Transcription
Guys, my name is Ellie Aluli. I'm a systems engineer and a postdoctoral fellow at the N Propulsion Lab. This video, I'm going to show you a 10-second technique that you can use to immediately stop procrastinating and get started on your tasks.
Now, this is especially relevant if you're someone higher up on the ADHD spectrum, where procrastination tends to be an issue. But even if you are a neurotypical person, this is still going to be relevant.
Now, me personally, I'm someone who has, uh, chronically procrastinated my whole life. Even during my PhD, I would wait the very last minute to write all my papers. I would spend a lot of time just kind of not doing what I should do, and I spent a lot of time reflecting, thinking very deeply about it, and hence I made this video.
Now, before I go, go ahead and get started, I did make a more in-depth analysis video about procrastination. I dive a lot more deeper in the root causes of it. I'll put a link for the descript for that in the description, so you can watch it afterwards. But for now, let's go ahead and get into here.
So, the, the before we understand how this 10-second rule will work for procrastination, we first need to understand why do we procrastinate? Why, why do people even procrastinate in the first place? Why are you not doing what you know you should be doing? And the reality is, procrastination is more, is, is not, is only partly a logical thing. It's mostly an emotional thing. It's a neurochemical thing that's happening inside your brain. Very often, when you're procrastinating on something, there's really two reasons you're procrastinating on it. One is you're overwhelmed, and you're not very clear on what you should be doing. Two is you're, um, you have some type of fear or emotional resistance, usually some type of fear of failure. And there's a third hidden one in that you just, the thing may not be interesting. You may not want to do it. There's more interesting options.
Now, that third problem can be done very, very easily. You just basically remove the distractions, you put the phone away, you do all that, and you can go ahead and get started. But that's not enough. We still need to take care of the other two, which is the clarity and the fear, right? And this is what this, um, what this, what this 10-second rule does. It's a four-step protocol where you, you do all that in basically, uh, 10 seconds.
Where the very first thing you do is you, you imagine how you're going to feel after, right? You can close your eyes, or you can keep your eyes open, what not. And instead of thinking about getting the task done, focusing on the task, or that you have to do the task, and kind of creating this emotional resistance that you have, uh, you basically forget about the task and just think about how am I going to feel once it's done, right? How am I going to feel once it's done? And you can spend literally like two seconds, three seconds doing it, and just imagine how am I going to feel once this is done. And usually, you're going to feel relief, you're going to feel good about yourself, you're going to feel confident, you're going to feel like you're on top of things, and you'll be able to move on to the next thing. Obviously, this may take a bit longer for some people.
But once you focus on that, then what we're doing here is we reframe the task, right? You change the goal altogether. Instead of changing the goal as, "Oh, I need to, uh, spend some time, uh, to do the task, and it's the task that I need to done, that is my goal." No, your goal changes. And your goal becomes that instead of trying to get the task, my goal is to get that feeling of how I'm going to feel once it's done. And especially if you're an ADHD where your brain is a lot more motivated by short-term reward than long-term reward or things that you know are good for you, um, having that feeling as the reward is going to induce some dopamine. It's going to basically help you gain a little bit of, uh, inertia and and and momentum and say, "Oh, wow, okay, yeah, I want to feel that."
But what it's doing also is by doing that reframe, we're kind of annihilating the fear of failure because fear of failure comes, which which creates the emotional resistance. It comes from focusing on the task and that you need to get the task done perfectly, or you need to do a good job doing it. But by telling yourself, "Oh, I'm just trying to get, I'm trying to get that feeling of how I'm going to feel after I get the task done," then you're kind of, not the task, kind of falls off, and it doesn't become as important, and you don't put so much focus and so much pressure on it. And ironically, you're more likely to do it, and you're more likely to go to do a good job doing it, right?
So, once you feel how you think about how you're going to feel after, you reframe how the, the, the goal from just trying to get the task done to trying to get the feeling of, of again, feeling good about yourself, feeling confident, feeling proud of yourself. And then what you can go ahead and do is you can spend a few seconds, uh, building a roadmap for the test. And, and there's two ways you can do that, and this is what the BS here stands for, stands for bright spot. Is very often people try to think, try to invent things from scratch, um, about like how to go about each new task. But why don't you just think of a similar task that you had in the past that you've solved, right?
Like, for example, I was talking to someone the other day, and he was telling me, "Oh, man, I'm resisting. I don't want to. I don't. I have to go create this website. I have to go fix it. Something's wrong with it." And I just asked him, "Well, is this the first time you've faced this problem? Have you solved another problem like that in the past relating to another website?" And he thought about it. He was like, "Yeah, yeah, I did." And then as soon as, as soon as I made him think about that, it became very clear what are the steps needed to solve that. And again, that took like three, four seconds, right? Like it didn't even take long. Like he literally just had to think for like two seconds, and and like he had an "aha!" of like, "Oh, yeah, I've done this thing in the past." And like his brain kind of was able to grab that roadmap from the previous task as a procedure, step by step, and then install it in this new task. And suddenly, that clarity problem was annihilated.
So, in, in, in step number one, basically, the feeling, we're inducing a little bit of dopamine. We're kind of thinking about the task, we're getting excited about the, thinking about the reward, getting excited about it. And step number two, we're reframing the goal instead of from getting the task done with a perfect job to just getting it done so we can get the feeling, which alleviates the fear of failure and the perfectionism and the and the other type of emotional resistance. And then in the third step, we go ahead and create a mental roadmap to gain some clarity on what are the steps needed to get done.
Obviously, in the case that you cannot compare it to something very, very simple, you have to come up with a roadmap on your own. But if you don't even want to do that, then you can, you can, uh, ask ChatGPT. You can go on ChatGPT and you can type something like, "So, I am procrastinating on building a website. Can you give me a five-step clear roadmap? Be concise, please." And the nice thing is that even if this doesn't give you a really good, um, roadmap, it's going to at least give you some ideas. It's going to create a stream of consciousness inside your brain where now you're go ahead, you're going to go ahead and start thinking in the direction of the task they need to do, and you'll be thinking about the roadmap and the steps rather than like, "Oh, I got to get this thing done." And again, that's going to alleviate, um, the fear as well.
So again, very, very simple protocol. Just focus on how you're going to feel after. That's going to motivate you to get it done. Reframe the goal from trying to get it done, uh, to from doing a great job on the task to just getting it done so you can feel good. And then build a mental roadmap based on things you've either done in the past or based on a roadmap that can be suggested by someone else or by AI. Obviously, you can always go ahead and build your own, but we're trying to do this as fast as possible.
Once you do that, you, you're going to feel really silly not to go ahead and get started. So anyway, it's kind of a very quick technique I use myself personally. But I did make the in-depth analysis. It should show up somewhere over here, or I don't know, somewhere, or it should be in the description as well. That being said, I'll see you in the next video. Peace, love.