How I Dealt With Procrastination

How do you deal with procrastination? This is a question I get all the time. And as somebody who in grade three was diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin, I like to joke that I was like the first lab rat on Ritalin, you know, because it wasn't super popular like it has been in the last couple decades. It was just. It was a new drug. I was notorious for procrastinating. I remember in elementary and junior high and high school and even in college to some degree, I'd have assignments and it just wouldn't be getting done and I wouldn't care. And I was just avoiding the shit out of them. Even though I knew I wanted to do them, even though I knew I had to do them, I just, for whatever reason, I literally internally felt like I couldn't. And this was something that I just battled with. And I had this story that, you know, there was something fundamentally and undeniably wrong with me, you know, of like, wow, I just can't stop procrastinating. And I see this with a lot of young men in the world today, a lot of the young men that I work with. I see your comments on YouTube and on my Instagram page, you know, talking about procrastination. Some of the men that I've worked with over the years have dealt with extreme amounts of procrastination. And there's a lot of reasons why these things happen, you know, from a psychological perspective. And so I'm going to break this down and just give you a bit of a base understanding of why this happens. And I'm going to give you, like the one thing that I found that worked because I tried everything. I tried all the stuff I tried to, like decluttering the desk and creating a clean environment and like focusing in on the one thing. And I have some hacks that have helped me. Like, a one thing I'll give you right now that I have found super, super helpful is anytime that I want to just go Pure Beast mode in my productivity, I will turn off. I'll download all my. All my emails as an example, and I'll turn off my wifi. I'll turn on do not Disturb. I'll just put. I'll just put my computer into airplane mode or all my devices into airplane mode, and then I'll go and I'll respond back. I'll, you know, draft up, you know, 30, 50 emails and I'll just focus in on that and I'll respond to a whole bunch of emails, turn everything back on, and then Send them all off, you know, and there's. There's something so just beautifully, like, juicy in that. In that tactic, because you just hear whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Like this email is just getting sent off. But there is this notion of procrastination that I've dealt with for a very, very long time. And sometimes the things that I procrastinate about are the things that I know I need to get done, but I don't want to. And so there's just a natural resistance. It's like my taxes. When it comes time to do my taxes, I just don't want to do it. You know, it's not something that I enjoy. I don't like spreadsheets. I, you know, Excel. I have, like, a natural aversion and probably a very real allergy. Excel, if you are out there and that's not you and you love Excel spreadsheets, good on you. But, like, I. Makes me nauseous a little bit.

I'm just. I was like, you're learning about me, right? Like, I just can't. I just don't like it. I. I just don't like doing that shit. It's just not something that I. I like to engage in. But power to you, if that's your jam, right? I'm not. I'm not shitting on you or. Or your passion. It's just not my thing. And so I have all of these procrastination tendencies. And what I've found is that I can find pretty much anything to do with my time to avoid the shit I know I need to get done. Like, it is wild. And maybe you're like this, where, you know, you need to sit down and send that one effing email. Like, that one email. And you sit down and 20 minutes goes by. And you have done everything else around the sun. You've watched a YouTube video, you've pulled up some social media, you sent other emails. You know, you called somebody, you were texting your boss or whatever, you were working on this side project. You did everything but send that one freaking email that you know you need to send. And you procrastinate. You procrastinate and you don't put it together. And this, this was me for ages. And I tried so many things. I just tried to, like, muscle my way through it. I tried to push my way through it. And the reality is that procrastination is, oddly enough, a psychological benefit. Now, this might sound strange, but I'm going to explain why procrastination happens. In a simple form, there's a few reason why procrastination happens. One of them I already talked about is that there's just things that you have to do they just don't like doing. Right. Your taxes, you probably don't want to do them right. Maybe cleaning your toilet is just something you're like, I don't really want to do that. Making your bed might be something that you just don't want to do. You know, having a hard conversation with a colleague or a boss might feel brutally uncomfortable. And so procrastination shows up because it's trying to create friction and resistance from you engaging with something that cognitively you have said, I don't want to do this. And now this is where there's a lot of these tactics that come in of like, think more positively and just put a positive spin on what you have to do and find a way to enjoy it or find the joy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that shit really works for me at least. Maybe they've worked for you, but for me, that stuff just doesn't work. So procrastination serves a psychological function in the sense that it's trying to protect you from moving towards something that you have cognitively said that you don't like, that you don't feel competent at. That is a very, very big one. All the men that I've worked with to some degree will have had procrastination around the things that they don't feel competent at. So if you have to apply for a job and you have to put together a resume or you have to go for the interview and you do not feel confident or competent or capable in putting together a solid resume, or you're very good at the job you're applying for. But, man, you just like interviews. There's something about them where you just act all fricking weird and goofy and you say stupid shit and you come out of the interview and you're like, what the hell just happened? That's a very real thing. And so a lot of procrastination can revolve around you not feeling proficient, not feeling competent, not feeling capable and in whatever it is that you are supposed to do. So that's one piece. The other piece is that it's trying to pull you back from something that you just don't want to do. The other thing is trying to protect you from something. So procrastination can also happen because our brain is trying to protect us from some perceived threat. And again, that threat might be an Existential thing it might be. It's usually not a very physical thing, right? It's usually like, I might get rejected if I go and have that conversation with that woman, and so I'm going to procrastinate going over to her and talking to her, or I might get turned down for this job if I send in my resume, and so I'm going to procrastinate. We can procrastinate simply because we are trying to protect ourselves from some form of failure, some form of rejection, some form of pain, psychologically and emotionally. So those are the reasons why procrastination happens. Sometimes those things can be very helpful because we can categorize them, right? It's like, okay, am I trying to protect myself from some perceived rejection? And that's why I'm procrastinating. Am I procrastinating because I just don't give a shit about this, or I don't care or I don't want to do it, or I don't like it, or am I procrastinating because I just feel incompetent in this area? And it's nice because when you categorize those things, you can deal with the psychological information, right? So if you feel incompetent at creating a CV or resume, you can reach out to somebody and you can say, hey, can you help me in building this? I could use some support. I don't really know what to do. Or if you don't feel competent in like, going up and talking to women. And so you always procrastinate. Whenever you see a woman in a bar or coffee shop or wherever it is, the grocery store, nudge, nudge, go to the grocery store to talk to women.

You can actually engage with a friend and ask them, like, what do you say and how you know somebody that's competent or that you perceive as competent in speaking to women? You can actually ask for advice and insights so you can develop the skill of going to do those things. All that stuff aside. Okay, all that stuff aside, some of those things work with varying results, right? It's like the warning label on a. On a box, right? Like some medication is like, warning. The results may vary. That's. That's all aside. The one thing that I have found to work is very counterintuitive, but it works almost every time. And that one thing is very simple. It's boredom. It is being brutally, brutally bored. It is literally staring at a wall, sitting in silence and meditation. And what I have found is that very often that can propel me Almost always that will propel me towards wanting to do whatever that thing is. And the reason for this is simple, is that our brains dislike boredom. Human beings in general do not like being bored. And you might think you like being bored, but what you actually like is zoning out and being entertained, right? That's most people's version of boredom. When they say that they're bored, it's usually because they're, you know, they're spending 20 minutes scrolling through Netflix trying to find a show to watch. Or when they say they're bored, they're, you know, spending whatever, 15, 20 minutes on YouTube trying to find a video to watch or, you know, trying to find the latest show to dig into or something on social media that'll engage them. When people say that they're bored in our modern culture, they're not actually bored. They are searching. They're in search mode. The boredom that I'm talking about is literally creating a space in your home or in your office or in your environment where you force yourself to sit still, where you force yourself to, like, stare at a wall or look off into the trees in nature out of your office window. And you do that for as long as humanly possible. Now, some people out there might say, well, that's not very productive. And to them, I say, I don't give a shit. It'll create the productivity eventually. The point of this is that you have to train your body to meet that boredom because oftentimes the task that you're doing maybe is boredom inducing, right? You don't actually find it engaging. It's not fun, it's not exciting. In some cases it is. In some cases, you're wanting to produce a work of art, write some poetry, create a painting, you know, do some photography or whatever it is, and you're procrastinating on doing something you actually love and enjoy. And again, that can be driven by fear and whatnot. But the main thing that has worked time and time again is boredom is actually forcing yourself into a state that creates so much internal tension that. That doing the thing that you don't want to do, doing the thing that you're avoiding doing. The thing that you're procrastinating on is. Is better than simply sitting there and staring at the bug that's on the wall or the trees that are outside or closing your eyes and, you know, doing nothing. And eventually your body and your mind will start to not revolt against that, but it'll create. It'll create a kind of tension where you'd rather just Go and get the task done. And so I tried this out for a number of years. I still do this sometimes where there's something that I need to do. Now the adverse side effect that I'm going to tell you about is that eventually you will start to enjoy the boredom. Eventually you will start to enjoy the meditation and just simply being in the moment. And one of the positive and benefit benefits of what I'm talking about is that eventually you will learn to be with. And this might sound a little spiritual, but you'll learn to be with the irritation of procrastination in a way where it won't bother you so much, where it won't have so much potency or control over your day to day actions. Because for a lot of us, and this was me to a T, my procrastination was so strong when I started doing this exercise. And I would set a timer, right? I would set a timer for 10, 15 minutes and I would just sit there and sometimes I would stare. I used to practice this like old Taoist or Zen meditation where I would light a candle and I would just stare at the flame and it was trippy. It's just like stare at the flame for 10 minutes. Or I would sit and I would try and do zazen meditation and you have to cross your legs in full lotus, which never worked. I couldn't get, my hips are too tight and I couldn't get my legs into full lotus. But I would spend 10 minutes trying and it was so frustrating. And then it's like, ah, screw this, I'm gonna go do write that email that I've been procrastinating on. And, and then you know, it would be done. But one of the beautiful side effects is that you eventually start to enjoy the meditative practice. And, and when you do that, the, the side effect of meditation is that you begin to learn to watch the states that are arising within you as if they are a weather system. The state of procrastination arises and it goes like a cloud and the state of anger arises and it goes like a cloud and, and you begin to watch this sort of emotional weather front that's unfolding. And over time you learn that those things are just states that will pass. And so sometimes the act of just sitting, being bored, not scrolling through Instagram, not distracting yourself with some other bs, I am talking about real, genuine, unadulterated boredom where you sit and you stare at a wall, or where you sit and you stare at the ground, or you lay down and you stare at the Ceiling or the, you know, the fan whipping around. But you find, you find whatever it looks like for yourself to create some type of boredom for as long as you can humanly handle. And sometimes that might be five minutes and sometimes that might be 50 or 15, but you let yourself be in that boredom and eventually what will happen is that all of that tension and that friction of that procrastination will dissipate. And again they'll probably come a moment where the desire, the urgent to go and do the thing becomes stronger than just simply being bored and laying there. And we have a very anti boredom culture. You know, if you look at most kids schedules in today's world and maybe this was you growing up or like your schedule is just chock full, you wake up and you know you have a lesson before you go to school or some type of practice and then you go to school and you're there all day and then you have extracurricular activities after school and like your whole schedule just packed. And on the weekend you're playing sports and you have study group or like whatever it is, you know, and, and your whole week is just jam packed. And so as a kid I definitely didn't know how to be bored. That was something that as soon as I had downtime, I was calling friends, I was around out in the backyard like trying to chop down trees or light on fire. Like there was just, no, no, nobody actually just got me to sit down and be still and shut up and not do anything for a period of time. And so that practice where you start to force yourself to sit in silence and quiet and allow yourself to be bored and to hear the chaos that's probably going on inside of you. And that chaos that's going on inside of you is part of the reason why it's very hard to do. The thing that you want to do is that there's just an overwhelming sense of noise and nonsense that is swirling around inside of you. And so if you can learn to sit with that sometimes, sometimes what you'll find, oftentimes what you'll find is that doing the thing that you've been procrastinating on becomes better than sitting with that noise. But again, eventually you acclimatize the noise, you learn to deal with it, you learn to let the procrastination just dissolve and pass through and you can just go and sit and do the, you know, do the exercise. So wherever you are, whatever it is that you are procrastinating on, try this this week. I know some of you are like did this guy just film a 16 minute video telling me to go and be bored in order to deal with procrastination? I did. I did do that. And I promise you it will work. And I promise you you will curse my name. You will be sitting in your room staring at the frickin wall and you'll be like am I actually doing this? Like screw Connor. Like what is he getting me to do? And I promise you it will work. I promise you it will work. You will sit there for long enough and you might need to force yourself to sit there for 15, 20, 30 minutes, an hour, but it will work eventually. So try it out. Let me know how it goes. Comment below. Man it forward. Share this video with somebody that you know will enjoy it and I'll see you next time.