World's Leading Expert On How To Solve Procrastination - Dr Tim Pychyl

Here we have to accept our common humanity, you know. Here, you and I are talking. We're different ages, living in different places, but we accept where there's a lot of things that are common between us because we're human beings. We've got light inside of us, we've got darkness inside of us. We've got good things happening, we've got bad things happening. We've got strengths, we've got weaknesses. We do wonderful things, we make mistakes. And so, when we can accept that common humanity and have some self-compassion and recognize, "I can have these feelings and not be these feelings," then that's the emotional work done. Then I can go back to that wonderful phrase we used earlier, which is, "And what's the next action?" And you can lay on top of that implementation intentions if you want, making things concrete, just getting started. And you see, they have to dance together. If you don't do the emotional work, you're you're not going to get to the cognitive work because you're you're gone.

Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week I have the immense privilege to speak to authors, researchers, entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring people about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to apply to our own lives. Now, this conversation that you're about to hear is fantastic, if I say so myself. It is a conversation with Professor Tim Pychyl, who is a retired professor of psychology at Carleton University, but he's one of the world's most foremost experts in the field of procrastination. He's written two whole books about it. He's authored dozens and dozens of research papers stretching back to like the '90s about the concept of procrastination and goal setting and motivation, and essentially all of this stuff that we love to talk about around productivity. So, in the conversation, we talk a lot about what it is that makes us procrastinate, why we do it, how, and what we can do about it. We talk a lot about the idea of goal setting and what sort of goals that we should set to actually kind of work towards in the most intentional way possible. But we also talk a little bit about spirituality, about Tim's love of Alan Watts, who's a person that I've gotten, uh, recently introduced to. So, I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

I am also in the process of writing a book about productivity and currently working on the the the middle bit, which is three chapters about procrastination. So, I feel like I'm trying to absorb all the things. And it feels kind of weird because I've been seeing your name referenced in like research papers for years. The whole "procrastination is emotional regulation," I think that's a phrase that's often attributed to you. But I didn't, I didn't know what you looked like until I watched your YouTube video talk where that you did for TED. That's a long time ago, and that that was like nine years ago or something. I was like, "Oh, Tim Pychyl, PhD, looks like that." That's right.

And well, I watched you. I I ran into you a while back. I don't know what I was searching for, but I watched you and I really enjoyed your work. I I can't say I've gone deep into all of your episodes, but I I did enjoy your your, um, episode on procrastination where you delve into Steven Pressfield's *The War of Art*. Because I I was introduced to that once, giving a talk to teachers, and an English teacher asked me if I read the book, and I hadn't. And I I agree with you that resistance is something very important to understand. Yeah, yeah, amazing. So, I'd love to have a chat mostly around kind of the idea of procrastination, given that that's your, that's your field of research. I guess one place I wanted to start with was the idea of procrastination versus delay. What do you mean when you say that, you know, sometimes when we think we're procrastinating, we're not actually procrastinating? How do you, how do you think about the difference between those two things?

Oh, I'm glad you started there. Procrastination in the research literature is defined as the voluntary delay of intended action, despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. So, right from the beginning, we define procrastination as a type of delay. And so, often when I get interviewed, especially by reporters who always want to have a catchy title by turning a vice into a virtue, they want to show there must be a good type of procrastination. And I get very upset about that. I think those are morons. Like, let's just talk about different forms of delay. So, to answer your question now, with that as a background, there's purposeful delay. Like, we, you and I, could have done this interview at another time, but we chose now. And in a sense, we delayed it from other times because it fit our schedules best. It was purposeful. And we do that every day. It's part of being a rational agent. We know we use our practical reason and all things considered, we say, "This is when I should do this." And it might mean I delay it. And if something else comes up that's a higher priority, we'll, we could change our minds, an intention update.

Now, there's also inevitable delay. Imagine, for example, recently here in Canada, we had a major disruption of the internet. Well, if that happened today, inevitably you and I would delay our interview. So, and that happens all the time. The plane travel, right now, is legendary for that. And and no one looks at this poor traveler and says, "Oh, you're such a terrible procrastinator." They understand it's inevitable. And then you can't see where I'm sitting. I'm sitting on my porch, and next to me is a picture of my father. And he died in 2016. And I love my dad a great deal. When he died, my world stopped for a little while, and things didn't get done. But not once did I say, "Oh, Tim, you're such a terrible procrastinator." Nor did anyone else. And we frame that as delay due to emotional problems. So, there's three, right off the top: purposeful, inevitable, delay due to emotional problems, that, um, aren't procrastination. And we need to separate those because often in our lives, if we only have one word for delay, we end up at the end of the day beating ourselves up when, in fact, it might have been a very conscious delay. It was a good idea to to wait there. I'll stop there because I could go on forever on just that topic. But there is hedonistic delay and and irrational delay and all these other ones that you and I will talk about, I'm sure.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess one of the things that we found when when we were doing kind of research for this is that you seem to be very like, "procrastination is always bad" kind of vibes. And in a lot of the articles, it's like some people are trying to make the point, "Oh, but like, sometimes some procrastination is good procrastination." And we've talked about how the idea of delay potentially solves this this issue. But I wonder, do you, one one idea I've had floating in my mind for for some time, you know, this idea of every behavior evolved from an evolutionarily useful behavior. Do you feel like procrastination has any kind of roots in evolutionary psychology in terms of short-termism actually benefited us rather than long-term planning?

Yeah, that's a very good question, a difficult one to answer. I want to take exception to your first statement that every behavior was adaptive somehow. We can have things that occur that have no function, or, and more importantly, in our our modern world, we have this Stone Age brain running around in a modern world. And so, even if our ancestors, there was a reason to believe that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, that may be one way we'd think about the impulsivity that we see in procrastination. Uh, certainly impulsivity correlates with procrastination, and it made sense just to do it, just act. But I, I don't think that every behavior is that way is adaptive. There's three things, and and we don't want necessarily dive too deeply into evolutionary psychology. Interested listeners can go read the work of David Buss, for example. But there are other, um, things can happen evolutionarily that are are not adaptive. So, is there a reason that we procrastinate that is related to those things? Sure. But I think that it would have a lot to do with the nature of reward, reward, and certainly our emotions. Yeah, nature of reward and our emotions.

Okay, so if if we knew the reward was, I guess, coming up in the short term, then what do you mean by the nature of reward? Well, we do prefer short-term rewards. I mean, some people who take a behavioral economic view of procrastination say it's all about utility, and they, they'll frame it this way, and that we end up doing the thing with the highest utility right now. It's a specious reward in some ways because it's, it's not related to our ultimate goal, but we're getting the sooner, smaller goal reward instead of the later, larger reward. And so, that's one way to frame this. But, you know, even as I listened to you, when you talked about Steven Pressfield in your earlier episode about procrastination, you talked about resistance and the reward and avoidance is very big. I like your question about evolution. You know, if we look at Robert Wright, who wrote a wonderful book years ago about *The Moral Animal* and evolutionary theory, he said, "Probably the fundamental behavior of every organism since the beginning of organisms has been the choice to avoid or approach." And isn't that, in some ways, the simplest way to think about procrastination and even Pressfield's notion of resistance? What does resistance lead to? Avoidance. And what does that avoidance do? It's a negative reinforcer.

Now, I think it's important just to step back for a minute for listeners to say, "Well, what's a negative reinforcer?" If, if it's raining outside and I put up an umbrella, I get rid of the negative stimulus of rain. So, it's a reinforcement. I get rid of a negative stimulus. We call that negative reinforcement. It's not punishment. So, if I avoid something because I'm feeling this internal resistance, and you dealt with it so clearly when you talked about Pressfield's work, I'm afraid, for example. I want to start a podcast, but I'm afraid it'll be a failure. I want to write a New York Times bestseller, but, you know, what's the odds of that? So, it freezes us in our tracks. So, we avoid it, and we get rewarded because it gets rid of those negative emotions. And that, in a nutshell, is what I look at in terms of when I say that procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy. And there, there's the reward. The reward is I get rid of an aversive stimulus.

Yeah, that that was something that really struck me as as I was reading your book. This idea that it feels good to procrastinate in the moment, and you're choosing to feel good in that moment over, I guess, serve yourself as it were. And I found that idea very interesting because, like, I imagine, you know, later tonight, I've got a personal trainer session. And, you know, it's, you know, I've pre-committed to this, paid for like 12 of them because I know it's the thing I want to want to take seriously. But if something were to come up and he would to message me being, "I'm so sorry, I can't do it," I would feel this immense burst of, "Yes! Oh my God, it's been canceled. I don't have to do it." This feels so good. And it's weird because I know that that would be acting against my interest. And of course, if I were more quote-unquote disciplined, maybe we can talk about discipline, I would choose to work out anyway. Realistically, I would feel like I've earned back an hour of my time completely for free, and it would feel incredible. And I'd, I it would be the happiest thing that's happened to me all day, other than other than this conversation with you, of course. So, what, what's going on there? Like, why, why does it feel so good to not do the thing?

Oh, you know, I think everyone had a visceral reaction to the personal trainer story. Uh, it's, it's a great deal of effort. It's one thing to even go for a workout on your own because you can put in as much or as little effort as you feel at the moment. Like, you can wander around the wait room quite aimlessly and and still say, "Yeah, I went to the gym." But when you have a personal trainer, you know you're going to bust your butt and you're going to do the extra set and you're going to work to exhaustion and and past that. And so, right there, it, it, it's built-in aversity. Now, you want it. It's serving your long-term goal, but you don't want what it means in the short term. Isn't that true for so many things? Like saving for the future. I'd like to have money for retirement, but I, I'd rather spend the money now. I'd like to be fit. I'd like to eat well, but I'd like to have the doughnut right now. And so, then we have this compensatory thinking. In fact, some of our most recent research in the area has been looking at what dietitians know as compensatory beliefs and compensatory thinking. And and so, in fact, you, you think, for example, "Oh, I really want that donut. Well, I'll eat just a salad tonight." You know, this commitment to later, but it's always later. And that's the same thing that's going on with procrastination. And it's the same kind of rationalization that goes on with, "Well, I didn't cancel the workout." And you're absolutely right, you could work out. We should spend more time on that because I love the feeling that yoga gives me. Stretching is just the best thing for my body. There's so many days when I don't feel like stepping on the mat, but the moment I step on the mat, magic happens. So, it's in that precipitous moment of beating that resistance that you talked about in that earlier episode based on Steven Pressfield's notion of this, uh, resistance and getting past it. You know, one of the chapters in that book you're reading through is just "Get Started." Now, it's funny because I'm very public, like you have are, or I have been, not recently. I haven't. And people would write to me and say, "Well, Dr. Pychyl, you know, it's really great if I could just get started, but honestly, sir, if I could just get started, I wouldn't have a procrastination problem. Could you do a little bit better than that for me, please?" I thought, "Oh, it's so fair." Right? So, let me go on a little bit longer. So, I had to go to the work of a productivity guru. You, you'll know very well, David Allen. And he says, you know, "We don't do tasks. We don't do projects. We do actions." And the best question you can ask yourself is, "What's the next action?" And so, that's become this own my own personal mantra as the gateway to just get started. "What's the next action, Tim?" Just roll out that yoga mat and stand on it. And as soon as you do that, you know, your body's going to respond. You're going to lift your arms, and things are going to start to happen. So, there's a bit of a rambly answer to your question, but still on topic. It's, it's, it's great stuff.

One of the, I guess, you know, I'm I'm in the process of writing a book about productivity. The the core thesis is that, at least for me, what I found is that the secret to sustainable productivity has been to find a way to make the things that I have to do more energizing. So that A, I'm feel more productive at doing them, and B, then I'll have more energy to be able to give to my YouTube channel in the evenings or playing board games with friends, and just not being completely drained at the end of the workday. And so, the first part of the book, the first three chapters are about power play and people, essentially autonomy, mastery, purpose, bringing other people, getting energy from that, making it fun, gamification, all that kind of stuff that generally the basic human needs. Yeah, yeah, all of those things. And if we can find a way to apply them to our work, then hey, it it becomes more energizing. But then we run into that thing of like, "Okay, I know that doing yoga or going to the gym is going to energize me, but it's just such a struggle to get started." And one of the things, one of the statements that I kind of want to make in the book, and I'd love to get your take on, is that really, 95 to 98% of procrastination is just about that getting started. And almost like Newton's first law, you know, the law of inertia, as you'll be familiar with, where it's like an object at rest will continue to stay at rest, but an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an external imbalanced force. Or the idea of activation energy in biology and chemistry reactions, where it takes a bit of energy to get started, but once the reaction gets going, then it's, you know, it's unlikely to stop and it's going to, it's it's going to do the rest of its thing. To what extent do you think, I guess, then that it's fair to say that to be honest, if you want to solve procrastination, just solve the getting started problem? Just like, find a way to just do the, take the first stab, do, do the thing? Or like, what else is going on? I mean, it's, it's fun to want to be able to say something like, "95% of the issue is this." I can't tell you that based on research, but I, I know the rhetorical purpose of that. And I, I would agree with you in principle that it is the major step. It's priming the pump. And it is becoming my personal mantra, because there's every day there'll become a point in my day, either because I don't feel I have the energy, or because the task I have in front of me is aversive, usually a combination of both, because they play on each other. The moment you face a task you don't want, you start to feel a a waning of your energy. It's a reaction to stress as well.

Back, I'll take you back into the 1990s when I first started doing research on procrastination. So, for a lot of your younger listeners, you're going, "What a geezer, the 1990s, really?" Yeah. I'm going to take you back there. There were no cell phones. I had to buy pagers. You probably don't even know what a pager is, right? But as a physician, you would. So, this, I bought pagers for students. I gave them little binders, and I paged them throughout the day. In psychology, we call this an experience sampling approach. And so, I'll just make up some days here because we did it throughout quite a few months. But let's say we did it Monday to Friday. And on Monday, we'd page the students and say, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm hanging out in the coffee shop with my friends." "So, how do you feel about that? How difficult? How stressful? How enjoyable?" Not surprisingly, not that difficult, not that stressful, pretty enjoyable. "Is there something else you should be doing?" "Oh, yeah, yeah, I should be working on my stats assignment." "How difficult? Stressful? And enjoyable is that?" "Oh, crazy difficult, crazy stressful, horribly not enjoyable." You know, zero, because they're rating these things from a zero to 10, 11-point scale. And then we asked them, "What, what other things are you thinking?" "Oh, I'll feel more like doing it tomorrow." "We need to come back to that, this whole idea of future self." You mentioned, and, "I work better under pressure." These sorts of things, right? So, we page them throughout the week. And sure enough, they're putting things off. And there's some wonderful philosophy around this notion, um, transitive intransitive preferences here, but we, let's not get carried away into that right now. We can come back if you want. But every day they put it off. Now, finally, this assignment, stress, this stats assignment is due Friday. Thursday night, we paged them and sure enough, "What are you doing?" "Working on my stats assignment." "How enjoyable? How difficult? How stressful?" The amazing thing was, we saw a statistically significant difference in the enjoyment, the difficulty, and the stress. It became more enjoyable, perceived as less difficult, and less stressful. Now, it doesn't mean that enjoyment was something like eight out of 10. Now, it just means it wasn't one or two. And the stress and the difficulty, it was still there, but it was lower in a way that more than you would expect by chance alone. And then when we asked them, "What are you thinking?" You didn't hear people spontaneously say things like, "Oh, I'm so glad I waited till now because I work so much better under pressure." They said things like, "This isn't as bad as I thought it was." "Why didn't I start earlier?" "Because I could do so so much better job on that." I mean, that was a turning point for me in our research in terms of the way I was conceiving this. Now, in some ways, that's nothing new. Like, we've all experienced that. But to see it consistently across people in a data set this way really taught me something. And so, I would argue based on just that, that we delude ourselves a lot. We're really good at self-deception. In fact, John Perry, who's written a wonderful little book on procrastination, if you haven't seen it, called *The Art of the Art of Procrastination*, I think it's called. John Perry, he's a retired philosopher from Stanford, and he's written this wonderful essay on the internet, if you haven't seen it already, called "Structured Procrastination." But John Perry, I won't go into that now, but we can go back to it. What he says is, you know, "All of this takes a bit of self-deception, but don't worry, procrastinators are very good at that." And I saw it in our research. We, we're really good at saying things like, "I'll feel more like it tomorrow," "I work better under pressure," and on and on and on.

Yeah, so back to your point, you know, you'd like to write in your chapter that 95% of it is getting started. And I say, "Yeah, I agree with you that it really is the kingpin in this." That once you get started, you've, you probably will keep going because not only have we seen it change our perceptions of the task, but I would argue that it changes your perception of self as well. There's nothing like the downward spiral of procrastination to make you feel like an abject failure. Right? That's why what's the most, uh, strongest emotion associated with procrastination? Guilt. And if we do it for long enough, that can become shame, because now we take it as this somehow this moral failing, not just guilt for this one action, but this something about our whole personhood. Now, the last thing I'd add is that other research in social psychology shows us that even a little bit of progress on a goal fuels our well-being. And that fueling our well-being can be what we can build our motivation on. Right? That it's the, um, the difference then between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness, which, you know, I know that your channel here is all about happiness and productivity, and you would know, you've probably talked about eudaimonia before. But by engaging, we find reward. And so, getting started is the beginning of that reward. There. Long answer, but one that is takes you back into some research.

Fantastic. Yeah, really appreciate the, the in-depth, in-depth answers here. And also, I, I hadn't come across John Perry before, so I will definitely check that out. And I found "Structured Procrastination." I found the book perfect. There's a few terms related to the idea of procrastination that I have always found various different definitions for, and there's three of them, and I'd love it if you can just riff on those three words. I guess the first is goals, the second is discipline, and the third is motivation. I guess discipline and motivation to me feel like more related than the idea of goals does. But like, how, how do you think of those different concepts or constructs?

You could spend weeks on each one of them, but I'm going to add another one because I know you've interviewed James Clear on habits and, or at least you've talked about his work. I would also think about an earlier book called *The Power of Habit*, Charles Duhigg, another really wonderful book. But we'll, we'll leave that to last. So, goals. You and I would quickly agree, we're social animals. You even put that in the first three chapters, you know, the people, uh, but we're also goal-oriented. If you think about that last part of the brain to be added evolutionarily to make us a human species, in so many ways, the prefrontal cortex, and there's a story in there about procrastination as well. It, it is all about goals, inhibiting actions, short-term memory, executive functions, we call it. So, we are a goal-oriented species. We, we represent our goals mentally, and we work to achieve them. Uh, so, really important. And in, in fact, we create intentions around our goals, and it's the gap between intention and action which is the heart of procrastination. As an aside, Ally, I didn't do my PhD in procrastination, although I procrastinated a fair bit on the way, like many students. I will tell you now, though, I don't almost ever procrastinate. So, I can, I'm a poster child for saying that once you learn some things about procrastination, you can reduce it if you want to. But, with, I studied goals. That's what I was studying. I was studying people's personal projects, what they were doing, and how it made them feel. And what I turned a corner on is that when I was doing my PhD research, when I interviewed people, it was the goals they said they were going to do, projects they said they were going to do, they never did. That really predicted their well-being. And if they had a lot of those projects, I knew where their well-being was. It was in the toilet. So, there's goals. That's me riffing on goals. And there's tons in goals, like you can talk about how do you set a SMART goal, you know, specific and measurable and on. And you can talk about that if you want to. I don't want to, because what I want to talk about is what gets in the way. You know, someone can help you set your goals, someone can help you be a better time manager, and you can still completely fail because what's going to get in the way is procrastination. And why you do that is everything to do with emotion-focused coping. End of. I talk about goals.

Discipline. Can I ask a quick follow-up question on the goals front? You probably familiar with Piers Steel? Very much. I I actually had a just a random Zoom call with him a a few weeks ago. He was, he was very gracious with his time. We were talking about procrastination, unsurprisingly. Something that he says in *The Procrastination Equation*, which is his somewhat more accessible kind of summary of the research, is that he doesn't like the idea of SMART goals because it contains too many and yet also too few letters in that. Like, specific and measurable are somewhat like redundant because it sort of means kind of the same thing. And I've, I have some, I have a weird relationship with goals in that for certain goals, I get very motivated, motivated, we can define that later. Uh, I get very motivated by the pursuit of numbers. Like, I had a DEXA scan a few weeks ago to measure my body fat percentage and muscle mass. And seeing the numbers and having a goal to work towards in terms of calories and training felt very motivating. And it, it felt great. But when I have a goal to work towards, like, "I want to hit 5 million subscribers on my YouTube channel," which is outside of my control at that point, it starts to feel very demotivating. And I think, you know, "What I'd way rather have a non-SMART goal like, 'Make a video a week and enjoy the process,' or something like that, rather than a more specific like, 'X number of subscribers by X date, X time.'" What's the answer here? Or is it just like a bit of a, "Yeah."

Let me back it right up to Piers' comment about SMART. Of course, I think many things that are pitched out there in the name of productivity and goal pursuit can be criticized, but they're not bad heuristics to work from. And I don't think we should spend a lot of time on saying it's got two letters too many letters or too few, or that's specific and measurable or too similar. That's not important. The thing that you, you just mentioned about the different kinds of goals you have, the one being the body fat measurement and the goal, and the other being the number of viewers or or followers, that reminds me of something you said in an earlier podcast about inputs. You'd like to focus on inputs and not outputs, things that are beyond your control. These are sometimes known as process versus output. And so, we need to focus more on process goals. I'm not, uh, keen on criticizing these heuristics, as I say, and at the same time, I would say that your notion of inputs is really important here. On the one hand, you know, you have control over the one with body fat. It's how much you're going to exercise. The other one is the internet here is a strange place, place, and you don't know what's going to go viral and what's not going to go viral, or when you're going to say something that's going to offend a million people, right? And and so, because it's out of your control, then you don't want to set a measurable goal or a specific goal. And there's even, for most people, like I have a good, very good friend in the Netherlands, and we might talk about him later, Joel Anderson, because he's a philosopher who writes about procrastination, and he and I often argue about the specificity level of our goals. Some people like them really specific, and some people don't. It's can be an individual difference variable. So, there, you said, let you allowed me to riff. I'm riffing back on you about this notion of what Piers said about your the SMART notion and about your earlier concept of inputs. And I think you're smart to focus on the things that you can control. Nice.

Okay, we could spend a lot of time on goals, and, and in fact, a lot of my colleagues do. In fact, and I, I remind you, that's where I started my own work. Yeah. But what I want to talk about is what gets in the way of our goal pursuit, because quite frankly, human beings are are always in goal pursuit. What I think we have to do is talk about what gets in the way. And I borrow that actually from Brené Brown. You know, she's a shame researcher who talks about wholehearted living. And when I read one of her books, *The Gift of Vulnerability*, and a point of connection for you and me, you and I, is that, uh, it was, I listened to it on Audible, and I know you're a big Audible fan, and so am I. I can remember the moment I heard this phrase in her book. I was horses here. I was crossing the creek in the gully. Let's go over to the pasture. And she said, "We have to talk about the things that get in the way of doing what is best for us." And I thought, "Yeah, that's where why I'm a procrastination researcher." And I can talk about productivity, and that's why she's a shame researcher, and she talks about wholehearted living, right? They, they, one gets in the way. And so, we can talk about goals forever, but, and I could help you set better goals based on some of my colleagues' research, and we don't have to use SMART, right? We could put that aside if, if we wanted to. But, and there's still other things we could learn about our goals. For example, I could use theistic of meaning and manageability. We need goals that are meaningful and manageable. And if they're not both, you're not going anywhere, right? So, all of that's there. Now, discipline. Your next topic. Well, discipline tastes and smells like willpower. And you're going to see, I have a short chapter in that book in your hands because it was written in 20, actually, the book was probably written in 2010 and then republished in 2013 because it was, I originally published it on my own, and then Penguin asked if they could publish it, and I said, "Sure, do you want to change anything?" I said, "No, we just changed the title." And I didn't have anything to change at that time. But since that time, that chapter on willpower was based a lot on the ego depletion model, and it's come under quite a bit of scrutiny. And I, like Roy Baumeister, would not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's certainly this notion of at some points in the day, you feel depleted. But this notion of willpower and, and Kelly McGonigal's *The Willpower Instinct*, you know, we, we know that it, it's, it's a very, you can't depend on your willpower. And in fact, I, I said we could talk about Joel Anderson. Joel Anderson says, uh, "We, we could actually outsource our will." And that's where I thought you were going a few minutes ago. Because if I said to you, "What's 3 * 3?" Ally, you'd say, "Nine." And if I said, "What's 487 * 963?" You might tell me, although you might not, because you're a pretty bright guy. It's called extended cognition.

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The highest correlation between any personality trait and procrastination is conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is really defined by dutifulness, organization, and self-discipline. A couple others, but self-discipline. So, some of us come into the world, because personality traits, nature and nurture, we're more disciplined to begin with. I'm very much like that, very much like that. And if I put something in my calendar, like I'm doing something tomorrow at 8:00, that's a serious commitment, and I'm disciplined enough to show up. And you go back to Steven Pressfield's work that you talked about, "Show up." Yeah, professionals show up. Yeah. So, what do I think of discipline? Discipline can be misused because we can always rely on internal willpower, and we should learn to outsource some of it. Some of us naturally have more discipline. We're more conscientious by nature. And if you've got it, use it, but don't bemoan the fact if you don't. There's lots of ways to outsource your willpower.

Motivation. Riff on motivation. Motivation should follow action, not the other way around. It's this is huge, right? That I can't, I don't know where people learn this notion that they have to feel like it, they have to be in the mood. But that's part of the procrastinator, procrastinator's song. "I don't want to. I don't feel like it. I'll feel more like it tomorrow." It's as if we're waiting for our muse. We're waiting for that bus to come that's going to pick us up and give us our motivation. Well, that bus doesn't stop here anymore. And so, motivation typically follows action. And it goes back to that notion I said earlier, if we make even a little bit of progress on a goal, it fuels our well-being. And that's when we intersect with motivation. Now, we could talk more about motivation. If I'm riffing on it, I'd say motivation is at the intersection of will and skill. And that's where we might bring in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow, for example. When my, uh, will and my skill match, and I'm challenging myself just a little bit beyond perhaps what my skill level can be, but I'm working hard, and I completely lose myself. I get into that state, magical state of flow. And that, and I use the word already, that's when the magic happens. So, there me riffing on motivation. Motivation should follow action.

And finally, I wanted to bring in the word habit, because I would say all of these things come together with good habits. And getting a trainer, like you do for 12 weeks, may well create a new habit, which is Friday night, Ally goes to the gym. Doesn't need a trainer anymore. He knows how to dig deep on his own.

I guess one thing I've been trying to get with this idea of sort of making things feel energizing is that feeling, and I'm, I, I guess I'm sort of thinking about the concept of flow here, but just that feeling of effortlessness. Where, for example, you know, people always ask me, "How did, how did you make a YouTube channel while working as a physician and like, and stuff?" And what I would do is, when I would see, when I would feel like it was becoming like, like too much of a chore, and I would just like sit down and do the thing. I would still sit down and do the thing, but I would at the same time be thinking about, "Okay, cool. I actually don't want this to feel like a chore. I want to, in a, in a dream world, I actually would enjoy the pursuit of the goal rather than treat it or almost coerce myself into doing it." And I haven't yet gone to this point with personal training, like I don't enjoy the sessions, I'm glad I do them anyway, but I would, I would love to be able to enjoy them. What do you think? Is there anything here around like helping us find the thing that we're doing itself more fun by changing the way we frame it or adding gamification or a progress bar or any other of the strategies that people use to theoretically make things a bit more fun?

Yes and no. Like, it's like everything. Yes, we can find, we can, gamification is a good way to go with that, right? But, you know, let's take your example, because you use yourself as an example. You're a highly intellectual guy. And so, for you, I, I'm really impressed with what you do in the episodes I've watched, because there's a ton of creativity in there. Like, even just choosing the shots and how you're changing things, and sometimes it's writing down, and then comes back to you. You're gifted in terms of keeping people's attention, messaging, you're articulate. And so, that feeds you partly because of who you are. So, you know, there's going to be a limit to to how much you can enjoy that compared to how much you could enjoy working out, because that may not be your first nature, that's put it that way, right? It's to use a very loose expression that, you know. So, there are other people who wouldn't love the creativity of creating the podcasts that you do, but would love to go and refine, let's take tennis as an example, because I taught tennis for so many years, a down-the-line slice backhand approach shot, and they'll hit hundreds, if not thousands of them, right? And they do get into the flow. But what's so fascinating, I'm glad you're brought in Mihaly's work on flow, because flow takes effort before you get there. The effortlessness is an outcome of a whole whack of effort earlier, of training and discipline and focus. And then you get to a point where now the skill and will meet, and boom, all of a sudden, it feels effortless. But you don't go into it thinking, "This is going to feel effortless." Right? But it feels, it can feel better for some people based on what I'm, I'm just loosely calling first nature. And I would say your first nature is much more intellectual, not that you don't have a strong physique. In fact, not mentioning training today, because when I was watching one of your videos, you were wearing a t-shirt, and I watched you move your arm, and I thought, "Yeah, that guy's got quite a bicep going on there." And so, it's obviously your training. Thank so much. Well, you're welcome. But it was easy to notice. As we notice things about each other, I, not, I've noticed your intellect as well. But so, you took special pride in that, because you're working harder at that. Whereas intellectual stuff, I bet you since you've been a little guy, it just, it just comes out of you, right? It's not hard. But this other stuff, you, you want to own it, but it's, it's not something that's first nature. Yeah. So, that's my reflections. And you're letting me riff, which is fun, because to do that means I have to pull in things that I can, uh, verify with papers I've read and data and things that my impressions as a psychologist of 66 years, or 66 years old. I haven't been a psychologist for 66 years. I've been on the planet for that long. Yeah.

Love it. Can, can we talk a bit about, so you, you mentioned earlier in the conversation the idea that we have, there, there is happiness and joy to be found within goal pursuit, or, you know, what's to that effect? That seems to be somewhat opposed to the idea within, for example, mindfulness, meditation, spirituality type people that says, "Hey, actually, in fact, all the happiness is found in the present moment." And the more we kind of, I guess, striving, desire equals suffering, and all that kind of stuff. Given that you're into yoga, you strike me, and you've mentioned meditation a few times, you strike me as having some understanding of that side of things as well. And I wonder, how is, are these two things really in opposition? Like, is, is it like, what's, what's the deal? What's going on there?

I guess, no, they're not in opposition, but to reconcile this, we have to embrace the really difficult notion of a paradox. The opposite of one great truth is often another great truth. And, and I first encountered that by reading Parker Palmer, who I really love. He's a Quaker, and he's written a wonderful book for anybody who's in education, *The Courage to Teach*, published back in 1999. Wonderful book, amazing human being. But if I think about it in terms of meditation, one of my favorite Zen stories in relation to procrastination is about, I think it was Joshu. And so, a new monk comes to the monastery and meets the head monk, and he said, "Well, I'm here. Teach me." And the head monk looks at him and says, "Have you finished eating your rice porridge?" Like, "Have you finished eating your breakfast?" And he said, "Yes." Then he said, "Then wash your bowl." And at that moment, some of the stories go, the monk was enlightened. And it, it did the same to me. It went over me like a truck. Right? Yeah. It's washing my bowl. Is this, is it Alan Watts' notion of "This is it," which is your idea of it's only found in the present? But this notion of that the happiness only comes from being in the moment, on the one hand, and yet we're human beings have are goal-oriented. You've said this in some of your earlier podcasts as well, that we have to lose the ego. And in fact, in flow, that's one of the experiences. We become less self-conscious. Doesn't mean myself is gone. I'm still the guy hitting the tennis ball. To keep on that one theme, and I can be in a, I had been in a wonderful flow state playing tennis. That was me.

Tim doing it, but self was gone, right? I was just in the action, and that kind of captures how, yes, joy can be found in the moment, but its goal pursuit is still part of what it means to be human. And to become a meditator doesn't mean become any any less human, and that's the paradoxical part of it. And if that's confusing a listener, then, yeah, who, nobody isn't, right? And that's where we spend time studying the Dharma, uh, doing mindfulness meditation to try to come to an understanding that is not just intellectual. Cuz if you, if you scratch the surface of that intellectually, you reject it. But you can come to understand it in a way that, uh, resolves the paradox there. I'll leave it at that, but because it's not an easy question to answer. Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like I've got lots of thoughts which are sort of floating around. My personal trainer, incidentally, is super into meditation. So he and I just did, did a session two days ago where he, we, we, we did it. I guess it's hard to describe. It's always hard to describe meditation. But like, after 20 minutes, I felt like the sense of calm and peace and serenity, to use that word, that I just haven't felt in a very long time, or don't remember ever potentially feeling before. And then I went on the Sam, Sam Harris's Waking Up app, and I was like, oh, wow, he's got all the Alan Watts stuff. So that's now my binge, uh, when I'm, I'm driving. Oh, and then you can have a meditation for 20 minutes and think you're going to lose your mind, right? Cuz all you're doing is thinking, and it's not going very well, and there's no calm at all. And that's meditation too. And there's another form of the paradox, right? And that it, and it's not the clinging. This is what you mentioned, that idea of this notion of identification or clinging. And you can think of that as well, if I have a goal, then by definition, am I clinging to it? No, right? You can have a goal, but are you, are you identified with the goal? Are you clinging to the goal? That's different, right? And, and that's an important distinction. We don't become less human and less goal-oriented, but we can become less identified with and, and not be clinging. Where, and you use the word unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, Dukkha, would arise because it's inherent. Then if I cling to it. And I mean, we can, we can go on this forever because it's just like the Zen archery thing. When you aim, you miss, right? And, and so again, these are things that are difficult to understand just on a strictly intellectual level because you think, well, how do you ever hit anything if you don't aim? Like, put a ridiculous thing to say. Yeah.

It sort of reminds me of the Stoic idea of preferred indifference that I sometimes think about, where it's like, I, I'd really like my book to hit the New York Times list, but I, I mean, but like, I'm trying at the same time, I'm trying to convince myself that I'm actually indifferent if it doesn't, as long as I've written a book I'm, I'm personally proud of, which is in my control, then, hey, you know, the gods of the New York Times or whatever, who cares? You're not indifferent to it, and it's going to be tough if it doesn't. Uh, if you, if, if those listeners are interested in the Stoic approach, William Irvine, you got to read his stuff or listen to him. An interview with Sam, he's got a series there on the Waking Up app, just on Stoicism, uh, because it is a wonderful root to happiness as well. And if you haven't already done it in your own podcast, I think it would be well worth it. Yeah.

Nice. Uh, I will, I will check that out. Yeah. I read William Irvine's, uh, The Guide to the Good Life, which was the first, my first introduction to Stoicism. And then discovered Darren Brown's work, and then Ryan Holiday's. And I still haven't read the original Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and stuff. But it's always, I always procrastinate from that because, well, it's not procrastination because it's not intentional. Uh, it's like, it's just on the to-do list and it will be done at some point.

Good. That, that's a really good, important distinction. Because in procrastination, but you never really made an intention. But then I could say to you, you know what, it's still procrastination because you have anemic intentions. And if you make an anemic intention, it's weak. It's here's an anemic intention: I'm going to do that on the weekend. When does the weekend start? Exactly. When does it end? What is it exactly you're going to do? Again, you're going to do that. What do you mean by the whole thing? So sometimes we can let ourselves off the hook of procrastination because we say, well, I never really made the intention. When not making the intention is actually the act of procrastination. Not that I'm accusing you of that, because I don't think you need to read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius either. But I just wanted to add that because it's never so straightforward. Procrastination is deeply subjective, cuz we, we alone know our own intentions.

This brings us very nicely to the thing that I was going to talk to you about next, which is, and again, I'm going to zoom out a bit and tell you what the sort of structure of my book is tentatively, because that's sort of the angle that I'm approaching this, kind of based on reading of your work and Piers's work and a few other people, whereby, and actually, I got, I got this, cuz I paid $5,000 for a productivity coach at one point. I was, I was just kind of curious, like, hey, what does a productivity coach do? And essentially, what he did was basically talk me through a method for goal setting that actually worked, worked really effectively. And it kind of got me thinking that if, if we think of, let's take a thing like, I'm going to, I want to improve my Mandarin Chinese, for example. Now, you would say that the anemic intention is, oh, yeah, I'll just do that on the weekend. And I would agree that like, it's, what, what the hell does that look like? Oh, I just learn Mandarin on the weekend is clearly never going to happen because, like, there's no plan, it's not in the schedule, I don't know what I need to do. And I find that, like, often for me, when I'm, whenever I'm struggling with procrastination, or what I think is procrastination, the first step is to actually just stick the thing in the schedule and figure out what, what specifically the next action step actually is.

Good. Yeah. And I find this a lot with students when I, when I'm teaching. It's like, oh, I'm going to study physiology tomorrow. I'm like, okay, hang on. Firstly, what time? They're like, God, okay, fine. Uh, 7 p.m. 7 till 8. All right, cool. Now, study physiology is never going to happen. So, like, what specifically are you going to do? It's like, okay, cool. I'll read chapter four. Okay, cool. Now, within chapter four, reading chapter four in Guyton and Hall's Physiology is never going to happen. It's too long. Like, do you want to pick some questions? And guiding people through that thought process results in, okay, fine. Tomorrow at 7:00 p.m., I'm going to do questions 8 to 13 in this book. Does that kind of vibe with your experience of solving, helping solve procrastination?

Oh, yeah. I'm going to give you a big hug from across the ocean here. I've leaned a lot in that book that you're reading on Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions. So there's goal intentions. We spent a lot of time talking about goals. You just told me you hired a personal trainer to help you have better goals. But it sounds like the trainer also introduced you to implementation intentions. And they're often framed, and research shows they're best framed as, "In situation X, I'll do behavior Y to achieve sub-goal Z." And, and there's other research to show that when we think about things in the abstract, they seem to belong to tomorrow. There's no sense of urgency to them. And when we think about things concretely, they belong to today. So you put those two things together, and it says something about the way the human mind works. Works that we can, well, in a sense, we can borrow this notion of nudge, right? That we, we move ourselves in the direction of the way the mind works by saying, I'm going to set a time and a specific behavior. I'm going to make it as concrete as possible because concrete goals, my brain treats them differently. And again, on implementation intentions also help us break habits or establish new habits because we put the cue for the action into the environment and not rely on internal cues. Because internal cues, I've already got my habits established. And the example I constantly use, Ali, is how years ago, I, I wasn't flossing my teeth, and my dentist told me that I was developing problems with my gums, not surprisingly, because of that. And for whatever reason, I, I brush my teeth every day, really habitually, and I felt it was an important health habit, but I resented flossing my teeth. I didn't like it, and it was just too much of a bother. But I realized I had to do it. So I made an implementation intention: "When I pick up my toothbrush," because I always did, "I will put the floss on the counter." When then, when then, when I put down my toothbrush, I will pick up my floss. Now, some of you listeners might be saying, "No, you should floss before you brush your teeth." I got there, but I needed to bootstrap this process by saying, "When, then." And then it became a habit to have there. And then I also realized that flossing actually feels good. It wasn't as aversive as I thought. In fact, I can't imagine not flossing now, and I floss every day now. That doesn't mean that there aren't some days when I'm tired and a little, little Timmy, little six-year-old Timmy, maybe even older than that, will say, "I don't feel like I don't want to." And I, then I have all sorts of other strategies. I go to, like, what's the next action? Just pick up the floss. Like, or, uh, more importantly than that, going back to our earlier discussion of meditation, mindfulness, uh, a Buddhist mindset, you name it. Parker Palmer, cuz he said this: "I can have an emotion without being that emotion." This is another big personal mantra. Yeah. "I'm having this emotion. I don't want to, like, I don't want to floss my teeth." I don't have to be that. I can work from other parts of my inner landscape. And my other part of my inner landscape is, I have a health goal that's important to me, healthy gums. And flossing a lot, one day a week, you floss every day. And then I pick up the floss and I floss. Right. And in a sense, to, I'm not becoming identified with a thought. But to take it back to where this part of our conversation began. Absolutely. Implementation intentions are a great step towards reducing procrastination. But as Peter Gollwitzer makes clear, even some of his papers in the late 1990s when he was really starting to roll this stuff out, you have to have a commitment to that goal, or it's not going to work, right? There's no trick or technique on its own will ever make a difference if you're not committed to the goal achievement. These tools serve goal achievement. And if you're not committed to that goal, but nothing magic's going to happen.

Yeah, like I, so I'm, I'm, I'm in the, in the middle of teaching a live course online, helping people become YouTubers. And I often get a bunch of questions around the, the, the tactics, the implementation, and stuff, especially when it's kind of friends in real life asking for my, for my advice around starting YouTube channels. And my thing always kind of starts with, okay, I can, let's, we can, we can talk through it, we can work through it. But like, really, if you don't fundamentally want to do this thing, there is nothing I can say that's going to make you do the thing. So let's tackle that part of the equation first. Yeah. And, and the question becomes, why do you want to do this thing? And it's, and it can come, you can get finally get down to an answer. Well, I want to write a bestseller, that on the New York Times list, right? And I actually had a fellow contact me because again, I've been very public with my research. People have emailed me from all over the world. And this one fellow, I won't even name the country, just to keep it as anonymous as possible, but was on the other side of the world. "I want to write a book." I said, "Well, what's stopping you?" Right? It's kind of the press field thing. And he had resistance. And it came down to, after a little bit of nudging and questioning, that he said, "Well, I, it's got to be a bestseller. It's got to be on the New York Times list." I said, "Well, you can't start there, right? There's never a guarantee in life that way." And then we often get into, and you and I ought to, at some point in this conversation, deeply existential issues, right? That we can all, we can want all sorts of things, right? But we're all alive here in a certain set of circumstances. And, you know, the only non-renewable resource that you and I have in life, really, is time. And we don't even know how much we're going to get. And so, in, in a sense, your focus on productivity, and now our discussion of procrastination, rests so much. That's kind of why I like Oliver Burkman's new book, you know, 4,000 Weeks, because he gets into this as well, that, you know, you got to be invested in where you want to live your life. This is not a dress rehearsal. And let's go full circle back to Alan Watts. This is it. This is it. And it even goes back to your notion of, isn't joy found in the moment? Yeah. Right now, I'm really enjoying myself talking with you, you know, why? Because I showed up, and so did you, right? And then when we end this call, I'll have just as much fun packing for the week ahead of me, because why? I'm going to show up and get into that. Uh, yeah. So there again, a bit of a riff on that. But that's good. I think it's important to riff because all these things will come together.

Yeah, yeah. I think, well, one of the, I find myself almost automatically doing the whole "when, then" thing. Like, I, you know, a few, a few months ago, decided I was going to try Acro yoga, which relies on ridiculous hamstring, or rather, just the ability to do an L-sit, like hamstring flexibility, which I just don't have at all. I was like, okay, every day I'm going to do 20 minutes of stretching. And it was never happening. And then I decided, you know what, I've got an electric toothbrush that buzzes every 30 seconds. So when I pick up my toothbrush and do my teeth, when I do the front, the bottom row, I am hamstring stretching my left leg. When I do the top row, I'm hamstring stretching my right leg on the bathtub, just cuz why not? And now I just do that almost as a, I, I almost feel weird when I'm at a friend's house and I'm like, I'm brushing. Oh, hang on. Yeah, I should, I should be putting my leg up on the bathtub and like doing a hamstring stretch. I feel like the more we can, the more at least for me, the more I tie actions to those things that I know I'm going to be doing anyway, the easier it becomes to, to just do stuff.

Yes. But there's also some theory, and I'm, I'm blocking on the name right now, event segmentation theory in psychology. When you think about the scripts and schemas in our lives, like you have a bedtime script and a morning script, and you want to try to make these new habits fit into something that, uh, makes sense in the script. And for you, it was, "I can put my leg up on the tub," right? But it's interesting, just because you make a "when, then," if, if you want to be really successful, you want to fine-tune that around making it fit into an event that makes sense. In fact, some of Peter Gollwitzer's early work on implementation intentions were that women who were told by their doctors to do breast exams, self-breast exams, "when, then," just made an intention. Very few were doing it. I can't remember the exact number, but it was very, very low, maybe 50%. And when they made an implementation intention to do it, "when I get out of the shower," it went up to 100%. Partly because of the implementation intention, but I'd say partly because of the event segmentation theory. That you put it into a shower, cuz you're already naked, and you're already touching yourself with a towel, so it's not a big stretch to actually do the exam. But if you said, "Let's do that midway through making dinner," like the chances of you remembering that, uh, are very slim, right? And, and that's the notion of prospective memory. Prospective memory plays a role here. And again, we can learn to outsource that. And again, to riff a little further, because you love productivity, so do I. I'd love to show you my calendar. My calendar, everything, a whole day, everything goes on my calendar. And I do block, block scheduling, very effectively. And I, but I schedule everything. And I, I can slide my calendar a day if I get up a little later than expected, because I needed to. But it's not just to be more productive. It's also to do an audit on my week. I can, and it's all color-coded. And I've, I've seen some of your calendars work too on your podcast. I think. Well, yeah, exactly. That I can take a glance at my week and say, "When did I do exercise last week? And did I do enough?" And so it's very powerful. And that helps me too with, I don't, prospective memory. I think you talk about them as type one, type two, and type three sorts of things. And so type two is your task. But you're moving away from that. Yeah. Good. That's good. But, but we're riffing around the same ideas, right? These structures can help us. Tools can help us. But the tools are only tools to get us to where we want to go. Again, the Buddhist would say, you know, the raft got you to the other side of the river. You don't take, pick up the raft now and start to carry it, right? And so you might use a tool for a while and then say, "No, I don't need this anymore. In fact, it's, it's in the way." There. More riffing.

Let's say someone's listening to this and, step one of my patent-pending procrastination method is, "Make a plan and stick it in the calendar and stuff." Let's say we've gotten to that point, and the thing is, "Start my podcast," or, "Do those questions from Guyton and Hall's Medical Physiology." And at that point, it's like, it's in, it's in the calendar, and you're sitting down to do the thing, and then there is this other, this, this more, more resistance. And we are genuinely procrastinating from the thing. Now, I feel this is where all the emotions come in. You're, I think your, your most famous quote, at least from all the stuff I've read, is "procrastination is an emotional regulation problem or an emotional disregulation." I wonder if you can riff on that, 'cause I know that's like, a whole thing. So we're all going to get there. Like, we all, you know, for the outset, we said we're goal-oriented. We, we may be have enough insight to put them in the calendar and so make a very specific intention. It's not anemic, it's quite an implementation intention. But we get there, and then something's happening inside of us. And because you've brought meditation practice to the forefront, I'm going to add a name here and say Tara Brach. And Tara, she loves the RAIN approach. RAIN, like the rain coming down. She uses it a little differently than other people have in the past, but I'll use it both ways. RAIN is an acronym for Recognize, Accept or Allow, Investigate, Interrogate, and then she says Nurture. And some people, other people would say Non-identification. The last one, we can talk about if you want. But then I think this is an important technique to bring to those moments when that resistance starts. Start first of all, to recognize it. Yeah, I'm, I'm resisting. Like, I intended to go to my desk, but this is quite real. A lot of us can feel that we, our bodies start to move away from the desk, like we're heading to the fridge. Now, why am I going to the fridge? I say I'm hungry, but that's not why I'm going to the fridge. Like, I'm, I'm excusing myself. I, I said I was going to my desk, so I have to recognize that. And then allow it. And recognize the emotions that are there. Can you label them? I'm feeling anxious. I'm, I'm afraid it's just going to not work out. We haven't talked about this yet, and I should do it as an aside. Perfectionism rears its ugly head. Socially prescribed perfectionism, like I'm internalizing the values of others. Some people call these perfectionistic concerns as opposed to perfectionistic strivings. So I'm, I'm having these thoughts of, "It won't be as good as Ali's." You know, Ali's, by my coach for creating this podcast. And I can't create something like him. What's the point? Right? I'm not going to get on the bestseller list. What's the point of writing the book? Well, allow that emotion. And I can go back to Parker Palmer's quote: "I can have that emotion, not be that emotion." But then I can do that next step in RAIN, which is investigate it. Where's this coming from? And what does it mean? Uh, and, and is this the only emotion I can draw on here? Right? And, and it's not, right? We can. But as soon as we start to name things, often times they go poof, they go away. Or we, we start to bring into it. And this is where the, the last, the end comes in for nurture or non-identification. And they can, they can actually dovetail together, even though Tara doesn't always do that. Because non-identification is probably in there anyhow with investigate. But here, we have to accept our common humanity. You know, here you and I are talking. We're different ages, living in different places, but we accept where there's a lot of things that are common between us, 'cause we're human beings. We've got light inside of us, we've got darkness inside of us. We've got good things happening, we've got bad things happening. We've got strengths, we've got weaknesses. We do wonderful things, we make mistakes. And so when we can accept that common humanity and have some self-compassion, and recognize, "I can have these feelings and not be these feelings," then that's the emotional work done. Then I can go back to that wonderful phrase we used earlier, which is, "And what's the next action?" And you can lay on top of that implementation intentions if you want, making things concrete, just getting started. And you see, they have to dance together. If you don't do the emotional work, you're, you're not going to get to the cognitive work, because you're, you're gone, you know? And physiologically, we can say, yeah, it's an amygdala hijack. Your whole limbic system is screaming at you, you know, the six-year-old in you was alive and well, said, "Get out of here!" We've learned early in life that if you get out of here, you can get rid of these. You're gone. So you got to do them both.

Yes. In, in your experience, what, plus research, what are the common emotional barriers that get in people's ways? We've kind of touched a few of them, the idea of perfectionism, potentially fear, potentially anxiety.

Okay, so Alan Blount and I published a paper way back, and we were looking at task aversiveness. You know, that task, how aversive is something? But Alan and I sat together, brilliant guy, and said, "What the heck does that mean?" You know, aversiveness tastes different to different people, and it's probably different for different tasks. And I, I won't get into all the details, but you invited me to talk about research. We actually looked at tasks over time. If you look at tasks over time or projects over time, there's an inception phase, like, you know, I might write a book, and then there's a planning phase. You said, "I'm, you know, I've got these chapters and this is what they're going to be about." And then there's the action phase, and then there's this closure phase. And we'll leave the last part out, we'll just look at inception, planning, and action. And what Alan did was, he had people list all their personal projects and have them say, "Where are you in these phases?" You know, 'cause you can explain this to people. "Oh, it's just a, just an idea at this point." It's inception. "Oh, I'm actually actually planning it." "No, I'm working on this one." It's action. And then he had them rate them on psychologically meaningful dimensions. This is Brian Little's work on personal projects. Brian Little was at Cambridge for quite a while. He was at Carleton, did his PhD at Berkeley, was at Carleton. He was my mentor for many years. I owe him so much that way. And then he was off to Cambridge because he was sharing things more widely, and Harvard too. Quite a guy. And his work has people take their personal projects and rate them on meaningful dimensions like, and you've heard me mention them some before, enjoyment, stress, difficulty, but things like value congruency, outcome progress, all sorts of things that are psychologically meaningful. And Alan put in there as well, task aversiveness. How aversive is this to you? Lo and behold, what we found is that the nature of task aversiveness changes depending on where you are in the project. In the inception and planning phase, if something generally what we call lacked meaning, it was aversive to us. But when we get into the action phase, it's not so much of whether it's meaningful anymore, it's whether it's well-structured. Do you know how to do it? And so this notion of aversiveness has many flavors. Now, the last part to my answer is really more bang on to what you're actually asking me, which was, well, so what are these things? Boredom, frustration, difficulty, resentment, anxiety, fearfulness. All those things are related to task aversiveness, some of them depending on the phases of the project I just explained, and some of them based on on our personality as well, because that's always present. If I'm a highly anxious person, then anxiety might be something that comes to the fore more things. In terms of interpersonal difficulties, then resentment and frustration may play a role. But all of these things, you could have any of them emerge, and sometimes they're a blend. "This task is so boring, I resent having to do it. It frustrates me no end that my colleagues, uh, don't want to do these things." You see that wicked blend that's there. Well, no matter what they are, I have to start to identify them, learn from them. So why am I frustrated? Because I feel like everyone's putting it on me in the team. Well, maybe I got to do some work there. But right now, I've got to do the task. And I guess once you, I guess applying kind of the RAIN method, recognize, accept, allow, yeah, except for allow, yeah, investigate, and then nurture, slash non-identification for whenever we find ourselves struggling with any one or more of these emotions, just running through that method, I will probably even just naming the thing, just recognize, yeah, I don't want to do this thing because I, because I feel fear or anxiety. All right, cool. Now I've named it. I've taken some of the power away from it. And I can just choose to do the thing regardless of how I feel about it. And you could also investigate and say, "So why do I feel anxious?" Well, 'cause this means so much to me. Like, this is my whole identity on the line. And then you can probe that a little bit and realize, first of all, that it's pretty irrational, and you can deal with that. And then that's the common humanity, self-compassion part. But is also then you recognize that this is really important to me. So rather than putting it off today, which is going to jeopardize me, I really need to work on it. Right. We often talk about volitional skills, or I do, because I say that procrastination is a breakdown in volitional action. Volition, just another fancy word for will, like, that, you know, this is my voluntary, willful behavior. One of the most important volitional skills someone might have is just being able to take a few deep breaths. Geez, there's a lot of focus right now in the Vegas nerve, for example. And you can go do a deep dive in there if you want. I won't. But calming down, we've known this all our lives. And I've got a daughter who is like her dad, she can get quite worked up. And I have to say to her, "Laurel, breathe. Let's just do this together." And even that one breath, right? Because you and I are talking right now, and you're a fast talker. You're even faster when you're just when you're doing solo. And that just calmed me down. And so I would argue that even before you start doing the RAIN technique, in fact, there's a wonderful German psychologist who talks about emotion regulation training or affect regulation training. He's got a book called Art that's well worth looking into. Affect regulation training, Mias Bur. And he, he talks about deep breathing, like, or, you know, in some of your yoga classes, or in your mindfulness meditation, doing a body scan where you slowly just relax the whole body. Those things work magic for you to be able to get your focus back to do the task at hand. So, but I'm a big believer in the breathing because it's very portable. And two or three deep breaths, and you're, you're changing your perspective again.

Yeah, I just want to add that. Nice. That's great. I, I have not heard of a lot of this stuff, affect regulation training. I will definitely check that out. Okay, so we've got the thing in our calendar, we've figured out our implementation intention, we've found that there's some sort of resistance holding us back, we've done the deep breathing thing, we've gone through RAIN, like, all right, cool. I know I'm feeling anxiety and fear and perfectionism about releasing this podcast episode, but I am going to do the next action. I'm just going to do it anyway and see what happens. Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that, uh, one of your personal things that you almost live by is, "Just do the next action." For the yoga mat, just get the mat out and stand on it. I wonder, do you have any other, I guess, tricks, techniques, strategies for getting over that, like, just that final bit of hurdle where it, it now just involves actually just doing the thing or getting started with the thing?

Well, those two together are pretty much bombproof for me. "What's the next action?" and "I can have an emotion without being an emotion." Those two paired together are very powerful for me. You know, I thought you were going there with your question, which is, you know, you've, you've put all your ducks in a row, to use another overused metaphor, and you're right on the precipice of doing it, but there's still a great deal of anxiety. This is where it goes back to this deeply existential question. And I can go back to a really famous author by the name of Paul Tillich, who in the 1950s wrote the famous book, The Courage to Be. Deeply theological, but really deeply existential. And it is this affirmation of self that is the courage to be, affirming self in the face of uncertainty. And, and there's, and he, in his book, he describes, but that's really what it's going to come down to. When I give talks on procrastination, I end up talking about Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, right? I can't help but, because not only, like, I turned a corner when I read Alan Watts as a young undergrad. Certainly, Man's Search for Meaning did the same for me. Deeply existential. And, you know, in his writing, he speaks of the fact that between the stimulus and response, there is the self, right? That that can make the choice there. And in that courage to be, that Paul Tillich writes about, it's the same idea. At some point, in all of this, you can learn tips and techniques, and we can draw on modern, down to a human issue of getting on with our lives. And it's okay not to do the podcast. It really is. It's to say, you know what, I thought I was going to do this. I took the workshop, value. But, you know what, it's not me. It's not value congruent for me. It doesn't feel, uh, that I fit this. I thought it would be cool, but maybe I was enticed by the thought that some people go viral and they make a lot of money, as opposed to, "I really like to share stuff that I learn, and I'm really good at it, and I, I find a flow moment in it, and I find it really creative." So sometimes when we get into that, we realize we shouldn't do it. And it, it's okay to abandon it. But you've got to do that from a place of being authentic, you know, authoring our own lives. And when you get to that moment, procrastination disappears. Because when you're authoring your own life, and you mentioned this word earlier, in your first three chapters, autonomy is in there. That when I feel autonomous, and when I'm authoring my own life, this word procrastination doesn't even exist. You, you might remember, maybe you don't, because, and maybe they didn't have this film in the UK. Do you remember the movie about the clown, that the physician who was a clown that healed people? No. What was this? I'm blocking on the name, but it'll come to me. Robin Williams starred in this movie. Patch Adams. So Patch Adams was a physician who healed by making people laugh. And Robin Williams played him. And a few years ago, the real Patch Adams, the physician, not Robin Williams, and I did an event together. I spoke in the morning, he spoke in the afternoon. So I stuck around because I wanted to beat Patch Adams. And he's not as funny as Robin Williams, but he was, um, an interesting man, very intense, very political. And at the end of his talk, I said to him, "So, Patch, what do you think about procrastination?" This notion of procrastination. Now, I'm channeling Patch here, I'm not trying to be rude, but he said, "Procrastination? That's putting your pants on this morning. Or did you try to put your pants on this morning?" And at first, I thought that was a trivialization. But in some, some ways, it's, it's just truthful, right? That we can make some things so much bigger than they are. And, and if you, as a physician, you probably know this, because you'll, you unfortunately get to meet a lot of people who are struggling with their own mental health, where putting pants on isn't a trivial thing at all, right? They don't want to get dressed. They don't feel they can get dressed. They can't, they can't feed themselves. We can get to a place in life like that. And, and in our, the human continuum of abilities, we can look at tasks like, "Oh, I'll try to do that." As soon as I hear someone say that, I think, "No, where's that courage to be? Going back to Tillich's idea. Where is your self-affirmation?" And to go back to that very deeply Zen perspective, "This is it. Are you going to assert your selfhood now?" And if it's through the podcast, then you're going to do it. But don't think for a moment. I, I will tell people, and this is why I think it'll be interesting for you to reconcile Piers Steel's equation with my existential ramblings, to say that it comes down to one, engaging in his or her life, his, her, or their life. That, you know, these are deep choices. And if you think you can move away from that around the things that you're really procrastinating on, that's just naive. No technique or trick is ever going to save you.

What was your experience discovering Alan Watts, and how did that change your perspective?

If, well, you know, like many undergrads, uh, I, I was an undergrad. Let's go back even further. I was an undergrad back in the mid-70s. So 1974, I began university. And so who did I read? Well, I'd read Nietzsche, of course, and, and Watts. And then that led me to other, uh, radical Zen and those sorts of things. Took some courses that, you know, I think it was George Carlin who used to joke, "You take just enough philosophy to screw you up for the rest of your life." Right? And that's kind of what happened with those things that you get introduced to these big ideas, not passing calculus or learning the periodic table, but, "Oh my goodness, like all all of these ideas are out there as well." So it was a revolutionary that way for me to be introduced to ideas that did those things. And if you listen to someone like Sam Harris and his Waking Up app, and he'll talk about, uh, psychedelic use and changing perspectives that way. And so we've all have life experiences that can forge these, these parts of us that realizes that life is more than just making a living. And to use an overused phrase, for some people, it's making a life. But until you get there, you never really embrace autonomy and authoring. And that's why, of course, I used to teach developmental psychology, and I had a section on it called midlife crisis. And it's those people who didn't have any of these struggles, of course, that hit the midlife crisis. They go, "Oh, geez, you know, this isn't that fulfilling, rewarding." Well, it took you a while to get there, didn't it? Right? And so it's well-advised in your 20s to do some of that grappling. And when you read some of these things, they are, they bend your head because when you say, "This is it," you go, "This is it, really?" Yeah. "This is it." And you don't even know how much of it you're going to get.

Um, I guess final question I wanted to ask you about is, I'm not sure if I, if I, this was in your talk from nine years ago, which may, maybe means your kids are older now, but you mentioned something somewhere that you're a fairly old dad, or words to that effect. And I was curious as to what extent did having kids give you one of those perspective shifts that's often, or sometimes people talk about that, "Oh, the kid came into the world and all of a sudden I realized something."

Oh, of course. Yeah. I'm a, so I'm a self-described dinosaur dad. It's interesting because I, I don't, I haven't ever put any videos of myself online or any lectures, although I've done many lectures, invited lectures, and things like that. And, and that workshop, people say, "I saw your lecture." I'm thinking, "What lecture? I never put it up." But I see that my university did. Uh, so that's, and, and my perspective is refined since then in an important way. I'm much more proud of my talks, but that's true of everything, right? For anyone. So that's a bit of a, airing some of my own stuff. When I say all that, but yes, when I had children, I actually thought I was, I pushed back hard on my wife, saying, you know, "I think I'm past this. I'm 50 years old." And we had to work hard at having our first child. Some fertility issues, something that many listeners will say, "Yeah, yeah, we've been there too." But we won the lottery and had an in vitro fertilization work for our daughter. And then our son, just decided that every, all systems were running again. So then we had the luck of having a son as well. And so I was an older dad. I was established at the university, so I took time off, and I, I was Mr. Mom for a while, like, I, full-time. And my wife can get really frustrated with that. She said, "Yeah, I was Miss Miss Miss Mom for a while there too, but no one celebrates that the same way." So what does, how does it change me? Well, my daughter just got back from camp yesterday. She was away for a month, and I was just so anxiously awaiting her return. And to see her step off, just last night, my son and I went out to get some sushi for her because she's been in the wilderness canoe trip for a month, and she hasn't had these kinds of foods, and we wanted to treat her. And, and I'm in a truck car with my son, thinking, "I, I don't know how to tell much, how much I love you. I can't even put into words." So loving another human being like a child is something that I could never have experienced ahead of time. I've watched other people love their kids, but typically what we see when we're not parents is we see the interactions in the department stores, which are outrageous sometimes, right? And you think, "The last thing I want to do is have kids." It is life-changing, for sure. And I'm glad I didn't miss it. And it's the most important thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm really happy to be a father. And I'm trying to do my best, which then you, you're run face-first into your own incompetence, right? And then we can get into the psychodynamic theories, uh, of the good enough parent. It was actually the good enough mother. Again, we've named so many people in this conversation, and I'm blocking on this psychotherapist's name, but he's quite famous. Winnicott. That's right. Winnicott. Exactly. Good for you. Yeah. And so, you know, that's influenced me in terms of being the good enough dad. And also, as my wife would say, "Don't steal their struggle." And I would bring from my psychological background, procrastinating children, because they don't learn to self-regulate. So I work very hard at modeling self-regulation. And that's a little bit further, but all these things come out of, um, parenting as well. And the last thing I'll add is that my daughter, the right, she's older now, she's 17 when this episode is, or when this conversation is happening, and she, in her high school, she was nominated as, as "Beth's Procrastinator." I said, "Laurel, there's a little bit of irony here. I hope you can see that." Yeah.

That's full stop. Tim, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being so, so gracious with your time and expertise. I'd, I'd love to stay in touch. Would it be all right if I email you further down the line when my book is a little bit more shaped, just to get some feedback on the procrastination stuff?

Oh, I'd like that. To be honest with you, because I'm invested in it being, if you're going to include anything I've said, and invested in being correctly presented. Uh, I don't think you would misrepresent it because I complimented you earlier on your intellect. I know you're good at what you do. Um, but it's nice to be able to just, uh, make sure nothing's taken out of context, of course.

Brilliant. Well, thank you so much. And if you're ever in London, would be great to meet up and maybe have a part two of this conversation in person.

Uh, I would love that. In fact, a few years ago, a fellow from the UK emailed me and said, "Do you counsel?" I said, "No, I don't counsel." And anyhow, I said, "But I'd talk with you." And we have been talking together every two weeks for two years, and we've become friends, just around procrastination. He had his own struggles, but I said, "I'm not going to counsel you, and I'm not going to charge you." He kept wanting to pay me. I said, "No, we're, we're meeting as two human beings. You've reached out to me because you think I have something to offer. You. Let me offer it to you." So I hope to meet him face to face someday soon, too. So if I come to the UK, I'll be hooking up with both of you.

Fantastic. All right, Tim. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

All right, Al. Have a great trip, and we'll see you later. Take care. All right. Bye.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Uh, do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.