PROCRASTINATION

Mon, 3/29 10:27AM • 3:55

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
procrastination, motivation, resistance, procrastinate, book, action, willpower, watching, discipline,
haden, ancient history, shackled, present, gym, mind, other words, habit, short term, idea, ancient
greek philosophers

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regardless of how many productivity books we've bought and haven't read or how many of matt and
tom's videos we've watched we all struggle with procrastination but procrastination is nothing new
10,000 years ago the ancient greek philosophers even had a word for it a crazier meaning to act
against our better judgment by doing one thing even though we know we should be doing something
else but despite its ancient history it's probably even more prevalent today as we live in a world full of
distractions and perfect procrastination temptations so why do we procrastinate well i'm very glad you
asked because procrastination is the perfect example of a thing called present bias present bias is this
idea that i can set whatever goal i want for my future self but it's my present self sitting here right now
that has to actually do the action to get there and when it's a choice between doing some exercise or
watching some episodes of hunter x hunter we can always say well i'll do the exercise tomorrow and
our present selves will always prefer the short term instant gratification of watching random anime
rather than the long term goal of becoming a gym shock athlete a 2013 study by the famous researcher
in the field of procrastination dr tim mitchell called procrastination the primacy of short term mood repair
over the long term pursuit of intended actions in other words procrastination is more about being
focused on the immediate urgency of managing negative moods and pushing the problem away rather
than getting on with the task in the present moment the weird thing is that certain times we can't afford
to procrastinate like when i'm at work at the hospital i can't just put off treating someone till tomorrow
the idea of delaying it because i don't feel like putting a cannula in does not even cross my mind or so i
tell people but when i've got the space and freedom to manage my own time at home i can always just
keep putting things off until the next day and like rationally we all know that procrastination is objectively
bad for us like for me one of my biggest fears in life is being shackled to a job that i might not enjoy and
i know that right now i'm at the age and i've got the opportunity to not procrastinate and build towards a
future where i've got the freedom to kind of do what i want and procrastination is actively holding me
back from that but the good news is we can do something about it and there is a simple formula to
overcoming procrastination that i've discovered over the last couple of years and that's really helped me
personally in you know fighting the procrastination bustle firstly let's talk about motivation and there was
a blog post that i stumbled across a few years ago that was a real paradigm shifter for my mind in terms
of how i think about motivation like i used to think that you need motivation to get something done but
actually it's the other way around you get stuff done and then the motivation naturally follows and this is
something that jeff haden talks about in his book the motivation myth talks about we've got this idea of
motivation or wrong he says motivation isn't something that you have it's something that you get he

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says that motivation is not the cause of action it is the result of action so it's like action comes first
motivation comes second and so the way that i think about it is that i try and scrub the word motivation
from my vocabulary and instead i think about it in terms of either discipline or in terms of habits
discipline is energy that we've put into the system we're using our willpower we are being disciplined we
are doing the thing but then once we do the thing often enough it becomes a habit and we don't need
willpower to do habits like i don't need willpower to brush my teeth every night for the most part but i do
need discipline to get up and go to the gym because going to the gym has not yet become a habit so
part one of this formula for overcoming procrastination was understanding motivation the second part is
about understanding momentum and the key insight here is that most of the resistance that we feel
when doing a task is just in the act of starting this idea of resistance is discussed by steven pressfield in
his book the war of art he describes resistance as a universal force that has one soul mission to keep
things as they are preventing action creativity and progress in other words resistance provides the
beating heart of procrastination

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