7 ways to overcome procrastination

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Hi docs. Welcome to the Entre MD Podcast where it is all about helping amazing physicians just like you. Embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, Dr. Una.

This is episode five five of the Entre MD podcast. Super pumped to have you here as always. And today we're going to be looking at something that is critical and would be a game changer for you. And that is seven ways to overcome procrastination. Now this is one of the biggest stealers, distractors, disruptors that completely ruins our lives is procrastination. So, so this is going to be really helpful to help you become so much more productive and get so much more done in less time. Now, my journey with procrastination, or fixing procrastination, started after I read a book by Brian Tracy, someone that I love called Eat that frog. It's 21 ways to overcome Procrastination. It is a very good book. If you haven't read it, you want to get it. I'll post a link in the show notes. And in that book he made a statement. He had been, you know, he didn't complete high school, definitely didn't go to college, went about doing odd jobs, doing all kinds of things, and found himself where he was, older, not successful, didn't have any money, and I mean like really, really broke. And at some point he had Some kind of aha moment where he was like, you know what? This is not the rehearsal of my life. This is actually my life. I get one shot at this, and this is done. So I'm going to kind of have to figure out how to learn the things that successful people know and start doing them. And that statement stuck with me, right? This is not the rehearsal. This is the real life. So the things that I know I should be doing today that I'm putting off till tomorrow, it's not like I'm going to live forever, right? Like, at some point, I'm going to have to leave. And I want to leave having done everything that I could have done, become everybody I could have been, and just live the life that I can, right? So we're going to look at seven ways. Of course, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about, I learned from Brian Tracy because he's just like the king of productivity. And, you know, we're just gonna go through them. Things I've used over the years to make sure that every 90 days, I so much different from how I was before that. And you can have that where you've learned so much. You can now do more things. You can do stuff faster, you can do stuff better. And that. That would be my goal for you. So, number one way you overcome procrastination is you plan every day in advance. You want to start treating 24 hours as if it were a gift, because it is. It's not guaranteed. People younger than us are no longer here. Um, you know, it's not. It's not a guarantee. And you don't waste years. You don't waste weeks, you waste days. Okay? The only way for, say, 2020 to be a great year is if you utilize a and squeeze out everything you can get out of the days in 2020. That's the only way that that happens. You don't waste a whole year. You waste the day. It's like, you know, you spend the D day. You're, you know, kind of surfing the web and, you know, having meaningless conversations and stuff. And you're like, yeah, all those important things that I know I should do, I'll do them tomorrow, right? And then tomorrow, I'll do them tomorrow. Because you know what? Tomorrow is not a day of the week, right? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Tomorrow. No, someday is also not a day of the week. It's not someday. Monday, Tuesday, right? So you want to plan every day in advance, and you want to treat your day the way maybe you treat money. Where you have a budget and you spend it on paper before you actually spend it, okay? And this doesn't have to be complicated. Depending on what would work for you logistically, you can say, um, before you leave the office, right? You sit and you quickly plan your next day. It will take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops, right? You plan the next day, plug it, plug everything where it should be, and then you're ready to go. Or in the evening, after you're done with dinner and all that stuff, you just plan your day and you put it, you know, you put that away and tomorrow you get ready to chase the day. Now, depending on the kind of person you are, if you are the kind of person that plans and goal setting and all that energizes you, you definitely don't want to do it just before you go to bed, because you won't be able to go to bed. You'd want to do it earlier, right? So plan your day in advance. And what that does is you're very clear on the vital things that you need to get done. It prevents you from wasting as much time because you know you don't have time when somebody says, hey, let's just go to the mall and hang out and. And you know that you have three critical things that you need to get done that day. It's so much easier to say no, right? So plan your day in, in advance. The second thing is apply the principle of one touch. And what that means is if you pick up something that you can do, don't put it down again and say, oh, I'm gonna do it later. Get it done. You get to work. They hand you a form that needs to be filled, and maybe you just need to check the patient's name and date of birth and then sign the form and give it off. Don't put it down and say, oh, I'll do it later. You've touched it. Be done with it. That way, it doesn't even make it to your to do list. Just be done, right? If you start off a project, sit on it and finish it, okay? If you're working your business, maybe you have a talk that you need to do and you do one slide and you walk away. You do half a slide and you walk away. No, just sit. At least be done with your outline the next time you're touched. Be you touch it. Be done with your first draft the next time you touch it, Be done with your first edit. But you see what I'm saying, like, is the principle of one touch. So you don't have one thing that you've touched seven times and you're still not done with it. Okay? The principle of one touch. Touch things just one time. The third principle is apply the 4812 principle. Now, this is a beautiful principle. And what it, what it, what that means is for every hour, right? 60 minutes or while you're working. So this is whether you know when you're working in your job or when you're working in your business, you take 48 minutes, put your head down 100% focus, no other tabs open, not checking Facebook, not texting, not doing, not talking with the colleagues. Just put your heads down, get your work done, and then the last 12 minutes, you can come up for air, you can kind of look around, you can kind of decompress, if you will, and. And then put your head down for another 48 minutes. If you will do this. This will make you so productive because you have that most of the time, you're not multitasking. Most of the time, you're a hundred percent focused on what you need to do. Now, this is especially critical if you're not working a job, right? Cause if you're in a. If you're seeing patients, you're going from one to the other to the other, there's really not too much room for you to not do stuff, right? But if you are working a business now, you're your own boss, right? And this is where discipline comes in. If you are supposed to be writing pieces or if you are supposed to be going to get referrals, or if you're supposed to be finding new clients, it's so easy to take off. And, oh, while I'm at it, I'm just gonna write this while I'm at it, I'm gonna tweak my website while I'm at it, and. And you end up having a day where you were busy all day, but you didn't really get significant stuff done, and you don't want that to happen to you. So especially if you are not working a job, you're not working a place that requires that you follow a set standard, you want to apply this rule, you want to put your head down, get stuff done, get it out of the way. 48 minutes, 12 minutes. 48 minutes, 12 minutes. Put your head down for 48 minutes, you'll find out that you are so much more productive if you will do that. Number four, apply the 8020 principle. So the 8020 principle, I'm sure you've heard about, and it's also called the provider law. And what it is that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your actions, okay? You have to be crystal clear on what those are. All right? So for instance, if you have a business and your business has the same problem a lot of business ha businesses have, which is obscurity, right? Many people don't know that you exist. Then your priorities is making sure that people know that you exist. And the most critical ways of doing that would be things like speaking, networking. So strategic networking, right? Strategic networking, referrals, centers of influence, stuff like that. Email is really, really, really important, but probably not more important than these. Social media is very, very, very, very important. But maybe not more important than these, right? So, but these are all important. These are all critical things. Choosing the paint on the wall and choosing, you know, the color for your website and those kind of things. Maybe not as, not as critical, right? Making sure some faxes were sent out that somebody else could do for 12 bucks an hour, maybe not as critical. So you have to define what those critical roles are, what that 20% is, and you need to stay focused on them. Now when I do my coaching programs, I teach a principle about your RGAs, right? Your RGAs being your revenue generating activities and the print. The thing is you pick three to five things that you know, these are the things that when I do they them, they directly affect my bottom line. And you need to commit to do them every day, right? And you need to be really clear. So if there's anything else you feel like is great for you to do, you want to make sure it's on your to do list. But these three to five things get done every day. So apply the 8020 principle. What is that? 20% that gives you 80% of your results. What are the things that you do? Let's say you owned a cash based practice, right? What are the things you do that gets your phone ringing, right. For appointments or gets people through the doors? Let's say you're a speaker. What are the things you do to get those speaking gigs, right? So let's say you do online courses, you do coaching. What are the things you do that get you clients? And it's easy, just look at what's worked before or ask people who are in the same field as you. And then you want to commit to make sure you're doing that, okay? Because the thing is this, you're never going to have enough time to do everything you should do. So you need to make sure that the most important things get done. If anything is, you know, falls through the cracks, it can't be the most important things. It can be the 20%. Okay, so that's number four. Number five. Number five is consider the consequences. Consider the consequences of not overcoming procrastination. Consider the consequences of not taking the action, of not starting the business, of not scaling the business, of not serving the, the clients. Think of those consequences. Now, as an entrepreneur, I have had to do so many scary things. Now when I say so many scary things, I mean so many scary things. I'm, I was, I consider myself now a recovering introvert. Doesn't mean I'm not an introvert. It just means I don't use being an introvert as my crutch anymore. Right? So speaking, not a thing I would naturally do. Talking to people, asking them for referrals and asking them for reviews. Not a thing that I would typically do. Airing my opinion in public like I'm doing on this podcast. Definitely not something that I would be doing. So those were things that were all scary. Trying to start a second business and a third business. Not things that I would normally do. But there's something I'm more scared of. I am more scared of another 20 years from now, another 40 years from now. I'm 80 years old and I'm looking back at all the things that I could have done, but I didn't do because I let my fear stop me. And you know what I. I know now. You know, when I look back in high school or college, I'm like, if I could talk to my younger self, I'll tell my younger self, dare your fears and do it anyway. Become everything you can be. Learn every skill that you know you can learn. Become the best version. Okay? Embrace business. Embrace it young. That's what I would tell myself. So I know my 80 year old self will have a lot to tell me now. And one of those things would be, don't be afraid, do it. If you don't do it, you're gonna regret it. Like just do it, you know? So consider the consequences. Think of the business that you could have, but you don't because you haven't taken action. Think about, you know, five years from now, you could maybe take a month or two off a year because that's just what you want to do, but you won't be able to because you didn't take action. Now think about the legacy you could leave your kids. Think about the people that you could have donated for their college tuition to have been paid off. Think about the missions, trips you could have gone on because you had financial freedom, which you're not going to have because you didn't take action. Now, the fear of that is greater than the fear of stepping out. Consider the consequences. Now, I had a mentor who always used to tell me that the pain of regret is so much bigger than the pain of discipline. Okay? It's painful to be disciplined. You have to give up stuff. You have to do things on a schedule. You have to do them whether you feel like them or not. It's painful to be disciplined or right. It's painful to call clients. It's painful to be consistent, asking for referrals. It's painful. Oh, my gosh. It's like painful to ask for reviews. It's painful to put your business out there. And somebody comes and is. Is, you know, the haters come and they're saying all kinds of stuff because your business is like your baby, right? Those things are painful, but the pain of regret is so much bigger. So he used to say that if the pain of discipline was, you know, weighed one pound, the pain of regret weighed one ton. One ton. So get rid. Get rid of all that. Consider the consequences of not taking action, right? Of doing the things that you know you should do and then just do them.

Right?

Okay, number six. Now, this one is a little hard for us because we are physicians and we are perfectionists because that's the way we're trained. And it's excellent training. We should be. But we need to learn to delegate, okay? So if you're going to start a business, if you're going to branch out into something completely new, you're going to have to give up some stuff and you're going to. So that means you're going to have to delegate them. And one of the things about delegation is that the person you're delegating it to may not do it exactly the way you would want it done. They may not, you know, do it in the exact same way. And they may need training, right? Two things we don't want to hear. So you're going to have to train somebody. So abdication is different. That's just handing off to them and not caring and not giving feedback and not checking, not monitoring or anything like that. But delegation. You explain, this is how I want it done. They do it. You give feedback. Tweak this a little bit, right? Sometimes, like, huh, forget that. I'm just going to do it. No, you're not just going to do it. If you do, then you can't Embrace new things. If you're going to embrace new things, you have to give up some old things. Okay, so delegate now for you, that may mean maybe I have to get a virtual assistant on board, maybe I have to delegate my social media and we can talk about that in different podcasts. Um, maybe I have to delegate some things that I do at home so I can use that time to chase my business. Um, you know, so if there's stuff that you do that somebody else can do and that will cost a lot less than you doing it, then you should delegate it. Okay, so delegation, you definitely want to embrace that one. Number seven, this is my favorite. You have to become action oriented, okay? And that, what that means is you don't want to see learning or information as an end in itself, because it's not. Okay? So let's look at it critically. If I learn about how to successfully market a business and you don't, but I don't do anything with what I learned, guess what? My business is not going to do any better. Your business is not going to do any better. We actually have the same results. Even though I learned something, but this is where it's worse. You learn something so you know what's possible, right? But you're still not going to get the results because there was no action. So it's actually really frustrating. It will frustrate you more to learn and not do, right? It's almost better if you didn't learn, but that's awful. So maybe learn and do, right? So you want to be that person who takes action. Now if you're going to be an action oriented person, it means that you're going to need to let go of a few things. One of those things is you're going to need to let go of perfection, right? So when you do your action, it may be messy and that's okay. So think about it. First time you rode a bike, you fell a lot. It was okay. It's part of the process. First time you started driving, I'm sure you wondered how people could drive and text at the same time. Because these are two very complex actions. But now you can, but you don't, right? Because you obey the laws, right? So you don't drive in text. So you're okay with messy action, right? So stop looking for perfection. If you're going to be an action taker, you need to be progress oriented, not perfection oriented. So take lots of actions. Take it even though it's messy, okay? The second thing is take it even though you are scared. Okay? You have done things scared your entire life. You were scared going into kindergarten, like, oh, my God, I'm going to the big boy, big girl school. You were scared, but your mother did not accept that as an excuse. She sent you there, okay? You were scared getting into med school. You were scared getting to residency. You were scared on your first day as an attending. You were scared when you got married. You were scared when you had your first kid, and you were responsible for this life. You've done all these things scared. And business is just one of them. Okay? So take action. Take it frequently, take it messy, take it scared. Okay? You want to be action oriented with. When you learn something, you just go ahead and apply, okay? All right, so these are my seven things, seven things you can do to overcome procrastination. And I want you to start applying these right away. Okay? So apply it. What you could do is you could share this episode with a buddy, another physician entrepreneur, and you guys can do it together, right? We're going to plan every day in advance. We're going to apply the principle of one touch. We're going to apply the 4812 principle, the 8020 principle. We're going to consider the consequences. You guys can actually have a discussion about that. Like, hey, you know, is the year 20, you know, 2040, and we're 60 years old and we're like, oh, my gosh, what if we don't do this? What would we be thinking? You know, you guys commit to delegate. You guys can sit, make up a list of what we're going to what we're going to delegate and, you know, commit to follow through with it and become action oriented. Okay? So share the episode with the buddy. You. You guys can do it together as always. Of course, there's a VIP Facebook community for the Entre MD family. You just need to go to entre md.com join and join us over there. Okay? So I want you to think about the new year coming up. Imagine if you apply these things and all of a sudden you have two times the productivity. Two times the productivity. What would that look like for you? Right? You could be 10 times, it could be five times, it could be a hundred times. But imagine if you are that person who acts on ideas. Imagine if you, for most of the days next year that you plan every day in advance and execute it, even if it's to 80%, imagine how huge that would be. Okay? So I want you to do this. Thank you so much for being on here. As always, I'm here. I'm rooting for you. I believe in physicians. I believe in physician entrepreneurs. I. And I can't wait to hear your story of what you've done with all the valuable content you're getting. And I would love to celebrate you. So just let me know, okay? All right, so see you same place next week for another amazing episode of the Entre MD Show.

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