a lot. It's most obvious in the delay thing as the time, approaches the motivation goes up, but the others can do the same thing too. You might value a task or the benefits of a task differently throughout the stages of the process of doing it as well. Yeah. So, yeah, it is the breaking down thing. I feel like it works on so many

levels. You know, part of it is Just the intimidation Factor. Yeah, you know, when you have this huge hairy goal it is scary and it feels impossible. And if it feels you don't get that sense of progress and movement. You know, and just a single day or a single week of action, but if you can break it down into that single day of action, then you get to feel the sense of accomplishment. It feels less intimidating. And then like you said, you do, get that sense of momentum,

right? Like, there's like, a old thing from that Jerry Seinfeld said that, you know, when he writes, he X's out a day on his calendar. Yeah. And he said that, you know, the initially the goal is to just X out a few days in a row. But he said, once he's got a few days in a row, his only goal is to don't stop the street. Don't break the chain. He's going as long as possible, and you can get that.

Like a beautiful example of like, Manipulating these factors within your own head and redefining what the metric is and read like breaking down tasks in the constituent tasks or like lumping tasks together into some larger tasks in a way that feels more doable. Feels more, exciting feels more fun and feels less intimidating for yourself. Yeah. So that's expectancy component

of the equation. I think for the value one, like you already mentioned to as like having some what you said it with respect to delay but I think value can also be manipulated through your purposes as well. Like if you do have a purpose again it goes back to If I have a job, I don't really necessarily like, yeah, I'm probably gonna procrastinate it, it's an appetite. If I have a purpose attached to that job, that same job. Now, the value could shoot up right at that point too.

So again, it's just these little mind, it's just it's all within your head too. Which is crazy. You know, there's some external factors as well. Obviously the delay and all of that impulse in this distractions, in your environment. But again, yeah, we're putting it all together at this. Yeah. And it is It is a skill. It is something you you work on and develop.

And I mean, we'll talk at the end of episode about how to work on and develop it. But it is It's not something you know because again it's like purpose is subjective. Value is subjective. Expectation is subjective. These are all things that you get to decide you get to decide like what success looks like, you get this to decide what is Meaningful. What is valuable, what, what is worth pursuing? How long you pursue it? You know do you want to pursue it for a week?

A month, a year, 10 years. These are all decided within your head and the skill is learning to draw the lines in such a way that makes it easy to move forward, right? That it stops being intimidating or feeling difficult. I was I listened to a podcast that peer still was on and preparation for this too and he made a good point. And you actually alluded to this earlier was that TMT?

A lot of it is about being very realistic too and he said the people he's noticed that do the best with procrastination are very, very honest with himself. And I think it applies to each one of these variables. But he, you know, he gave the example that we've already given two of You know, he doesn't buy junk food. Yeah. And it's because he knows what happens when he has junk food in the house and I've been very like with my friends.

They all know like I'm a sugar fiend, I'm a junk food fiend and that's what I don't buy it, you know? And but I think that you that's part of like reducing distractions part maybe or it is even increasing expectancy like I know I cannot eat junk food if it's not around me. Yes, boom. That's like a media unlock for me Immediate win for me. So it is just getting into the kind of minutiae and dialing these things around to fit your personality and be real honest with yourself about it.

Yeah. How do you, how do you feel like this maps with the Near ILS. in distractible stuff because, you know, one of the things like quibble with near on sometimes, I feel like, you know, It is a two-sided coin. One is just don't have Temptation in your environment. Yeah. Like be aware of your triggers and get rid of them but then some of it too is like being aware of your own, internal triggers like being aware of when you get bored or and see or anxious.

And not choosing the, the avoidance in the moment. Sometimes I feel like he leans too much on the ladder, but like, I'm wondering, I'm wondering if you, like, if his framework kind of fits into the, the TMT stuff. Like, So specifically around environmental design or more about the emotional trigger stuff. The emotional trigger stuff. Yeah. Well, so I think that's actually kind of one. I would say, fair criticism about TMT is that?

It kind of is a little, it's not specific enough, around the emotional triggers, not really yes there's impulsivity in there and there's some subjective constructs like value and expectancy and all that. But the emotional side I don't think it's quite it kind of tries to boil down these very complex, emotional processes that we go through. Yeah, four variables. And that that's one of the, the criticisms of it, that I think is fair.

Yeah, if it feels like it should be like six or seven variables. What? Yeah, while the variables are pretty well. Clearly defined like actually measuring them and defining them in the, in the real world is much harder. Yeah, so I think that's a fair criticism of it. And we'll get to more of the emotional side of things, but yeah, it oversimplifies some of the, the complexity of human behavior.

I think to some extent all equations will, of course, well, and it's This is this is the problem with this field is like anytime I see an equation in Psychology I'm like yeah you know it is probably directionally correct. Yeah. But it probably doesn't not measure a single thing, I can't capture.

Yeah. And really what they found in the experimental studies is TMT does a very good job of predicting procrastination in the short run but it's not super great about like chronic procrastination or just like repeatedly. Procrastination is the same domain. Yeah. You and I'm sure you've experienced this before too. Sometimes you're like, highly motivated. He still procrastinate, like, I like, surge of motivation, I'm going to get this done and you still find a way to

procrastinate. And so, that's the one thing, the output for this. If you notice in the equation is motivation, it's motivation equals the expectancy times value. Yeah, there's can still be times where you feel highly motivated and still, you still don't do it and it just it, this doesn't fully capture that. Yeah, so that's one of the criticisms for sure. I and they're just isn't really a lot of focus on the emotional

affective triggers. Yeah. Because I'm just thinking about the impulsivity piece, like everything else makes sense to me, right? Spelling to see the value delay, the delay. I feel like the impulsivity you could actually break out into probably three or four of its own variables, right?

Like there's how many distractions are in your environment like how easy is avoided like this is the near Ile thing which is like he, it's It's your level of distraction is proportional to both, how many opportunities for distraction, is there in your environment and how prone are you to distraction through your own? Internal emotional triggers right? Like you want to work on both sides of that coin, right?

You want to reduce your internal emotional triggers and you also want to reduce your external environmental triggers so that you're you're kind of like hitting it from both sides so that feels like it's missing and then all. So I know we're gonna get to emotional regulation in a second but it's a huge piece like if you are not good at managing

your emotions, right? Like if you were the type of person who When you get angry, you just fucking lose your shit for an entire day and become extremely impulsive. Or when you get anxious you just like panic and like run to, you know, whatever the the nearest bucket of chocolate is like it is the the intensity of your emotions plays, a huge factor in this and The ability to regulate your emotions to come down from them to, to cope with them. Effectively is a huge part of

this as well. Yeah. And this doesn't even get into the physical side. Like it's like, if you haven't slept. Right? Like if you haven't, if, you know, if you've got an injury or if you're sick, I mean, like there. It's well documented and everybody's experienced it that, it's like, if you are physically, not in good shape, Your willpower is just basically gone, right? Right. Entirely a cultural norms, too. Those are captured in this

either, you know? So it's really hard to that impulsivity when I agree is kind of like it's a catch-all ya category for any sort of emotional influence that would go into procrastination or whether you or motivation. Yeah so yeah it's limited in that regard. I definitely think so. Yeah it is kind of I really want human behavior to be boiled down to like an equation. That would be awesome. What would it be?

Nice. Yeah and I'm sure there are there like this equation, it does capture a lot of procrastination or motivation in certain situations but it's not it's still not complete. And I you know whether we ever get to a fully complete view of it or not, I don't know. But this is definitely a step in the right direction. So I don't want to knock it by any means. So where are we at now? What is what's, our current best understanding of procrastination and why it happens?

Well, Mark, I hate to tell you, but it comes down to emotions. I know, we have to get Squishy. Why see you just need to be hugged more? That's why you're not. That's why you're not doing your term paper. You have enough hugs. Well, that could be part of it. Yes. In the early, 2010s late 2000s, early 2010s, there was one researcher in particular, Tim pitchell, who started to notice that. Actually, this isn't just A problem that boils down to these

four factors. It's a much deeper emotional mood regulation problem. And in 2313, he wrote a book about it and it's very accessible and great book if you want to check it out. And then his one of his proteges was fuchsia while we interviewed for the show too. And she is kind of carried the torch since then Tim's.

He's retired. Now a few as now, living in England and she's scared on. She's kind of the world's foremost researcher on procrastination and their, the core Premise of the emotion regulation theory of procrastination is that it is first and foremost procrastination is a mood regulation strategy that we use and an emotional regulation strategy that we use to avoid these nasty negative feelings that we associate with any

given. Task that a lot of what we've already talked about, but they say that is the point that right there is where procrastination starts and where we need to focus our, our resources and our ability and our higher cognitive powers and everything. We've been talking about this is actually where we really need to focus on the research findings point to the negative affect triggers that we have around or more likely to delay tasks that we just find them Pleasant

sense, right? There's task aversion as well. Anything we perceive is unpleasant or overly challenging. It gives us this kind of urge to procrastinate. Almost we also prioritize mood repair, right. So Procrastination typically serves to like, kind of quickly improve our current mood, that we have like, oh, this feels bad. I just want out of this, I want Escape, basically research backs, all of that up. There's a lot of individual

traits too. We've kind of we kind of mentioned that you're, if you're more impulsive or not, that's like one individual trait, that might influence the way you procrastinate or whether you procrastinate on anything, And there as opposed to something like conscientiousness, which we haven't really talked about. But that's an individual trade, a personality trait, that can influence all of this. There's very personal experiences too.

We've talked a little bit about you know, your childhood upbringing or anything like that. They incorporate that into this framework as well. There's also just kind of a personal nature to all this so it's Both Universal emotional processes but then also the individual differences. So it's kind of trying to tie all of that together into this picture of How we regulate emotions on a even moment to moment basis.

Not just day-to-day basis, but a moment to moment basis, procrastination is a strategy for mood repair and just wanting to not feel bad. Yeah essentially yeah. So when you say procrastination is a strategy to for mood regulation like explain that like I'm five. Okay. What is that mean? Okay, so Marky Marky Marky in case people like don't realize, it's emotional regulations. One of those things I like everybody's heard the term, but like it's fuzzy.

What is it actually? Yeah, let's just take an example of when you are going to procrastinate on something. You have a work task, you want to do or you're you need to do? Yeah. Okay. You don't want to do it. That's kind of the point, right? When you approach this task all like, might get an anxious feeling? Yeah, it's red. Dread boredom. Yeah. Or the perfectionism can even come in at that point too like, oh my God. Am I not gonna do a good job at

this? And if I fail anxiety, anxiety, boils up and anger, why the fuck do I have to do this? Yeah, any, any negative emotion associated with the task will increase your likelihood of procrastinating in that moment. And so what we do is we look into usually into our immediate environment or past strategies that we might have used as well to Alleviate those uncomfortable feelings that we have and that's

when procrastination takes. Okay, I I've approached this a task that I find them Pleasant. Don't like that unpleasant feeling get me out of here let me do something else. Let me distract myself with you know these days it's your phone or whatever it is. Yeah or yeah this is why you can also like people procrastinate by cleaning their houses or something like this. Something some boring task because they find that even less awful than whatever they're going to be right on. Right right.

Does that make sense Marky? Yes. Okay let's get to call you Daddy. Please do not. Early on. In this, this when this framework was being developed, a lot of the psychologist called giving in to feel good, right? So you look for whatever, feels on a relative basis, whatever feels better in the moment than whatever you're uncomfortable with. Yeah. And you go and you go to that and you give in to that urge. Yeah, there's some impulsivity around that, totally as well.

There's environmental factors that go into this but its base at its core. It is that that emotional regulation. That moment when you choose between, do I need to do the thing that needs to be done? Or do I need to? I just want to remove this anxious uncomfortable. Angry feeling that bored feeling, painful, feeling. Whatever it is.

Yeah. Yeah. I still it's funny because I didn't think about this when we were researching the episode but like now that we're talking about it, I'm kind of like seen it in my mind. Again, it's kind of two sides of a coin. One is managing the environment managing Giving yourself fewer opportunities for that avoidance, right? Like clearing the junk food, all right, turning your phone off. Turning your phone off, leaving the phone in the other room, all

those things. And then the other side of the coin is, is that that emotional management, the awareness, understanding the emotions that are coming up, and then understanding Perhaps why those emotions may be arising for? Unnecessary reasons, right? Like are you being too perfectionist? Are you protecting your ego? Are you rationalizing, past Behavior? Are you trying to impress? Somebody? Do you, is the reason you're motivated. The reason you want to do this thing.

A shity reason, and it's actually not very motivating at all. Like, all of those fact, all of those things that we've talked about, do you have a lot of Shame around this and you just like, don't it makes you feel icky and horrible about yourself and so, you just find any way you can to get away from it. All of these factors that we've been talking about up to this point, Almost all of them are factored into that emotional negotiation of like, why do I

feel this way? Is it reasonable to feel this way? And now that I feel this way, how do I manage it? Well, That's one side of the coin. And then the other side of the coin is the How do I give myself as few Escape Routes as possible? Exactly right. And that's the behaviorist, right? The environmental design stuff, right. Coming back to the skill thing. That it's the two sides of the procrastination skill coin, right?

It's like on the one side, it's the environmental design, the managing your triggers managing, your nudges, and on the other side it's managing your own emotion, right? Understanding? Why you use, you associate certain things with that task and how to kind of manipulate the levers or dials in your head, to make the task feel

easier, right? That's through breaking it down in the smaller chunks, whether that's gamifying it, whether that's finding accountability with somebody, rewarding yourself with something, there's all sorts of levers. You can pull to, like, manage those internal emotions, right, right. Everything we've talked about, does it crosses that point of emotion regulation that you have to manage? Right. Exactly. Yeah, there's it's and it does, it goes back to Short-term relief for a long-term

detriment, right? Right. All of this. Is it what it comes down to is I don't have to feel that discomfort right now. If I just do something else. Yes, all of those things are kind of like getting at that. Yeah, good. Whether it's in your environment or just an emotional. Well, and what's amazing too is that like all of the thinkers that we talked about throughout this entire episode, from Plato to Augustine to Aquinas to everybody? It's not that they got it wrong, right?

It was just incomplete, right? It's like Augustine said. He's like it's it's the failure is, is you, are you are sacrificing your higher level value. The thing that is more important to you, but difficult to do for the thing for the lower level value. The thing that is easy to do but much less and less valuable, and less important, you know, Plato saw it is like a a, an ignorance of the repercussions of your decisions. Like not understanding, like how your behavior like the what what

you are doing in that. That very moment, even till like the Buddhist perspective of like not being aware of what your internal triggers are like, this is, this is what I found. Really interesting when I looked at the Buddha side of it like again, it's correct. It's incomplete but it's

completely correct. Like, and in fact, I actually found a meta-analysis of 14,000 participants of who practice mindfulness and meditation and they showed Significant improvements in time management, task initiation and, and also a sense, you talked about that sense of like how long it will take to complete something, their sense of how long it would take to complete a task actually got more accurate after the

mindfulness as well. And so again, it's like a total sense emotions tend to be fun house mirrors in our brains, right? So like when you're angry, Things that are small appear, very large and things that are large appear. Very small, you know, it's like when you're anxious, there are other things that things that appear very close are actually very far away and vice versa, right? So it's it's understanding that you're looking at a fun house mirror.

You know, meditation is a practice of like, developing the ability to recognize the Funhouse mirrors and adapt to them, and still navigate through them. And whereas, when you're just, you know, I think, We're Plato was correct. Is that the actual ignorance is just believing the Funhouse mirrors, real. Yeah. Like that's the ignorance. Yeah. Definitely.

And the one of the big recommendations from this group of researchers, temperature, a and fuchsia, your wall is more mindfulness around these things so we can talk about this. Now, the the rain method, this is what this was an article that Tim Mitchell wrote his books as well but it's a mindfulness tool that gets you For figuring out that fun house mirror and kind of brain that we all have and and being able to deal with it and he calls it, the rain method because there's an acronym.

It's recognized allow investigate and not identification. Okay. So it's just a very basic kind of I believe it's from Zen Buddhism, even maybe actually too but recognizing in the moment. Yep. When you do feel that resistance, those, those uncomfortable feelings, that pop up. I think most people like, when those that pops up, your initial reaction is to look for a distraction. This says, okay, wait, just recognize when it's happening. That's all you have to do up first.

This is, I'm approaching a task. I don't like, I'm just gonna sit with that, right? And that's actually the second step is allowing those emotions to just exist and not push them away. Not reach for distraction. Just allow them to be there and don't flee from it. The I is investigate those emotions. Get curious. Why do I feel this way? You? That's something you just said to like, why am I feeling ashamed about this? Why am I feeling anxious about it?

Angry about it are my expectations, reasonable. Am I blowing things out of proportion? They might just tired that I sleep last night. Oh yeah. Start asking all those questions. Asked those questions investigate and get deep with it right there. And the last one is not identification with the emotion. This is a very Buddhist thing, very Buddhist. Yeah, which is, you know, I am not this anxiousness.

I feel anxious. I am not saying, yes, don't, you don't want to fuse your identity, like you just said, if you fuse yourself with that fun house, mirror image, that you have in your mind, then everything becomes like a fun house mirror room, right? And to Freud's Point you'll protect it. Yeah, yeah, right. If you just decide that you are anxious and perfectionist then you will you will actually protect that.

Self-definition. Yes, which will cause you to like actually you're procrastination will become part of your identity, right? And it's it's, we talked about that. Earlier about people who identify as like, oh, I just work better under pressure. What they probably don't realize they're doing is that they are, they are incorporating their procrastination as a part of their identity. And so now they will start unconsciously protecting it right?

And continue to procrastinate to show like this is my identity to prove to themselves and others. Yeah. Yeah. So that as far as practical takeaways go that for me after realizing that I realize that did some kind of version of this or bits and pieces of it, when I really did need to get something done, I would kind of like, you know, buckle down be like, okay, I don't like this, why don't I like this? All right, I just get going, putting it all together like that though.

Has been super, super useful for me and the Nana identification part that last part is very important. Yeah, I think too. Like I can just don't wrap your identity up and whatever you're doing totally for sure. Yeah, well speaking of identity's, I've got like a fun exercise for us. Oh, before we wrap up. Okay. The the tactics and strategies for everybody Dr. Linda sapped in and she's Clinical psychologist, she wrote a book in the 90s called the six types

of procrastinators. And so she has six types that she is identified through her clinical practice and fun. And I thought it would be fun to kind of like now that we understand all the Frameworks, right? Like I think it'd be fun to go through these six types and kind of identify what the factors are like that lead to their procrastination. And I imagine that listeners will see themselves and at least one of them. So The first one, which I know. I know you've done with this.

The Perfection, right, right? Fears imperfection sets unrealistic standards, refuses to accept good enough and ends up. Having to use time limits to avoid endless revisions or reduce Do you feel attacked? Yeah, I feel like I'm getting better at it. I mean, this is kind of my this is my Beast display this year. I think, was the perfectionism. I I actually feel like, as I'm getting older, I'm letting more things go. I'm like, yeah, that's not gonna be perfect.

Do you think that's just from accumulating? So many imperfect? Yes, experiences. I don't think I've actively worked like getting over. It's like now except reality for it. Yes. Yeah. All right. The second one is the dreamer loves big ideas but struggles with the details breaks goals into steps and needs to use structured plans to maintain consistent habits. Tends to wait for inspiration, rather than just take action. I relate to this one a little

bit, like, I my mind. Definitely, I like to dream big and like, have these kind of giant aspirations and that's fun, and that I think that is like overall.

It's a net positive to have like big goals and dreams, but the, the drawback of that is the intimidation Factor because it's like if you have this massive world-changing plan, That is going to take 10 years to execute and then you wake up on day one, it just feels so minuscule and insignificant and so yeah it says here that these the dreamers have to break break their goals down in the steps I am like as you know I am an evangelist like this is my number one go-to.

For any any time I'm procrastinating? I mean, to the point where, like, if I'm procrastinating writing This outline for this podcast I will tell myself literally just write one word. Yeah that's all it takes start with a word and then go to a sentence and then go to the paragraph, right? Like Its it creates the momentum. It removes the intimidation. It like generates emotional momentum its it's the way to go, like my My brain tends to just want to make everything as big

and ambitious as possible. And so it's it's like I'm the work for me is constantly breaking things back down and making them smaller. Yeah. Well, so that makes sense to me when it's something like do it. A podcast outline where I struggle with that, though is, okay, I'm breaking something down, makes sense, it's doable, you have self-efficacy around it. I can do this thing. My problem often comes in when it's time that back to the bigger picture.

Oh yeah. You know, wait it makes sense but like a podcast outline because that's a tangible thing. But like if it's more abstract further in the future, Maybe And I'm doing this one little task. I have a really hard time, marrying what I'm doing? Like writing a sentence about something. Yeah some Grand goal that I have so I'm actually I didn't expect to do this. I'm gonna bring Eisenhower back into this.

Oh okay, so Eisenhower is a great quote that I love where he says a plans mean nothing, but planning is everything, okay? And I truly believe that like planning projecting forecasting 99% of its bulshit. Okay, you know, it's like none of its gonna come true. It's funny because I just, I just worked with our head of operations on like a projection for 2025 and 26 and I mean I've been doing this long enough. That is gonna come true but it's still useful.

I still do it every single year because it does exactly what you just said which is it? Like it ties, this individual podcast shooting this segment, this podcast. Is now tied to this episode, which is tied to the projection for the podcast this year, which is tied to the overall business strategy, which is tied to like our overall mission and goals,

right? So it's like it lines all those things up. That's what I find is that like, it's like the numbers don't matter like it's nothing ever plays out the way you expected to. But the act of creating that plan or projection Ties, all those things together. Okay, in your head that makes sense to me. Yeah, next one, the warrior avoids risk due to fear of failure. Struggles to reframe fear as growth needs to take small manageable, stack steps and challenge catastrophic thinking

with more realistic outcomes. I am definitely not this person. I don't think you are either know, maybe a little bit, but yeah, I've definitely known people like this who are just like, almost like Doomsayers. Like they just think everything's gonna go wrong. Don't worry about everything all the time. And it is like freezes them in place. Kind of like a, like a fight or flight response or more of a fight flies. Freeze response. So they're freezing or way, what

is it? That makes them procrastinate about this. I definitely think you know, if you think fighter fight or flight, I think it's the flight side of it. Like I mean procrastination is essentially just the flight in the fight or flight but yeah, for people who are prone to worry and fear. Chronically. I could see how it's just like you just don't want to do anything because what if it goes wrong, right. You know what? Like they're just kind of always imagining worst case scenario.

Yeah. Which you would think it's kind of like almost a perfectionist thing but it's not. Yeah, it's it's more because the perfectionist is like, well, what if I don't do it perfectly, what if I you know, what if What if I'm embarrassed by, this is like, what if it, just everything, just the worst case scenario combined what it would, if it goes wrong. What if it, what if I'm worse

off than I am that? Like, yeah, the perfectionist is like here my bars way up here, what if I don't hit it, whereas like the Warriors just like what if things get worse? Because I tried this thing. The crisis maker. So we talked about this thrives on last minute, adrenaline enjoys, the emotional Rush Of doing things last minute needs to create earlier. Artificial deadlines needs to work in scheduled sessions and needs to reward themselves for

finishing ahead of time. I think we've covered this person quite a bit here but it is interesting to see them show up in the list here. The next one is the defyer I definitely relate to this one. Yeah resist imposed tasks dislikes, Authority struggles to reframe actions. As personal choices, needs to identify with the direct benefits, use autonomy to stay in control, rather than react passively. I, as a person who just chronically hates being told what to do to the point.

Like is just like Unnecessarily. Contrary in a times, big cultural component that one though, too. You know, where if obedience are at least tradition or service to, yeah, your family. Society, whatever it is. There's there's a big cultural control as well. This feels like maybe a little bit of a privileged procrastinator. Yeah, like it's could be surveying too many college kids. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Like, it's just, I mean, my personality is always been like, if somebody tells me to do something, my first reaction is like no I'm not gonna do. Yeah. And then finally the overdoor takes on too much tries to accomplish too many tasks at the same time unable to manage their energy effectively The they must learn to say no delegate their tasks focus on high impact tasks prioritization, which we talked about and then set boundaries to

reduce overwhelm and burnout. This is me definitely a little bit of me in there too. Like it just you, you try to take on a lot. You do I have a hard time saying no, yeah, yeah. I definitely see this one in myself. I to me, this feels like the if there's one of these that I imagine is has grown over the last 10. 20 years, I could see it being the overdoor. Yeah, just because they're the opportunity of things to do and

engage in Grown exponentially. So the need to create boundaries and say, no is also growing exponentially and it, and those are hard things to do. Like it takes, it takes like, there's quite a cognitive load to, like, turning something down or refusing to do something. So, yeah, those are the six

types of procrastinators. I think it's it's a little bit useful before we get into all like, the specific tips and strategies and stuff, like I think it's it's useful to kind of ask yourself where you are, and What you need to focus? What each of us needs the focus on? To improve as ourselves. Absolutely. All right, Drew. So now that we've Beat people over the head with a trash can full of information.

It's time to bring this home, it's time to now we get to the end of the show, we get to the part, we're like, okay what are the takeaways here? Like what do we actually use and Implement into our lives? How do we actually fight procrastination within ourselves and so you and I we like to do this section. We like to start this segment of the podcast with A section we call the 80/20 of procrastination. Which is what is?

What are the 20% of? Actions or behaviors that are going to give you 80% of the result. Like what what's the highest? Leverage implementation here. So you and I we've got a list of a bunch of things, you know, we we've talked through at this point dozens and dozens of different ideas. These are the most useful, the most verified, the things that have the most evidence behind them. And also, the things that you, and I have personally found the most leverage with when we've

implemented them. So, let's let's go through them one by one. I think it could be useful, kind of returning that external versus internal framework like managing your external environment versus dealing with your internal environment. Let's start with the external first, sure, right. So why don't you kick us off? Let's talk about environmental design. That's right. What is it? What's a good way to implement environmental design to help

with your procrastination? The core premise of this is, altering your surroundings so that the desire behavior that you're targeting is just easier or the one that you don't want to do as much harder distractions, like that will. So, we'll talk about how to do that. So, set up your environment, so that for Success basically. Yeah, some of the ways like we've mentioned right now, if you've been procrastinating on your diet, don't buy junk food.

Don't keep it in the house. That's like an easy win. You can have right there if it's more work-related, get your workstation set up. Put the phone in the other room, get all distractions out of out of sight and out of mind. That's, that's a good place to start with that. You can use like you you mentioned, you use website blockers? There's a lot of software like

that. Yeah. So if you're the type of person who's like prone to just going down, email rabbit holes, or YouTube rabbit, holes or Sports Website rabbit holes. Right? You know, one piece software is called Freedom.

There was another one called, I believe it was called self or no, it's called Focus. Yeah, there was another one called control, there's a bunch of them use and then there's all sorts of accessibility things like, on your phone's like, you know, I found an Android. They have like these are working hours. So you turn off all the notifications. Honestly, just keep your phone

in the other room. If you're really serious about that, but if you need to have it on you, I would say definitely use those that hack back notifications on your phone too. I don't know why people like I look at people's phones and they're just there's like 90s on them. Like why from like an app, they downloaded four years ago that they don't even use and That's crazy. In turn off your notifications, just text messages, maybe a couple of other things, and that's it.

Yeah. It's, it's if your phone is chiming or buzzing all day, that that's like putting crack in front of the crack addicts. Like you you're doing yourself? Zero favors? Yeah I I think I think one thing that's really useful to think about this too. Like there's kind of I would almost put this in two different

categories. One is There's actually physically altering your environment like I said, get rid of the junk food, one of the things that I like a really extreme example of this, that my friend near Ile did, and by the way, his book on this is excellent like environmental design. Go to that. Yeah. Bible for that his book indestructible. It's excellent. If you're if this is if distraction is a huge issue for you, like that is the best book that I can recommend.

One thing that he did in his own house is that he put all of his Wi-Fi, routers he put on these plugs that you could put on timers. Yeah. And so he like programmed, the timers to shut off, I think it like 7 p.m. or something every night. And so he's like the internet and his house just went off every evening at 7 p.m. and it's such a pain in the ass to get up and like replug in the router and like, do all this stuff.

So he just He never did it and and he sure enough he stopped using the internet passed a certain time, and he would start, he was reading more books and he was spending more time with his family and he was doing all the behaviors. He wanted to do. So there's there's kind of like actual just physically alter your environment that's kind of the first category and then the second environment are. The second category I think is creating rules for yourself.

You know, like when you were saying things like, you know, leave your phone in the other room or, you know, people will say stuff like, oh, only check email after 2 p.m. they're like that, like, it's I think it's really useful to get explicit of like this is a rule that I live by. This is a rule that I have for myself because if you try to I think the the key principle here is that when you leave it up to your own decision making You can't trust your own decision,

right? And in the moment at least. Yeah. And not consistently over a long time you might you might get it right the first day or the first week but like eventually you're going to start making the bad decision. And as soon as you make the bad decision, once that's going to justify every future bad decision. So it's just like you have to create a rule. I'm not allowed to have my phone

in my office period, right? Or I don't check social media until after 4:00 or whatever email to only do email at two or three PM in the afternoon, or at the end of the day. Once a day, clear the box, then it's done. Yeah, yeah. And then the physical side, the physical, and side too. I've done things like well, for a long time, I really, I didn't even have a TV which just didn't have it in the house. It's like, you know, not having junk food in the house, same type of deal.

I know in times where it's like, okay, I need to get a lot of work done. And since I do work from home, there are those distractions. So I've taken like the power cord to my TV and like giving it to a friend, right friends? Seriously, I'm just imagining you like regular doorbell, just like, I'm gonna come back for this. Too far off. Back to mentioned earlier that you know that interview I listened to with Pierce daily said the people who are most honest about these things.

Yes about they know themselves well enough to be like okay I know I don't have the wreck was it willpower to fend off the TV or the fridge or whatever and these certain moments and so I'm just gonna accept that. Yeah, there's another thing is, there's a self-acceptance to environmental design that you have to be really, okay, with right. You have to accept that you're flawed and that you're not gonna

change your own nature. I think that's something, you know, I think a lot of chronic procrastinators they like have this unreasonable expectation that there is going to be a day where like they are able to turn down every Temptation and they are going to be impervious to distraction and they are going to be able to put their phone away whenever they want. It's like, no, you're not gonna happen. You're human, you're not you're not gonna you're not going to

defeat 100,000 years of biology. You're just not. So you might as well work with it and create rules and structures and environment for yourself. That like nudges you towards success. I'm curious. Like, what is your personal biggest environmental design win that you've had? Yeah, besides the not keeping junk food in the house. Like that's, that's a, that was a big one, but also separating my my workspace from other parts. So I just have there's one room now, in my house, that it's just

for work. And now I, I've seen after a while. It's been a couple years now that I've had that, it's when I enter that space, that's workspace, right? And I try to keep the phone out, I try to do all that. So separating your, your workspace from your kind of like, your play spaces, you know, I guess you could call them. That's been a big one for me, too. And then keeping that space. So I try to keep it clean because for me, anyway, if I see clutter on a desk that's a

reflection of my mind. So a big one for me is just yeah, using those cues too. So it's like it's like I enter that room in my brain automatically goes into work time. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big win for me and it's great because now when you leave you're like it's done personal time. Yeah. Not worrying about it. Not checking email. Not that, that's a while. I've been working remotely for a long time, and I've had about reissue a little bit about where

does work happen. And where is yeah. Leave your absence. Yeah, about you, for me, I mean, obviously, the junk food stuffs big, the phone stuff is been big in the past. I would actually say home gym. Was. Oh yeah. Okay. Ah, absolute Game Changer. And it's funny too because I remember You know, when I moved to my place here in LA. And I started putting together a little home gym. You know, it's a really small room. It's like half the size of this studio. Probably.

And so, there's not a whole lot in there. There's just some free weights, a bench and like a small squat rack. Yeah. And I was like, you know, it'll just be kind of cool to have this. I, at first I did. I was gonna keep my gym membership and the idea was like, I just kind of work out at home as like the supplement. Yeah. It was such a massive Game Changer because it the simplest thing is I no longer had any

excuse, right? It's like come home at 5:30, I'm tired long day of work or whatever Big, Dave shooting and I'm like, ah, I should work out today. Like normally I'd be like, well I don't want to get back in my car and go to the gym and change and like do all those things and shower and all this stuff and it's like no. Now the gym is like 20 feet away. Motherfuker like you have no excuse. It's right there, go do it. Yeah, it doesn't matter what time it is. It doesn't matter how tired you

are. It's right there. You can get something in. And at first, it was a little bit of, like, It's like, ah. Why did I do this to myself? But now I'm just so happy, it's there. And actually I quit. I cancel my gym membership like, within a month or two. So just like this is so easy. And it's so even dumb things like You know, like, I'll be

like sitting on my couch. Watching the TV show with my wife and she'll get up. You know, we'll pause it and show it up. Have to go do something for 10 minutes. I'm like, wonder how many pull-ups I can just like walk into the gym or doing pull-ups? I'm like yeah, it's not bad. Like it's just, it is been set. Like just having it right there, the convenience, the ease and the elimination of, like all the friction of like, having like,

Get dressed, get in the car. Go get a gym bag all that stuff. So home gym up even if it's like small and simple. And like, not not even doesn't have all the equipment that I like a normal gym would have. Huge game changer. Yeah, so I think the big kind of takeaway from this then is using friction strategically, remove it for the things that you want to do, like, have a home gym. It's frictionless, you get right

into there. Yeah, and then add it to places where you don't want to do a behavior. Don't have junk food. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of friction with not having. I gotta go all the way to the grocery store, just to get back a chips or, you know, a candy bar or whatever strategic friction is really the key here. Yeah. And it can even go as far like One thing I learned when I was kind of going through my health Journey, don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry.

Oh yeah. Like that's a good. That's an easy one. And then also another one, like this one, like my health coach pushed on to me because I'm like, well yeah, you know, and then I'm in the grocery store and I've got my list, but then I'm gonna start walking through the aisles. I see all this stuff, it looks good and he was like, you know what, don't even go sign up for

instacart. Yeah. Put your list in when you're like while you're eating lunch while you're full, put your list into instacart, don't even give your self the chance. To again, it's like removing those decision points like the the more brain dead simple. You can make the good behavior. The more likely it is to happen. Yeah, absolutely cool. So similar to environmental design, another big ones, social accountability.

We talked a little bit about the Confucianism and, you know, we've we've kind of skirted around this, you know, with all the talk of of emot And conditioning, and all this stuff, the egos stuff. We haven't addressed it really directly but like, it is worth understanding that probably the strongest driver of our emotions.

Period is other people, right? It's the people in our lives that we like that, we trust that we respect that we want to win the respect of, or the trust of they are some of the strongest levers on our own behavior. And You can utilize that. I mean first of all on a very abstract level is being conscious of who you let into your life. You know there's this old saying that you are the average of the five closest people to you. I think there's a lot of evidence that that is true, right?

It's like if the five closest people to you in your life have absolute shit habits and they get nothing done. And they're always complaining and laying around on the couch and brain rotting like That is going to nudge you into those behaviors because that is what is going to get you, social validation, and approval and fundamentally. We're human, we all need social validation and approval. So surrounding yourself, by people that you admire people

that have good work habits. Good health habits, that have the habits that you wish you could have. Just by spinning more time with them, you are more likely to

adapt a lot of those behaviors. But then on a very like tactical level finding somebody who has the same goals you and is also struggling with that goal is and then like working on it together it is just your chance of success Rises exponentially like the difference between say I don't know trying to learn a new language by yourself and trying to learn a new language with a friend. Your chance of success is going to like five or 10x if you do it with a friend.

And I think that's true of pretty much anything. And a big part of that is just more fun and interesting, which we'll get to in a second. But I think the biggest thing is just the accountability. Yes. You don't want to be the asshole who like, Skips French class like you don't want to be the, you don't want to be the the dick that like paid for, you know, convince your friends to like join a CrossFit gym with you and then never shows up like

it just that's embarrassing. That loses respect that, you know, people stop trusting you as much. And so that is a huge lever that you can pull within your own brain. I do have a quick story about this, so that friend that we mentioned earlier near Yale and that book I recommended in distractible so he he was riding that book. While I was writing, my second book, everything is fucked and we were both having trouble

finishing our books. And so we agreed that we were going to meet up. I think it was twice a week for writing sessions and we set. Basically, we both gave ourselves, the deadline of the end of the year. I think this is 2018 and we made a bet that if I don't remember how much money it was, but it was like, if one of us finished our books in the other one, didn't we had to give, whoever didn't finish the book had to give the other one. I think it was like 5000 or 10000 dollars.

It was like a very painful. Yeah. It was a very painful amount of money and we like wrote it down and like had like a contract and everything and and we did it and it was He, I mean, we both, we both got it, done. I mean, like, let's just put it this way. We, we were more effective. I think in those four or five months, then we were like the entire year prior to that.

So I I've heard near tell that story too that people and he said his hand was shaking when he like because I think you each wrote a check or something or a contract or whatever. Yeah. Is in my hand was shaking. Yeah. I ended it over because it is that powerful. Yeah. Think about that emotional space. He had to be in for that, he's like, oh God, the man.

Now my ass is on the line. Yeah, and it was, it's funny because there was kind of that looming threat of like, oh my God, I have to get this done, but it actually turned. I mean, he and I really close friends. Yeah, and a lot of it is because of that, because we started meeting up riding together every week and And it just became there was a lot of kind of soft accountability that happened in

the interim right? Like there, you know, it's like I go over there on a Monday and we'd spend a few hours riding and and then afterwards, we'd have lunch and kind of look at each other and be like, well, how'd your session go like oh man, I didn't is a disaster. Like I got nothing was usable, right? And then we kind of talked through it and be like, oh yeah, that's how last week was for me but like today was pretty good. Yeah. And like it was just nice to like, Validate each other and

reassure each other. Because, you know, if stuff like that happens, when you're by yourself, like let's say, you have a horrible writing session or a horrible workout or something. Again the tendency is like the inner fun house mirror Wars it so it feels more catastrophic than it is. Whereas when you're with somebody else, they're like, oh yeah, I've been there. I felt that way last week. But, you know, you just try again and he'll be fine. You know, it's like having other

people around. Reminds you that it's not as big of a deal. As you think it is or it things aren't falling apart. Yeah, the way you fear, they are. Yeah, and I want to highlight something you already mentioned with regard to that though, but finding people who are in a similar situation and place that you are as real important. In this case, too.

Yes, you can find somebody who's like, you know, get an accountability coach, like somebody who's Fitness or something like that is really good and they're waiting. You there's some accountability there, but I think it's a lot more enjoyable and relatable when you find people who are at a similar spot. As you are, for example too. Like when I started CrossFit, it was me. And two friends. We started in both of us all about. None of us.

Have done CrossFit before. All of us, kind of probably hadn't been in the gym for a little while. And so there is that kind of Commiseration that you can all do around it and you're like, oh this person's in the same spot struggling with the same thing that I am. And you kind of feel that sense of community around. Yes, I think that's really important too, so that I like. Yeah. And it's funny because we talked a little bit about how like, students are the biggest

procrastinators. And it's funny because this is the easiest solve for them, you know, like, oh yeah, you were constantly surrounded by people who in the exact same situation as you struggling with the exact same procrastination as you are. And my first two years. Well, first year, first year of college I was at music school but you know first year out of Music School My grades were okay, like up and down.

But then my last three years I was like a straight A student in the primary reason it was two of these things that we've talked about already. The first thing that I did is that I realized to like if I went back to my dorm, studying would have happened like absolutely nothing would happen.

You know, the guys down the hall will be playing poker or something and next thing, you know, I'm at a party on a Tuesday night and I'm like drinking till 4 a.m. so like nothing useful would happen at the door. So I eventually developed a rule for myself that when my classes ended. I had to go to the library and I had to spend at least two hours at the library, didn't matter. If I just sat there like, stared at the wall, I had to go to the

library and sure enough. Once I'm in the library it's like, well, I got all my books. I might as well like start studying or, you know, do that like, start working on that assignment that's due in two weeks that, you know, I haven't really thought about and I started doing that and sure enough, like grades immediately went through the roof. And then, you know, jump a year to a head later and I like started telling some of my friends like, oh yeah, I have

this rule. I just go to the library and a bunch of people I need were like, can I come with you? Yeah, yeah, sure. I'll be there at 1 p.m. on Thursday, like I'll be there till at least three and like sure enough. Bunch of my friends started coming to meet me at the library and and again, it's that accountability, right? It's like, well the my friends there, she's studying for her History exam like I'm gonna look like an idiot if I'm not studying for my exam.

So I might as well study for my exam and you just again, you start, nudging yourself into the right behaviors. Yeah, a very similar experience in college, too. Yeah, I wasn't very good at studying the first year or two, and then after that, I did find like, especially the more difficult classes. You'd find a group of people in there and be like, hey, we're gonna be at the library, what was that? And that like I look back on College. I remember those.

Yeah. Study groups very, very vividly like and so leveraging that too just the social connection that you get really brings it all home to it's strange, how like, yeah, it becomes fun. Yeah, I don't know, like when you're young you kind of think, like, you need to be like drunk or doing something crazy to have fun. Yeah. No, seriously like a stats class that we took that was just for it horrible. Our study group that went to the library Hotel, like I remember

that. We had a lot of fun like about stats, you know, like, yeah, absolutely nerd. I know totally was cool. All right, so that's the external stuff. There's the external factors that we can manipulate to help our own procrastination. Let's start talking about the internal stuff. Yeah, you know. So, let's let's start with the

big question. I think you let's take this, take opposite, starting points, why don't you start with like the big hairy questions and then I'll kind of like break it down into the small questions. Okay. Okay. Well first, we talked about purpose and finding a why for your actions, right? And I think that's just foundational and fundamental as we already discussed to getting things done and not there.

I mean procrastination kind of becomes an afterthought when you really have a strong purpose time to what your daily actions, right? So you reconnecting whatever task or job or whatever it is to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and what is this? Doing for me in my life that is going to bring like a greater sense of purpose around things that starting there. So, kind of finding your, why the Simon sinek thing, you know, you could dig into that.

Why? Why is something important to you really digging into the reasons? Like, okay, why is this? I have this job or I have this task, or I have this creative project I want and finding the underlying drive and value that you associate with that. So, go back and listen to the first episode on values. That'll give you a very good foundation for this as well. Yeah, but starting their starting with why, why am I

doing any of this? And like, really getting into and digging into playing the white game with yourself like a 30 year old? Why why why am I doing this? Why why why? I think that's a really good place to start. Anyway. Yeah, I think two like, Having a basic understanding of like, what a good. Why is versus a bad one? Yeah, we didn't talk about that, did we?

Yeah, but I generally speaking, I think, I think the best way to characterize like a good wife is that it's something that is bigger or more important than yourselves. Yes, you know, I think if you, if you dig down and ultimately you find that your why Is just pointing back at you. It's like, oh, I'm doing this. Just because I want people to respect me, or I'm doing this because I want to impress,

right? You know, this group of people that I wish were impressed by me or, you know, whatever. Here, that's going to be a week. Why? And generally the strongest wise are the sorts of things that you're like, you know what, I don't matter, right? I will do anything for my kid or I will do anything for my church or I will do anything for the environment, right?

Like it's it's like when you find something that is greater and more important in yourself that even if you die you hope it continues on past you like that is generally indicative of some some a good form of why the other good form of why I would say is is around creativity. Like it's like if there's an action that you appreciate just in and of itself, like if it's, if it's something that you would do, if nobody was watching and nobody knew you did it right? Like it's, it's Then that's

probably a good. Why? It's just like the pure enjoyment and satisfaction of that thing, right? It's like I would still Play music. If nobody ever heard me play. It's just because it's like, the pure joy. And satisfaction of playing is, is fundamentally enriching in my life. That's a good wise. Well, you know, it's like, Try to stay aligned with that, right? Yeah. We talked a little bit about in this section two, we talked a little bit about this where if you do start out with the why

that you later find that? Oh, this isn't very good. Why? The example I gave anyway was yeah I started working out because I wanted to look good. Right? And yeah, but eventually did change into something else. Sometimes that can happen. So sometimes we need to abandon something. If we don't have a good wife for it, but sometimes the why can

change too, right? So like in that case, I changed from my vanity and which is if I'm honest, it's still important to me right on some level, but really, the what it grew into was, oh, this is a lifelong skill that I'm developing that's going to help me and tell the day. I die rightly. Like hopefully I'm gonna be one of those 80 year, old people like my great uncle home out, still out there skiing and I can, you know, do this blitz, back kind of stuff so you're why can change.

But sometimes you also just need to let something go because it's just there's no foundation for your your wife and your purpose. I think that's a really good. A really good point though, is that like those, those weaker wise, don't go away. Yeah. You just need to find the bigger stronger one like, yeah, you you never will stop caring, you will always want, you know. The cute boy or girl to like find you attractive, you will always want respect from your

peers. You will always want to impress certain people like that. That's a very natural human thing. It's just like, that's not sufficient. You need to find something bigger than that because if that's your only why then you're you're just on a very ugly treadmill and it's it's not going to get any slower. Yeah yeah absolutely. Okay so he has zooming in a little bit so we're going that that's the super big picture now cutting in super super tight.

I have this concept that I, I've called for many years, the minimum viable action, which is, this is, this is the breaking down or chunking down, you know, actions into a smaller component pieces. I called the minimum viable action because it's basically what you do is you, take, whatever you're procrastinating, you break it down into sub,

actions. And then you continue to break it down to the point where it stops feeling intimidating and then the point where it stops feeling intimidating, then you say, okay, cool, I'll go do that. So, really simple examples like let's say, I want to develop a meditation practice And I wake up one morning and I'm like, oh man. 20 minutes of meditation. Like that's a huge pain in the ass. It's like, okay, well let's break that down. Like What about five minutes

meditation? It's like yeah it's still kind of like okay. What about one minute meditation, right? Like, just go sit on the fucking floor, don't even have to just sit on the floor and just do like 30 seconds. Like okay, yeah, that's not intimidating. So then you go do that.

And then what you find is that once you do the tiny action, once you're on the floor for 30 seconds, then you're like, well I could do five minutes and then you do the five minutes and then you're like, I could do 10, you know? And then you do 10, you're like I could do 20 or maybe not, you know, maybe you just do the 10 but at least you did 10 because 10 before you were in a place where he was either 0 or 20, If you sit down and do five, that's better than 0, right?

So at the minimum viable action is always, it helps guarantee that something gets done even if it's not as much as you would hope. Or imagine It's just that something gets done. I have applied this in almost every area of my business and my productivity. Like this is just this is my absolute go to in my personal life anything that I'm struggling with or I'm delaying this is the first thing that I go to is I'm like how can I break this down into something that's not intimidating.

So with workouts, I do this. Just the other night we had a long shoot day. I got home, like 6 p.m. I'm like, I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm supposed to work out today. I don't want to do this shit and I like looked at my workout and I was like, you know what? Just do one set of each exercise. Like you don't have to do the full workout. Just do one set of each exercise and I was like, all right, I can do that. And yeah, I did one set of each exercise and that's better than nothing.

Right, right. You know, when I'm writing a book, books are really fucking intimidating and some days you sit down and you're just like, I don't know how to start this chapter. I feel like this whole section is terrible. I don't want to deal with this right now, and I just look at it and I say, Just write one sentence just to just put together one, non shity sentence. Like doesn't have to be good. Don't have the same. You don't have to be Hemingway.

Like just put together a sentence that like makes that is readable right? And then you start there and you're like okay well that kind of know what the next sentence is and Well, let me just finish this pair of, you know, next thing. You know, you've got two pages, right? And so, Minimum viable action use that momentum to carry you forward to me.

This is like the most, the biggest tactical hack that I've kind of ever found, you know, aside from the environmental stuff like this is the biggest tactical hack that I've ever found for my own procrastination. Yeah. Yeah, you've been recommending this one for a very long time, in a long time, many different ways and what really clicked for me when doing this episode? Was that how that really helps with the emotional side of this.

So what you're really addressing is kind of like this overwhelm. Yeah. Happens when you have this big task in front of you and we mentioned in the previously, you know, it was actually this kind of came out of the time management crowd, which a little bit surprised, but if you think about it, they went from okay, where in a factory you know, where we want to build a car, but we have to break that

process down. Yeah. And so they're like, this is, you know, this is how you should do it. What they missed was, it's because it's an emotional problem, not a tactical rational problem that's an emotional problem. You have this big huge task in front of you and you need to break it. Into more manageable emotions that are attached to this test, right? Like we keep saying procrastination is an emotional problem. Self-control is an emotion,

emotional problem. Like this is not, it's not a problem of information, it's not a problem of motivation. It is a emotional problem, that's managing your own expectations, managing your own self-perception. And so, yeah. This is just the most effective trick that I've ever come across to that. Yeah, and with the minimum viable actions too. Don't underestimate like a small win the impact of a small win.

Yeah. That can have an outsize emotional impact on you especially if you go from man, I'm just not feeling like I'm getting anything done to even just getting one or two things done, it's a huge. Don't. Don't understand that. It's exponential. And how good that feels. Absolutely. Yeah, not to get off on the too much of a tangent but like I. Yeah, I have noticed that So

much throughout my career. That like, you'll get these people who have been stagnant for a long time, and I think what happens when you feel stuck and stagnant is that you start developing the story in your head that like, I've got to do this drastically in the turn my life around and it's like, actually, no, dude, you just need to go get like, yeah, go get a couple small wins under your belt, like That will actually that will move mountains for you.

Just, it will open things up for you way. Way, way more than you would ever anticipate. So absolutely 100%. All right. What's the next one? Okay. Yes. So the next one is addressing those underlying emotions. This is what kind of the Crux of it. This is where we want to end up and be able to really address what's going on, dig into what's going on. Why are we putting this task off? Why are we anxious about why are we angry about it? Why do we board? What's so painful about this task?

And addressing those emotions that we attached to these Dreadful tasks that we have to do or perceived read full task. So we talked about the rain method. This is one way, it's really just more about mindfulness being aware so you're rain method. Remember to recognize allowed and investigate and nonattachment to those emotions? So it's just a way to be more mindful at every single stage of what's going on during procrastination. Yeah. And you can I mean there's there's different ways you

could. Be more mindful about this but this I found any way just on a moment to moment basis. When that does pop up, this is a really good way to just get like, really get in there and be like, okay, what's going on here? Why am I feeling this way? Where am I feeling this in my body? Why am I feeling it there? All the things you think about. When you hear about mindfulness practices that? Yeah, that's how you can start to address the underlying

emotions. And I think it's important to emphasize because I imagine that there's some subset of listeners right now like just went through four hours of Information in the history of procrastination and the craziest and they get to the end and they're like ah fuck it's about a motion. Are you, you mean, I gotta go to therapy to like, get work done

and it's like, not know. You don't have to, like sure it would help, but you don't have to like this is, ultimately, it's more about, it's not about fixing your emotions or like solving your emotions. It's more about Becoming aware and accepting of your emotions like not being hijacked by your emotions. Just like as you said like recognizing what's going on beneath the surface so that you can work with it instead of against it, right?

So if anxiety comes up, you can like Alter the action or the expectation in your head and see until you get it to a point where it's not. So anxiety inducing, or you know, or if there's like a despair or sadness or whatever like you can kind of play with, you know, your goals or or your, the way you approach an activity to to try to find a way, that makes it a little bit more exciting or fun for yourself. So it's just Until you're aware of the emotion.

That's that's underlined the procrastination you can't really. Adapt to it, or use it in any useful way. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of this too, this these all tied together, right? And so if you have like an environment, that's bringing up a lot of these emotions too, and fixing that will help. But again, it's still just goes

back to the mindfulness. Part of that you have to be aware of those triggers in your environment or maybe it's a person or you know work situation that happens a lot too. But yeah, becoming more self-awareness. We talk a lot about self-awareness and a lot of different areas and That's a skill to that. You develop over time and self-awareness around why you do and don't do things.

I think that you have to find some method whether that's through met more meditation or maybe you do need to go through to therapy just to get a little more self-aware around your emotions. Yeah. But at the end of the day, yes, I'm sorry it's about emotions and you do have to address. You have to figure out a way to

address them. And again, it goes back to being honest with yourself, like me, I just know that there's certain things that I do procrastinate that I like, and I have these emotions that I don't like around them, but I was like, look, except that. That's just how it's going to be, and it's probably never gonna change. I'm never gonna have this like, real big excitement to, I don't know, clean my house or whatever it is, but that's okay.

We gotta work with that. So you're telling me there's no notion template to solve my anxiety attacks. I'm trying to, I have tried them all. That's, that's a good point. You make those. That's a million dollar idea, get this notion template, the salve All of your anxiety is right? I I think that's a way of the underlying motions around all of this is trying like we've, we talked about this, they're trying to find the new app or the new system or whatever it is. Oh yeah, this, that is

avoidance. That is not addressing the underlying emotions here. You're recognized that what you're doing in that situation is you're saying I want a way around this uncomfortable. Feeling, please just give me the fixed. Just give me the one thing. The one hack the one trick. It's not there. It's the appearance of progress without actual progress. Yeah, yeah. 100% for sure. Well, let's talk about how I deal with my own Pleasant emotions, which is I just find a way to make it fun. Yeah.

Party boy Mark. Yeah. So A friend of the show, Ali abdaal has a great book about this called fuel feel good productivity. And I for me, My favorite thing about that book, it's one of it was reading that book. It was one of those things that that I had personally believed and felt for a long time but I didn't really know how to say it.

And I never really seen it said, well anywhere else, and I feel like he was kind of the first person to say, which is like you can find a way to make boring things fun. There are actual ways that you can apply certain principles that just makes something. That's, that's drudgery feel more, interesting. I think you mentioned CrossFit earlier. I think CrossFit is like, a primary example of this, right? Like most people don't enjoy working out. So what did CrossFit do?

They gamified it? Like they created systems and achievements and goals and and challenges and they have you track your progress over time, and then they put you in a social environment and they put you in teams and the teams are competing against each other. Like, these are all just like really basic how to make it fun, 101 techniques and you can do

this with anything. You can game a fee, anything you can track progress on anything you can Again, if you've got social accountability you know you you can set up a little game with your friend of like okay let's see who can study more hours this week or who can learn more French words this month, you know, create little friendly competitions, between yourself and somebody and track your progress over time, create little rewards and incentives for yourself.

It's you know, human nature is pretty simple and if you understand how to how to leverage it, you know you can get a lot further. Yeah. What are some of the examples? I don't use this one as much. Maybe I hate fun or something, I don't know. What are some examples of specific examples? You've used around? You've been on a big Health journey, I know. Just tracking in general, you think is fun, which is, you know, some people might think just tracking as fun. I think, I think progress is

fine progress. Okay, so one thing that I find very fun, I am a very competitive person and one of like I agree. Tracking is annoying. Yeah I don't the tracking itself, I don't enjoy. Okay, what I enjoy is the comp With myself. Okay. Right, so it's like I know how much weight I lifted. On every on every exercise last week, right? So, okay, it's fun for me to go into the gym this week and be like, let's see if I can do one more rep, right? Like, let's see, let's see if I

can do this. Let's see if I can add five pounds to this. Like, let's see how that feels. I mean, and don't get me wrong. I'm not like skipping to the gym every morning out of it. Yeah. But like, it makes it interesting enough that it's it. It's not as hard to go and it's not as hard to finish the work out. It takes, what would be A pretty dull and boring workout and it makes it interesting and

exciting. The other thing you can do is you can pair like, you can batch activities with each other. So um, you know, if you let's say there's a podcast you love like two handsome, men talk about procrastination for four hours. You can you can you can make a you can make a rule with yourself that like you can only listen to the solve podcast while you're doing housework. Like this is, I've got a couple podcasts that are just frivolous and father and I, they're my chores podcast.

I don't listen to them in any other time. It's like, when I'm doing the dishes and taking out the trash and, you know, cleaning the office. Like, that's when I put this podcast on because it's kind of it takes, what is normally just a painful boring experience and it makes it interesting for me and you can lump activities

together like that you know. If if you love audiobooks you know make a deal with yourself that you can you can only listen to audiobooks either while you're working out or while you're getting ready for bed you know and it's there's no other time. Okay, so I did think of actually ways I have made things fun for me though, it's more of a combines the social aspect to it, you know? So CrossFit being the example that you gave but I like it

instead of having Home gym. I just, I don't like heaven. I need to leave the house for whatever it is. But what I've realized is that it's actually really fun for me to go to CrossFit and see those people. Yeah, the workouts themselves are brutal and they're, you know, intense, but you go and you start you kind of get your little CrossFit friends, you know? And yeah, there's a social aspect to that.

I used to do Jujitsu too. Like you go and there's a very social aspect to that obviously too. So yeah, for some people for you you have fun with competition with yourself for me even though I'm also introverted in a lot of ways. I that social there's still some social reward in a lot. Yeah you might yoga studio. Go to two. There's yeah there's that. Yeah, yeah it's I mean. So what's fun for you could be

fun for somebody else? Yeah. Everybody's fun is a little bit different but you know, the principles are the same thing. I'll even goes through this, he's like gamify it, make it social, and then like it with something that you enjoy, right? You know, so like those are the three tried and true methods. I think he has a couple more in his book. Okay. I'm probably not thinking about that.

So, All right, last one. And I know this is this is the the spicy one but just really quick, productive procrastination. Okay, with an asterisk. Yes, this is personality dependent. If you are an ADHD person like me, you might get a lot of Leverage out of this. Be careful. Like it is it is like juggling steak knives. You can hurt yourself. If you're not, if you're not very focused and depth at like what you're doing, the productive procrastination, it can get out of hand very easily.

So just to review really quick. It's when you, you procrastinate one task by doing some other task, that is also intimidating or difficult to do. And it can be very effective if it's honed well, and honed correctly. It can be extremely effective. But you can also waste a lot of time spinning your wheels doing a bunch of shit that seems useful but is not. And like you said it's like Another subtle form of avoidance.

So the difference between productive procrastination and just unproductive progress, and nation is like a, very fine line and I would urge people to consider it. But also be very, very careful about it, right? All right, last section draw, I've been banging on for a long time. Now, is that everything in life is a trade off? There's no There's no when no win is 100% a win. There's always some downside somewhere with it. Yeah.

So in that Spirit, we like to finish every episode with what are the hidden costs or what is the hidden trade-off of solving this area of your life? And so what what are the hidden costs of getting a handle on your procrastination? Like, what are the unnoticed sacrifices or things that you're going to have to give up? If you actually get over this issue in your life, get a analy. I am the first one that I put and this is something that I've experienced quite a bit myself.

Is that you have to accept that you, you're probably going to lose Hobbies interests or diversions.

Like they're gonna be certain things in your life that you do genuinely like and appreciate that you're just gonna have to let go of and that could be anything from like, you know, the gaming Discord server that you hang out in to the sports websites that you frequent to, you know, the the tiktok Yeah, channels that you you enjoy watching, like you're just gonna, you're gonna have to let some of those go.

That's the price. That's the price of admission of just getting this area of your life handled, and that can suck. I experienced this a lot with the video games, like, one rule I had, I discovered I had to create for myself. Was no multiplayer video games because I'm too competitive and a single player video game. I can play for an hour and just put it down and like, go on with my life, a multiplayer video game. I'm like, no, fuck you.

I'm gonna practice, I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna grind. I'm gonna get so good at this. I'm gonna beat all of you.

Get talk trash on your head. I literally wasted months of my life like trying to get good at certain video games so I just don't let myself do that anymore and and I miss it sometimes like, I really do miss it. Like I very fond memories of certain games that I did get very good at and but that's just that that's the price of, you know, it's not worth giving up my business and my My career and my marriage.

So I have chosen those things. So yeah over it that we talked a little bit already about trading, a lower boundary for a higher value. Yes. Talk about in the previous episode too but that it's, it can be. That's pretty clear example where it's like, okay, yeah, I probably shouldn't be playing these multiplayer video games or video games in general. I should be doing this other thing. There's a clear trade-off, you know you should make it, it's a

struggle. But you do sometimes though you also like in my situation, I've had to a just where I don't feel like I'm necessarily trading a lower value for a higher value. I'm sacrificing something that is genuinely genuinely meaningful for me, but I guess at the end of the day, it is a higher one. So my example is when I did finally start to address my health stuff and stop procrastinating on working out and eating, right? And all of that, that takes a lot of time.

So you work outs and usually work out in the middle of the day because it's just, that's how my brain works. And so, it takes up kind of a big chunk of time in the middle of the day and I've had to sacrifice, Of my like woodworking has kind of I haven't been able to do as much just because I did have less time now for that and that's kind of a big like, I love we're working and it's great and it's it adds a lot of fun and enjoyment and meaning to my

life. But I guess I did realize that taking care of my health long term is probably more important right now and then we'll be more important in the future and I can would work longer. Hopefully, you know it's a physical activity. I'm going to need that when I'm old, you know, when I'm sure man in the wood shop and so yes, sometimes it's really clear that.

Oh, I need to give up this kind of lower value with this lower fund that I have in my life for something that's more important and sometimes it's not quite as clear-cut. Those two? Yeah, it can be in ambiguous. All right. What do you have? Yeah. So this one might get a might ruffle a few feathers from certain type of person. Yes, you got a lower, your standards and accept your limitations. I know there's a certain type of person out there that's going to say what?

No we like I'm not gonna lower my standards like that's not what productivity is. That's not what getting your life together. Means, it's raising your standards and actually you know, there are certain situations where you just have to accept reality and I think is really what it is and like we already mentioned, one thing, celebrate those like little wins that probably don't look very sexy on the outside or to anyone else, but That's a, that's a win.

Like a win is a win here and like lower your standards from. I'm gonna get 10 million things done today, you know? So I'm gonna get one or two things done today and they don't look like it's making a whole lot of progress, but it is actually in the grand scheme of things. When you step back, this is how it works. And you are speaking on this this one you were speaking as a

recovered perfectionist, right? Like this is, I think this is the one that the perfectionists like really struggle with is like Yes. Like no, I have to be excellent. It has to be perfect. And it's, that is That is self-defeating. Yes, before you even get started, there is a fantastic book on this front of the Pod, all of her berkman's 4,000 weeks has to book. It's one of the most recommended books.

I recommended people. Yeah, it's just it, it's the subtitles called productivity for Mortals, which I love. It's it. It's all about this. It's all about, like, You can't do everything. Yeah. You and and accepting your

finitude is yeah. Like, not only and not only can you not do everything but like a coming to that realization and be like properly prioritizing, the things you can do is a very difficult thing and this kind of like A lot of it's a critique of just kind of the the productivity industry in general. Like the mentality of like bro you just gotta you just gotta hustle man. You just gotta like get this new system and like you can do it

all, dude. Like you, you don't have to don't make any sacrifices, you don't need to sleep. Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, no actually, the game is sacrifice. Like that is the game is like, what are you willing to give up for your goals? And by the way, you, you know, if you really are trying to do something ambitious and great, you probably only have the capacity to do a handful of things. Like that in your entire life. Right?

So yeah you you have to get very realistic on on timelines and capacity and time management and everything. So huge fan of that. Here's a drawback that I think a lot of people are won't consider, which is that if you handle your procrastination, you have to give up your excuses. Yeah, so that we hold on to so dearly. You gonna have to own your bulshit. Yeah, the OWN Suddenly, some of these stories and narratives that you've had and maybe in many cases for your entire life.

It kind of explaining your own underperformance or why things didn't work out the way you thought they would. Or you know why you haven't been able to dedicate as much time to this thing as you thought you would. Yeah. You're gonna have to let that go. Yeah. It's like again, it comes back to the pure steel thing about about reality. It's like the best. The best people at not procrastinating, are the people who are the most realistic who understand.

They're like, yeah, it's just a story. Tell myself, right? The justify, like, not doing the thing. I don't want to do and that sucks. Like it's, it's, it's, it's the sort of thing that, like, when you let it go, it's painful, but then, once it's gone, it's liberated. Right? So yeah, that goes back. A little bit too. We can sneak for it. Back in here, the defense mechanisms, right? You have to let go of those and recognize that.

That's what you're doing is you're just protecting your little ego and letting go with those. That can be a painful thing too. Because those Fence mechanisms, they're defensive, they protect you in some way, but they're protecting you in a way that's holding you back. So, recognizing that right? Like you said, at first? Yes, it's painful. Rip the Bandit off. You adapt comes back to the the ego flexibility.

Yes. And not building an ego around the lower values building them over over the higher values. Yeah. All right. What's the next one? Disconnecting from bad influences. So we mentioned this a little bit already but there's going to be people in situations in your life that are not conducive to you getting things done.

And you taking care of what you really want to get done in your life and you're going to have to remove yourself from some of those situations or some of those relationships that you have. And that's all so painful. Those relationships have serve some sort of purpose in your

life. I might not be a healthy purpose, but if serves some purpose in your life and you're going to have to leave those in some way shape or form and that will be painful if there are, you know, certain work that there's going to be situations where it's like in work situations where you might not be able to get away from somebody, you're going to set. Some boundaries, that might be a little bit. Have some uncomfortable

conversations with these people. It's going to be, there's a, there's a more opportunities for you to manage emotions. Let's just situations. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's you know, in some cases it will be removing the people from your life or reducing your exposure to the people in your life. In other cases, it will be managing that relationship in your life and even more important than simply like who's in your life and who's not, it's really paying attention to.

Who are you seeking validation from? Ask yourself, are you do you respect the person? You're trying to win respect for him because a lot of cases you know so like why the fuck are you trying to earn their respect? It makes no sense but it is very human, right? Like we kind of default to just wanting to be a by the people around us, right?

So if the people around us are actually people that we don't really respect or value their judgment highly, we should have a difficult conversation with ourselves of like why am I trying to win the approval of this person? Like I Should find somebody a little bit more admirable to try

to get validation from. And I I do think there is a little bit of a misconception in just self-help in general, which is that like there's like a cliche advice of like, you know, stop seeking validation from others, I think that's impossible. It's it's not, you don't stop seeking validation from others. You you seek validations for from better people and for better reasons, right?

That they're more in line with your values more in line with what you want to get done with who you want to be. Alright, so again it's like finding that lever to push you in the right direction. All right. Last one as we're talking about relationships with other people and this is going to. This is definitely a champagne problem. Yeah, you will have this

problem. You will not mind having this problem but it is a problem nonetheless which is the more effective you become as a person, the more productive you are, the more successful you are the more you get things done, accomplish your goals, the more the people around you will expect of you. Yeah, the higher the standard you will be held to by others and in some cases people will not like holding you to that stand. They won't like that, you're that productive or that.

And so they might there might be a little bit of backlash among some people, but for the most part people will respect and admire it. But they'll also, you know, you'll set the bar high for yourself and that can be stressful and intimidating at times. It can feel unfair at times, but it's all. So again, I think it's a positive social pressure, right?

Like if the people around, you see you as somebody who performs well and is diligent, and is reliable that puts social pressure on YouTube below things and ultimately, that's a good thing. Yeah, so it's it's an example of a desirable stress. I would say in fact that I would say most of these are desirable stresses, I would say, Most of these in most cases are things that you would like to trade off. So don't don't get the wrong idea that this these are any reasons to not fix your

procrastination. We're just trying to be realistic of like, hey, if you get your procrastination handled, here's what you can expect on the other side. Yeah. With the higher expectations one too. That you've got to be careful because then you lead into the situations where you're not saying no. And we talked about that certain type of procrastinator who takes on too much at that point too. And then you just end up procrastinating anymore.

So yeah, that's it's a, it's a hazard but it's a good Hazard. Yeah, good Hazard. Yeah. All right, we're at the end. Finally, before we sign off Drew, I'm curious and all the research and prep and recording that we've done for this episode. Has anything. Have you been inspired to change anything in your life? Has there been any like, kind of tangible? Takeaway for you going through

this process? Yeah, I'm so when we started researching this a long time ago, right, I did my own little experiment and I borrowed a Nintendo switch from from a friend and I said it's like not too far away from my office. So it's really easy for me to go in and I was like, okay how how bad are these distractions? So we'll talk about the environmental side of it. It's bad. It's very, very bad. And what it did for me, is a really made me get again, get honest.

I knew that being honest with myself, was actually a key to this, you know. Don't don't buy the food, don't? Yeah. Don't buy the junk food and put in the world, all that kind of stuff. I already knew that I though realized really the impact of environment really came home for me and a lot of this. But what the I took it one step further too and it was very surprising to me just to learn how important emotions are.

I'm knew they were important. Yeah, procrastination on some level was it wasn't an emotional problem, but I think we've come to the conclusion that it's all an emotional problem. It's not it's not. There's an emotional component to it, it's just Baseline and emotional problem that you have to deal with. Yeah, all this other stuff, environment, social connections relationships, even ego stuff. It's only relevant in so much as it Alters in affects your

emotions, right, right. Like your ego's, only a problem with procrastination. If your ego is causing negative emotions to prevent you from actually doing the thing you want to do. Yeah. And so far as though would have changed specifically, I've used more of the mindfulness like the rain method and I've definitely implemented that in my daily habits and routines. Now when I start to procrastinate on something I'm much better at it now too, just stopping catching myself.

Okay. What's going on and achieving that last step in the rain model in which is non identification? I'm like, oh this is what I'm feeling right now. I'm not gonna identify with it so much. That's going to derail my next hour day or whatever. Yeah so that's been a huge win for me. Anyway. That's funny because it's yeah prepping for this episode is I mean I've been thinking about it for a while like as you know I've been I've gone in and out

of meditation. Yeah. Quite a bit throughout my adult life and done it. Very intensely for a periods and not at all for periods. I'm currently in a knot at all period but it's funny prepping for this episode. It's making me think that I should kind of get back on the meditation train, you know, I I've done it on and off Main mainly to kind of help manage

the ADHD. I've definitely noticed over the last year year and a half, I am becoming a lot more distractible and I am all like I'm the stimulus junkie in me is like He's getting is becoming a little bit of a dope fiend. and it was just interesting, going through all this research and really seen the importance of That self-awareness, the importance of boredom, The Importance of Being able to sit and Stillness and recognize emotions and, you know that Gap.

So in Buddhism, the, they talk about the gap between the emotion and the action, you know, and it's like, the more you meditate, The Wider that Gap gets and I have felt my Gap shrinking over the past couple years. And I don't think, I don't think it's resulted in a huge problem with procrastination. I've been very productive recently, but just in terms of like mental health and general well-being and happiness, it's kind of inspired me a little bit too. Maybe get back on the mat.

Yeah. And put some time in again. Yeah, I recently heard that, that Gap. Yeah, the way that was described was the gap between whatever happens to you and your reaction in between is your interpretation. And that's what you can control. Yeah. And that definitely, through all of this too has been kind of a motto of mine as well. It's like, okay, you can't control what happens to you.

Sometimes, you can't like your reaction is sometimes not where you control either, but the interpretation in between and then it can obviously influence the action that you take. So that that's been a big one for me too cool. They're mindfulness. A little trick that. Yeah. Cool. That's it. I think so. We made it. We made it. We will be back next month with an episode on, emotional

regulation. Yeah. Since it is we I think we realized researching this one or like, Yeah, if this is all about emotional regulation, we should probably just do an episode. Yeah, that's gonna be a foundation after share. Yeah. So, all right. And finally, if you have listened to all of this and you want to start taking some action on this stuff, we have an amazing online community that is

designed to do exactly that. So, we break every episode down into 30-day challenges, with daily exercises and implementations. We also connect you with like-minded people who are doing the same thing as well. The community is called momentum and it's it's incredible. Honestly, it's just, it's full, the smart, hardworking. People who just want to get this area of their life solved once and for all. So in momentum, the whole point is to build a habit of action. It's to get those small wins.

Get the momentum towards doing something, too many people, sit around. Listen to a bunch of podcasts and don't ever do anything. We're trying to fix that too. Many people also think that the solution to their problems is a huge transformational moment. No. It's actually just getting up and doing a little bit more each and every day. It's gaining that momentum.

So if you've enjoyed this podcast and you want to know how to implement these lessons, into your life, check out the momentum Community, we have a 30-day course that breaks everything that you just heard down into bite-sized actionable chunks. So you can actually make some progress on it and get more shit done. To learn more, go to find momentum, calm slash procrastination. That's find f. I n d momentum calm slash procrastination. The link is also in the description below.

I will see you all there.