George Kao argues procrastination comes from working too hard, with too much judgment. He suggests two shifts: adopt an "it's all good" attitude with frequent breaks, and publish sooner with less polish per task. Working lightly builds skills faster and produces better results over time.
A primer to working lightly. Why is it even needed for us to talk about this? Well, if you have ever felt yourself wanting to escape a task or a project, you're wanting to distract yourself with social media or a snack, or you don't even arrive, you just are recoiling at the thought of a project or task. I'm going to say that there are many reasons, but one core reason is that you haven't found a way to work lightly on that task. In other words, you work with great intensity or judgment or perfectionism, essentially. And this is why we procrastinate. I think this is really the core reason we procrastinate. We avoid. We exhaust ourselves when working on something is we haven't learned how to work lightly on that particular task or project. The core, I guess, solution to this is to change your perspective about the task or project. This is a cliche, but there's a reason why it's a cliche. It's all good. Ultimately, somehow, in some mysterious way, it's all good. And however this project turns out or this task that we're doing turns out, it doesn't really matter. And perhaps what matters more is whether we brought love to the situation. And so by love, we can mean love of life, of ourselves, of the other that is going to encounter the output of this project, love of the process, and so that the core solution is a shift of perspective. And the core tool for me for shifting the perspective is the energy reboot. Which is why it's so important to do the energy reboot so often, in my opinion, in my experience, because every 10, 15 minutes I could again lose perspective. Every two minutes I could lose perspective again. And to say, oh, this is so important, that's why I have to frown my brows, eyebrows, and you know, and tense my body so that what it. Does it help to tense the body to work on this thing? Probably not, but it's a natural reaction to, this is so important. This is important. This has got to be right. This has got to be perfect. This has got to. I can't fail on this. I can't. I can't just publish it like this. I can't just put it out like this. And yet the other shift of perspective. So the one shift of perspective is all good, that love is what matters here. And the other shift of perspective is that value creation and quality output happens with skillfulness. Can we agree on that? The more skillful you are about a task or project, the higher quality the output tends to be in a shorter time. Also Right. And how does skillfulness come about? Skillfulness comes about through many reps. Reps, reps, Repeated outputs, repeated actions creates more opportunity for skillfulness. At least you can then observe the process and go, oh, I've done this 500 times now, I've done this four times now. And I've noticed now I'm, I just notice, oh my gosh, now that I'm doing it for the fifth time. I can do this a little differently here or differently there. At the very least, when you publish sooner or put things out there and with a time boundary, you collect the experiences that allow for skillfulness, which then allow for value creation, truly quality output. So again, the two shifts of perspective, it's all good, it's all about love. And two, skillfulness comes with reps, many reps. So I've given you the tool here for it's all good is the energy reboot. You know, it's all about the, it's all about your wellness in the moment is more important than the perfection of the task. And then the second perspective, it's long term skill building is what creates naturally quality output over time. And so what's the tool for that? The tool for that is to work lightly, to publish half assed, to put things, to put more projects out there. And therefore you have more time for more projects. Sorry to put projects out there sooner so that you get, you gather more experiences, you actually reach more people if you're doing marketing and business and you have more time for more projects. So instead of spending three hours writing an article or an hour writing a newsletter, you shorten the time. Now it takes stamina and this is the final thing I'll say it takes exposure to working lightly to develop the stamina for working lightly. Ironically, it might think working lightly just means it's supposed to be easy. No, it's not easy because you grown up with working hard. Lee, that's funny thing, right? It's a play on words. You work hard so you recoil from work and so you hardly work because you're, you're, you're using all the wonderful distractions we have in modern times to, to recoil from work because working is heavy and it has a lot of judgment and perfectionism. So, so this is, this is the, the homework for you or the. Yeah, it's the ironic thing about working on. Working lightly means to continually practice these tools of something like an energy reboot and something like the tool of shortening the time you spend on each task bit by bit. First, right now you take three hours to write an article that's working hard and therefore you don't have as many articles out there and therefore you can't test the market to see what you need to produce more. And so it's sort of like this vicious cycle of working hard. Less experiences, slower skill building versus working lightly. More experiences, greater reach and greater skill building, faster skill building. And so it takes stamina. Right now you're taking three hours to work on an article. Now you're going to say I'm going to do it in two and a half. I, I mean I time myself, it takes me three hours. Now I'm going to try to do it in two and a half. My tool is publishing half assed to build more experiences and therefore to have more skillfulness over time. So I hope this is inspiring for you to want to work on working lightly and I have another lesson that goes more in depth into all this but I hope this is helpful to understand the overall concept of working lightly.
