Transcription
Are you procrastinating right now? Maybe you're even watching this video, procrastinating by watching this video on procrastination. Today, I'm going to help you understand the three main reasons why you procrastinate and what you can do about it. At the end, I'm actually going to jump into real conversations with people from my audience live to talk about how to stop procrastinating.
Getting yourself to do something when you don't want to do it is a skill in itself. The reason that you procrastinate is because you lack skill, not because there's something wrong with you, not because there's something wrong with the thing you need to do at hand, but because you lack fundamental skills of managing yourself. Cuz let's be honest, you've probably put it in your calendar, you probably put it on your to-do list, probably avoided it, didn't do it, thought about how much you didn't want to do it, thought about you could do something else instead, thought about how you should do something else instead, and then done something else instead.
Procrastination isn't any practical problem; it is an emotional problem. My friend Dr. Cashy introduced me to this, and he calls it the three-headed monster of procrastination. So let's dive into them.
So the first of the three-headed monster is anxiety. So for me, I don't know about you, but anxiety is almost 200% of the reason I don't do things. And I can tell you personally, this is one I have probably dealt with the most. And so what it means is that the thought of doing something or the action of starting to do the thing makes you feel anxious, and so then you avoid doing the thing.
This actually was really relevant for me because about 3 years ago now, I'd never made a piece of content in my life. I had accumulated a net worth of $100 million. I think we'd done at that point 130 million in sales, and I still felt terrified to make content about business. I would draft up the YouTube videos, I would write the tweets, and then every time it came to actually hitting post, I would just stop. My fear of posting content got stronger and stronger. My anxiety continued to elevate. My brain was saying all these different things. It was like, "One, this is not your job. LEL, you don't need to post content, just go like, run the business like you've been doing. People are going to talk [ __ ]. It's going to be really uncomfortable. Who wants to listen to a woman talk about business?" The reason I wasn't making content wasn't because of those thoughts, but it was because of the anxiety that came with those thoughts. So to get out of the discomfort, I avoided doing the thing.
I have learned to ask myself a series of questions to help myself remember the long-term benefits of doing things that provoke anxiety in the short term. The first one I ask myself is, "Is this going to make my life easier or harder in the long term if I do it today?" And most of the time, when I think about it, I'm like, "[ __ ], it's going to make my life easier if I do it today." Not long ago, when someone asked me to speak on stage in front of 5,000 people, and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm so busy, I have so much to do." But then I was like, "Will this make my life easier or harder?" And I was like, "Well, does future Leila do presentations in front of thousands and thousands of people?" Yeah, she does. If I do it now, it's going to make it easier for me in the future because the next time someone comes to me, maybe it's a group of 20,000 people, it's going to feel even harder to say yes.
The second question I ask myself is, "Leila, gaining the skill of speaking in front of thousands of people, a good thing?" Well, yes, I see tons of benefits to that. Then you have to figure out what committed action am I going to take from here on out. In the beginning, when I would try to do something new, I would just sit there and I would just stare. A huge amount of the anxiety came from feeling like I didn't know if I was doing it right. The reason that we want help when we're starting anything, we want more certainty. We want our brains to settle down and say like, "I think I know what might happen." So I went to somebody who I knew that was good at it, and that happened to be my husband, Alex. And so I said, "Can you share your framework with me?" And for the first 6 months of making content from that day forward, I used his framework to make the content. So what it helped me do was actually get started.
A lot of the times, the things that cause us anxiety are things that we think that we have to take this giant leap now. When I've learned that if I develop a framework that breaks a large task down into small steps, I'm much more likely to be able to do it. One, it's easier to work on over a longer period of time. If you just sit down and you just say like, "Start the presentation," you have to go from zero to entire presentation done and presenting in like a day. But the reality is, if you break it down to small steps and you're able to work on each step thoroughly, then you're going to also desensitize yourself to the situation and then also most likely be more prepared for it.
The way I like to do that is I like to chunk time that I dedicate towards the thing. I'm going to make space for the thing. The second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to break it down into small steps. And then the third thing I'm going to do is I'm going to always anticipate that things will go wrong, things might change, or other things are going to get in the way, or an emergency might pop up during the time you're supposed to work on something. I provide myself with way more buffer time when I'm doing something that provokes anxiety that I haven't been able to do before. And so what that looks like is I will always, for example, when I'm making a presentation that's causing anxiety, I'll make sure that I have it done two weeks ahead of time because I know that if I really don't like something in the presentation, two weeks is plenty of time for me to change it before I have to go on stage.
The second of the three-headed monster of why people don't get [ __ ] done is rebellious. Some people, I'm saying myself, some people don't respond well to authority or to others telling them what to do. When somebody says go left, some people just want to go right. So it's funny because a lot of the times, you know, we feel like, "I'm doing the opposite, I want to do what I want to do." It's like, well, maybe what's best for you is also what's what they suggested, and there's nothing wrong with that.
An example of this for me that really made it real was that during COVID, I owned a company called Gym Launch, and our entire customer base was all gym owners. At that time, people weren't allowed to be in person working out. And so we had to pivot and teach gyms how to fulfill their contractual obligations to their customers online. And when we did that pivot, so many of the gyms just wouldn't do it. I remember talking to a select group of them and realizing on the call that they simply didn't want to do it because it felt imposed upon them. It didn't feel like it was their choice.
By rebelling, we like to think that, "Oh, I'm showing this person they have no influence over me." But they do have influence. In fact, they have influence over you to go in the opposite direction. So if this resonates for you, ask yourself this question: "Does putting off this task help or hurt me in terms of getting to my goal?" At the end of the day, you cannot control every thought that runs through your mind. You cannot control every feeling that gets provoked, but you can control how you behave. But just understanding that you have an aversion to authority and when somebody in an authoritative situation asks you to do something, whether it benefits you or not, you like to reject it. And guess what? That's okay. We just need to accept it and then make ourselves aware enough of it that we can feel gross about it and still act in our benefit, no matter what. And it's the same recurring theme as you see with anxiety, which is like, you can still do the thing while having that feeling present that you don't like. You can still act in accordance with your goals, even while feeling like, "I don't like that I'm doing what this person wants me to do."
The third head of the three-headed monster is boredom. So what this means is that the task that you're working on, you don't feel excited about. Meaning you're not getting reinforcement from it, you feel bored, your mind wanders, you want to avoid doing the thing because it's not exciting, it doesn't provide you with enough feedback. This is fairly typical, especially in companies. You'll see like lots of people want to take on new projects, right? But they can't even stick with getting their daily tasks done because the new projects are more exciting and more stimulating than the tasks that they need to do on a daily basis.
I think this is really relevant for business owners in sales. So a lot of times people ask, "Why is it that this salesperson can't transition to being a sales manager?" Well, let's think about how much feedback a salesperson is getting. You know, every day they're closing sales, they're seeing money in an account, they're getting great job, amazing, good work. There's a very fast feedback cycle, and there's a lot of it. And then when you move into being a sales manager, I think it's much less of a hard skills discrepancy and more of a soft skills discrepancy, which is learning how to delay reward and gratification. So you move into a job where suddenly you don't make money except for on a quarterly basis, where you get bonus off of what other people sell. Suddenly nobody's telling you every day that you've done a good job. Suddenly you're only talking to your team, you're not talking to customers anymore. Think about all of what you lose when you leave sales and go to a sales management role. That's why you'll probably hear whenever you have a salesman that has to get back in the saddle, they're like, "Man, it feels good to be back in the saddle." It's like, well, what feels good? What feels good is that you're missing all those rewards you were getting. A lot of times the reason I think people can't move up is because what they're currently doing is actually more rewarding than continuing to move up in the company.
Things that are very important and pay really well, like doing financial analysis, learning how to build a pipeline properly, fitting a CRM, you know, getting a company audit ready, all incredibly valuable, but also slow feedback loops and not a lot of reinforcement from others. It's the same reason why people have a hard time losing weight, which is because the things that you do to lose and keep off the weight are boring: drink more water, eat more protein, eat less calories, walk and work out. That's not exciting. But if you do a fad diet where you basically starve yourself, you're eating these weird nutrients, these interesting vitamins, they're telling you to do water cleanses, this is like exciting. There's movement, there's feedback. The reason I would say more people succeed when they have a coach, for example, is because they're getting feedback, they're getting reinforcement. Same when people do it with their friends, feedback and reinforcement, right? Versus if you're doing it alone, you don't have a coach, you're not measuring anything, you know, you just create this situation in which your environment is working against you, and so people end up quitting.
Now, in that situation, I think there's a lot more you can do to make it more exciting so that you do get faster feedback and you don't have to do that. But a lot of people, like over a long enough time horizon, it makes sense with people's lives that they don't have a coach 24/7 and they're not constantly working out with their friends. So if you feel like you're not able to achieve your goals because you're procrastinating them due to boredom, the first question I would ask myself is, "Is this the best thing for me to be working on in the short term and long term?" Often times when we're working on something exciting, it's good for us in the short term but not leading to our long-term goal. And often times when we're dealing with boredom, it's good for us in the long term, but in the short term, it's not very incentivizing. And so what I like to say is, "Cool, okay, is this aligned with the long term?" Yes. Then what can we do to make it more exciting in the short term?" Which leads to the second question I ask: "How do I give myself more intermittent reinforcement to keep myself engaged on this task?"
Intermittent reinforcement is creating shorter feedback loops. For example, somebody was trying to lose weight in a year, maybe you've lost 20 lbs. But what do you do to keep yourself engaged while you lose 0.5 lb, 1 lb, not even a pound this week? Can we recruit two of your friends to come to the gym with you? Can we do at-home workouts where you invite your friends and you put a little garage set up together? I think the best person that you can get to help reinforce you so that you can get yourself to stick to good habits is a spouse. You know, ask them to high five you every time you go to the gym. Ask them to tell you great job every time you eat something healthy.
So for example, while Alex was writing his book, "$100 Million Leads," he was writing it for 2 years. Nobody was reading it, nobody was seeing the work he was doing. He was working 6 hours a day, every day on this book, and it felt punishing because there was no reward. He's not seeing anybody read it, he's not getting any feedback. So I made a conscious effort to try and support him, encourage him, leave him little notes, tell him how proud I was of him every day, and tie it to his long-term goal. I was like, "I'm so proud of you for working on that book 6 hours a day, every day this week, because you're going to write an amazing book that's going to change people's lives." Every day trying to reinforce to him that what he was working on was good, it was good quality, it was a great book, and it was going to lead to his long-term goal. I think the strongest sources of reinforcement that we can have are the people around us. So recruit the people around you to help you while you're trying to achieve your long-term goals, and you'll be much more likely to stick with it.
Creating more engaging situations in the in-between is how you create that reinforcement. So if it is in line with your long-term goals, then finding ways to make it more reinforcing in the short term. This is why, for example, companies have short-term and long-term compensation. It's like, we're paying people, they're getting a paycheck every week, and then we're also going to give them a long-term goal where maybe we're going to tie them in with the success of the company because it's best for it, the short term and the long term.
Hopefully, you guys are liking this video so far and it doesn't completely [ __ ] suck. If you're still watching, now I'm going to go ahead and bring in people from my audience live to talk to them about procrastination.
What's up, Evan? My question is, how do you kill procrastination that stems from the paralysis by analysis effect when really everything in front of you kind of looks like it would be a viable and profitable option? Like, just for some context, I run an SEM agency, and we're kind of just deciding like, do we go into paid ads? Do we go into cold email? Because we don't want to spread ourselves too thin. We're very, very new. It's a partner and I don't have the budget to do all of them or don't have the time budget to do all of them. So pretty much we haven't done anything in two months because of that.
Understood. So really, it's you're putting off making the decision out of fear that it's the wrong one. That's right. Do you have a way that you make a decision besides how you feel about something or what you're thinking? No, pretty much it's just that, which kind of gets into that feedback loop of, yeah, you know, this is the right one. I think there's a few things that you can do. Okay. So the first one is that whenever I'm making a decision in business, actually probably anywhere in my life, um, I like to write things down. I like to put them in a chart because a lot of the times we make decisions based off of previous experiences that might not have anything to do with this experience or off of how we feel about something, which feelings have not often as much evidence as we'd like. But it's basically like, I'll put the decision I have to make, and then it's like, cool, here's the options I have. I have options 1, 2, and 3. And then I'm going to ask myself, what's the upside? What's the downside of route 1, 2, 3? And then, if I made this decision and the worst-case scenario did happen, would I still be okay with it? Many times in business, there's a lot of risk mitigation. Like, it's not making one amazing decision that's going to make your business grow, it's making sure that you don't make a stupid decision. All the options you've got, let's say that you just eat [ __ ] on all of them, which one would you pick?
Yeah, Emil, I mean, we'll burn five grand, the max, if we don't do it right, and that's pretty much it.
Reframe this. You are trying out cold email. You're not like, this is the new direction of the business. Like, we're going to [ __ ] try it. Like, you know, if you try it, it doesn't work, you just do something else. If it was irreversible, it would be justifiable to say it took 2 months to make this decision. But it's not irreversible at all. And if it is reversible, then you don't need to take 2 months. I have always found that even if I choose the wrong thing, taking action will always get me to a solution, and usually the solution faster than not. So like, in the last 2 months, you would have already known if cold email would have worked or not, and you would have already, if it didn't, probably transitioned to like paid ads. You would have learned more and gained more skills in the last two months if you had already made the decision.
Yeah, that, uh, well, that made a decision in my head for everything. And that's going to be. I love it.
Hi, Callie. Hello. Nice to see you. So tell me, what was your question? I'll set aside time blocks and things to measure my productivity, and I'll even like write down, I worked on this for so long. But my problem is whenever I am in that time block and working on what I need to work on, I am not actually finalizing it. I'm just working on perfecting and being a perfectionist, and it never actually gets finalized.
Mmm. So you're aware that you're doing it, but you continue to do it? Yes. And, uh, I do believe it stems from fear of not wanting my business to fall off again like I did over the summer.
So I understand why you're probably putting things off and wanting to feel like you're getting everything perfect before it's done. I think that's super normal. The question for me is like, okay, so those are the circumstances you have. What's the goal with your business right now? Like, where are you and where do you want to get to?
Literally just get my ideal clients.
Would you say, okay, let's contextualize it, get your ideal clients and make enough income so you don't need to go back to the 9 to 5? Yes. Yeah. So then the times when you put that thing on your calendar block, right? What happens when you see it and you're not able to get something done?
I start kind of beating myself up. I'm like, you're falling into this pit again. You know, and I'm telling myself, well, I'm sitting here and I'm spending the time working on it, but I'm never actually completing it and getting it done because I'm working on like the tiny details and like trying to make everything perfect.
Okay, so here's what I want to ask you. Is we do things because we get a benefit from doing them. Not completing your work also has to have a benefit, otherwise you wouldn't keep doing that. So what's the benefit? What good do you get out of procrastinating? Like, really think about it. What good? Right after you procrastinate, what happens? Is it relief of anxiety? Is it that you put off something that scares you? Like, I want you to think about what that is.
It is from the fear of getting back into that rut that I was in in the summer when I let it fall off because I got, I got to a bad point.
Here's what I think would be helpful for you. I want you to stop referring to what happened this summer because you can't control the past, girl. Like, you can't do anything about what happened this summer. But what we do often as people, and I'm guilty of this, I used to do it to myself, is I used to use the past as a reason for why I'm behaving in a non-productive way in the present. And so what we want to do is like, let's look at the situation objectively. You put something in your calendar and commit to getting it done. Something happens. Some thought or feeling, doesn't matter. Either way, you don't get it done. If you had no fear and you didn't even have the memory of what happened this summer, what would you do? Like, what would a person do who didn't have that fear or memory in that moment when that's on their calendar?
Get it done.
They would get the [ __ ] done. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing preventing you, it is not in your head, it's not these feelings, it's your behavior. Get out of your head and get into your behaviors. How can you create an environment where it makes it easier to get it done? Or how can you put something in place so that the moment that you get it done, you give yourself a reward? I want you to put something so that if you commit to the task and you stay there and you sit in your [ __ ] seat until you get it done, that you have something at the end of that. Reward yourself with what's something that you like?
Uh, I like going on walks with my dog, honestly.
Okay, so that's great. So here's what we do. You do not go on a walk with your dog until you complete the task. So the reward for completing this is that you're going to go on a walk with your dog. Disengage from the mental drama why you feel a certain way about getting work done or not. It doesn't [ __ ] matter. But we can create an environment where it makes it more rewarding to get the work done, and you put contingencies in place. And I think that would be really helpful for you.
Yeah, I think so too. That helps so much.
Hey, Carrie. Hi. The Network. What's that? Is that your business?
Yes, The Network. We are a real estate consulting firm that empowers women to build their financial freedom through real estate investing.
That's badass. I like it. So tell me, what was on your mind?
How do we, or I specifically, chunk or batch our work to maximize days, weeks for productivity? If you have a hard time switching between tasks, like, yes, then I think theming your days is the best thing you can do. The hard part though, is not that. That's not where anybody struggles. In fact, everyone that I [ __ ] know puts on the theme of their day at like the top of their calendar and they're like, "I'm going to do it." And then they're like, "Oh, wait, but what about when this happens or when this person needs?" Right? And so I think that the best thing that you can do is one, let your team know. I think a lot of times we do these things to manage ourselves, but we don't realize that like, you own the business, right? Right. And you train people how to treat you. And your time is truly the most important resource in this business right now, especially if your business is smaller. So I think the first thing is communicating to your team, here's how I'm going to be theming these things. In terms of things that are needed on a day-to-day, hour by hour basis, here's how I want to handle them. So what that means is that when someone comes to you, Carrie, they're not saying, "Carrie, I need help with this thing, do you have time?" They're bringing you and saying, "Carrie, I've tried to do X, Y, and Z, and I've come to a point where I realize that I need help. I'm proposing three solutions. I'm going to put them on your Asana board, and when you get time, could you tell me which solution you think is best given the situation?" So it's like theming your days, then communicating to your team that why those days are themed, and that your time is very important, and then also communicating with your team how you need to be communicated with to get the best out of you. Because just like you learn how to manage your team, you have to teach them how to manage you. Yeah. And they're just guessing and they're probably [ __ ] terrified of you because you seem amazing and very nice and very friendly, but nonetheless, you are founder and CEO. It's a very scary title. If you place more importance on your time being allocated in the right places and protecting it, you will do right by the business. Yes. I want to look at my calendar and not feel overwhelmed, anxiety. How the heck are we going to do all this, right? So that's, that's really what I'm looking for. And I'm going to take you up on the suggestion for sure.
Yeah. And the last thing I'll say is, just like, if you don't say no to something, who's going to? For sure. So normally at the end of these videos, I tell you, hey, go watch this other video that's related to this. I think it's really going to help. But if you're watching this video and you've watched all the way through, instead, I'd like you just go do the thing that you've been putting off and get ahead started doing that.