How To Stop Procrastinating: The Only Guide You'll Ever Need. EP #276 - Den Lennie

G', day, guys. It's Dan here, and thankfully my cough has finally shifted. So today I'm going to share with you how to stop procrastinating. This is going to be the only guide you'll ever need. I know that filmmakers procrastinate an awful lot when it comes to matters of business, so hold tight. Let's get back to it.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

Right. Procrastination.

It is the enemy of all creatives. I am a recovering procrastinator, and so I know what it's like to sit in the seat and know you've got things to do, but avoid doing them. And this follows on from last week's session. We talked about the good, the bad and the ugly of habits and how they affect sales. Procrastination is a form of delay tactic. You know, it's when we start, you know, looking at reviews of the latest camera or the latest upgrade or the latest bit of software instead of actually focusing on nurturing prospects, talking to people, and especially talking to people. I think that's probably the area that I find most creatives really struggle with when it comes to procrastination. We avoid the things that make us uncomfortable. And yet what successful sports people do, what successful business people do, they feel the same sense of dread sometimes when they want to speak to someone or pick up the phone or an athlete who's going to train at 4 in the morning, but they do it anyway. I've talked about this before, but procrastination is one of those.

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How would I describe it? It's one of the greatest excuses in filmmaking when it comes to business. So how do you stop procrastinating? Well, you have to create some systems. The habits that keep you procrastinating will keep you doing it unless you break them. And so how do we stop procrastinating? Well, first of all, you need to create an environment that sets you up for success. So what does that look like? Well, it involves creating some structure in your day. And the first way to do that is to take some very specific steps to ensure that your time is protected. Now, this is going to feel uncomfortable, okay? But I want to recommend that you don't have your phone standing by, ready to pick up at a moment's notice. It's very unlikely that you're doing work that is life and death.

And so if you believe that a client might call and if you're not able to pick up the phone, you might miss out on the work, then that is a terrible situation to live on, a terrible cloud to live under. The reason being that if you were in a studio filming all day, you wouldn't be able to pick up your phone. If you were out on a job recording an interview, you wouldn't be able to pick up your phone. So if you are looking to break this procrastination, you have to take some pretty dramatic steps. So put your phone on. Do not disturb. Now if you want to put a voicemail on there, put a voicemail on there. My voicemail actually reads, I'm sorry, I'm not able to take your call just now.

I actually don't check my voicemail. But if you need to get a hold of me, please text me. Now. You might decide that you want to have people leaving voicemail messages. That's fair enough. So by taking the phone out of your equation, you're no longer going to be picking it up to see if you've missed anything. Putting it on do not disturb means no incoming calls will come in, which means you can have uninterrupted time to spend focusing on meaningful work. The other thing you want to do is take all of your alerts off your phone and all of your alerts off your computer. Silence. Absolutely everything. Every time an alert comes in, you will be distracted and that distraction will take 15 to 20 minutes to recover from. So if you want to beat procrastination, take all the alerts off your phone, all the alerts off your computer. And then the third thing you want to do is get very clear on what your intentions are for the day. Now I have a little A5 notebook and I put in the top left hand corner the date and I write one through to five or seven items that I'm focusing on in the day. I wouldn't go any more than that.

And then it's a manual process. So I don't have to open any apps, I don't have to have my calendar open. I just look at what's on the page and that helps with focus. Procrastination is the enemy of focus. So if you're, you know, got alerts coming into your computer, if you got social media open, something's going to drag your attention away from what you should be working on. So it's very important that you do that. The Other thing with procrastination is to create structure in your day. So I would say have your calendar open at the very beginning of the day and put blocks of time into the calendar for focused work. Now the only alert I will suggest you have on your computer is your calendar notifications so that it's reminding you that you've got a block of work coming up. And I would set an alarm 10 or 15 minutes beforehand. Um, and then the final thing that I would recommend for beating procrastination is if you struggle with focus is you can download something called the Pomodoro timer or another apps called Be Focused. And these apps, they help you to.

They act as a timer, they're a focus timer. So with that Focus timer in mind, you can set yourself up to do very specific tasks. So how I would tie that into your calendar is when you, when you have your five or seven items for the day locked into your notebook, actually place them into the calendar so that they become priorities, they become appointments. And when you treat them like appointments, you'll find yourself locking in in the same way that if you had a 45 minute call with a client, you would turn everything off. You wouldn't be checking your phone, you'd be completely focused on that client. So if you take that approach, you'll find yourself really starting to thrive in an environment where you used to procrastinate. Now what I would say to you is the desire to go and look at cool stuff. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm saying diarize it. So if you were to set yourself up with two or three slots in a day for focused work, you could give yourself half an hour at the end of the day to say, this is going to be my half an hour time for looking at YouTube, looking at Vimeo, looking at, you know, whatever you want to be checking out online. And that's the way that you beat procrastination.

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