How To Permanently Stop Procrastinating
A speaker breaks down why you procrastinate and what actually works: set daily goals, split tasks into tiny habits, and reward yourself. He shares a personal story about measuring progress to show why it matters.
What is it that you'd like to achieve that you find yourself just continually putting off? If you're like me, you've done this all the time. And maybe you even wound up on this video because you should be getting work done, and you're here mindlessly wandering through YouTube. That is something I've done. It's something we've all done. Don't beat yourself up, because by the end of this video, I want to help you start doing that thing. You will feel much better if you do. But in order to do that, we got to step back and understand where procrastination comes from. The there's three psychological triggers that account for 95% of the procrastination that I see. And when we turn those triggers off, we get the thing done and we get what we want and we achieve our goal. So let's go through them one by one. The first one is a lack of clarity, right? You get a thesis paper, you're told to write a thesis. You have no idea where to begin. So you don't for this one. The best way to deal with it is to set a concrete daily deadline. And the most important word here is is daily. When I was making these videos, I set a goal at the beginning of the year to do a video a week. Really smart goal. Happy that I did it. But what I found was that I started waiting to Saturday and Sunday to get everything done before the Monday release. What has worked much better for me is setting daily goals. So I know that Monday I have to have my topic picked. Tuesday I need to have a couple of headlines written. Wednesday I have to have an outline. And what often happens is that I go in on Monday, I pick my topic and I just feel like writing more. And I get so much done and I'm done at the first half of the week. Maybe I'll even film this beforehand. Setting these daily deadlines keeps you moving on a daily basis. And it often gets you running faster than you would have if you just wait to the end of the week or the month to get something done. So think of a concrete thing that you can do towards your goal today. If it's fitness, maybe it's a particular workout regimen. If it's writing, which is something I've tried, set a word count, whatever it is, concrete goal that you will do at the end of this video. Which brings me to the second point, which is overwhelm. If you're like a lot of people, you started thinking these grand things that you're gonna get you're going to write three pages today, you're going to go run four miles. And when I said do it at the end of this video, you're like, no way. Not about to start that. Make it smaller, make it to the point where you can actually turn off YouTube and do it at the end of this video. So if it's writing, make it 50 words, right? If it's some sort of fitness thing, make it do 10 push ups. If you're really struggling to get started, you want to make this habit as small as possible. This comes from something that is called tiny habits. You can research it, but I believe it's out of Stanford University and it works incredibly well. Because what research has found is that the hardest thing in starting a habit is just that, it's in starting it. Once we've gotten going, we often want to continue. So we do one lap around our block and then we're like, you know what? I'll just do a second and a third and a fourth and before you know it, you've run a full mile when you only set out to run one lap around your block. So think of that habit, make it concrete, but make it very, very tiny. I told you, mine for this. Or sometimes just picking a topic for a video. Think of something you can do at the end of this that you can actually get done. And then of course, the third thing, because I do want you to do this at the end of this video, I'm going to make you turn off YouTube. If you follow this right, the third thing is to incentivize yourself. One of the biggest problems with procrastination is that there's delayed gratification. When we want to do a thesis paper, we don't get the A. We don't graduate for another six months. So why do work today? What you need to do, because we are all animals. And when you're trying to train an animal, you need to give them the prize right away, is set it up so that you get gratification as you're doing the hard thing. So in my case, I'm filming this video right now. I am hungry and I'm not allowed to eat until I finish doing this video. That is going to make me want to get it done. In fact, that's why I'm standing here right now and not waiting until tomorrow or the day after, whatever it is. Even for you, it could be coming back to YouTube and watching more videos. But set that one thing that you're going to do and don't give yourself the gratification of something that you'd like until you complete that tiny habit. I know what this is all going to sound like is you're like, alright, I'll go do one pushup right now. I'll come back to YouTube. But you will be shocked. You implement these things in your life, you will start moving on a daily basis towards the things that you need to do. And oftentimes, once you've gotten started, the momentum just keeps going and going and going. One quick story and then I'll let you guys off to go actually do that thing. I had a student in one of our programs, in addition to learning charisma, he's been working on creating a business and he wants to do it in mobile apps. So I asked him, okay, how are you gonna do this? What have you been doing? He says, I spend hours a day, I'm researching on YouTube, I'm doing other apps. He said, no, no, no. What is it that you're doing on a daily basis to get there? I said, well, I'm researching. No. How many lines of code are you writing? The answer, as you can guess, was zero. So you gotta pick a metric here that is gonna take you towards your goal. If you're trying to get better with fitness, you don't watch videos on fitness. If you're trying to get better with charisma, as much as I want you guys on the channel, you don't watch videos on charisma, only go out and set a goal to practice it. So right now what I would love for you guys to do is click, subscribe to this channel so you can check us out later and get the heck out of here. Don't click any of the sidebar things. Don't click any of the after things. YouTube is designed to never let you go. Get out. Go do that thing. If you want to set your incentive for after this video to come back and watch a YouTube video, great. If you want to set the incentive to go eat a cheat meal, great. But do that, that thing. I hope to God this is the video that least creates been watching in my entire channel and I hope that you guys get started doing the thing that you've been procrastinating. Hope this helps. I look forward to seeing you guys in the next video.
