Conquering Procrastination 101: How to Quit Putting Your Life on Hold and Actualize Your Potential (Intro)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting About Conquering Procrastination 101, how to Quit putting your life on hold and actualize your potential. As always, we've got a ton of philosopher's notes we're using as our basis for some of my favorite big ideas on how to approach procrastination. We've also got an awesome workbook. We've got 10 big ideas we're going to walk through in a moment in depth. For now, let's look at what procrastination is. We'll start with the Latin root of the word procrastinas. Procrastinas. It literally means to put forward to tomorrow. So this has been around for a while. Thousands of years people have been procrastinating. You are not the first one. You are not the only one. Science says we all procrastinate at different times in different ways. Now, of course, there's a spectrum and we want to deal with our tendency to put things off to tomorrow and do what needs to get done today. The way that researchers describe it is a needless voluntary delay that has a negative impact in our lives. So some delay is actually not bad. Sometimes you say, you know what, I'm not going to do this right now. No big deal. That's just being smart. But when you really want to do something, it's really important to you and you can't get yourself to do it because of procrastination. That's what we want to talk about today. That's what we want to solve. I've got 10 big ideas we're going to look at with some of my favorite strategies. Again, grounded in science on how to deal with this. So let's take a quick look at those 10 big ideas, then we'll dive in in depth. Alright, so the first big idea is the motivation or procrastination equation. Pierce Steele is one of the leading researchers studying procrastination and motivation. The guy won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in psychology for his research. Looking at all of the different data on motivation, he came up with an equation that we're going to go off on. It's M equals E times V over I times D. Motivation equals expectancy. Whether you think you can do something times value, whether you're really excited about it or not. If that's high, your motivation is going to be high divided by Your impulsivity times the delay until your goal is kind of due the outcome timeline. Right? So if your impulsivity is really high and the delay is really long, your motivation is going to go down. Then what happens? Then your procrastination goes up. So we're going to unpack that equation in depth and help you understand that. I want to tattoo that equation on your brain because it helps us navigate when we get stuck. That's the first big idea. The second big idea is goals. We talk about this all the time, but we are teleological beings. We need to have a target. This is the most important thing. In order to create that expectancy and the value, you've got to have something you're really excited about, that you're aiming toward. That's the second big idea. Third big idea. You've got your goal. Now you need to just get started. This is the cornerstone of Tim Pishel's work. Tim Pischel is another one of the leading scientists studying motivation and particularly procrastination. He's dedicated his entire life to studying procrastination. We'll talk about him a lot through this class. One of his big ideas is just get started. Too often you stress yourself out when you say I just need to do it all. No, you just need to get started again and again and again. The fourth big idea is related to that. It's process versus product or process versus results. Too often we're thinking about the outcome and that we need to achieve. Whether it's something as mundane as inbox zero. I need to get all my email done. Oh my gosh. But there's 32 emails in there. That stresses me out or I need to get a business plan written or I need to do this or I need to do that. That can stress you out and lead to more procrastination. You just need to get going and you just need to focus on the process of putting. In 20 minutes, for example, we'll talk about the difference between process and product. A big idea. The fifth big idea. If then implementation intentions. Again, we've talked about this one in nearly all of the classes so far and it's huge. If you want to get something done, then create implementation intentions. We're going to talk about this specifically related to what you do when you procrastinate. We want to bring awareness to it and notice that if you start doing that, then you're going to pre decide in advance. You're going to tell yourself what you're going to do. Really, really big Idea. The sixth Big Idea is another one we come back to often mental contrasting, plus, whoop. Too often, too many people get excited about their goals and they visualize their outcome, but they don't rub them up against reality. Pure visualization has been proven scientifically to not be as effective as seeing what the challenges might be. Sounds counterintuitive to a lot of the positive thinking, but Gabriel Oettingen makes it unbelievably clear, with unbelievable scientific research to back it up, that you're way more effective. Which when you simultaneously hold your ideal and then contrast it with what's getting in the way of you achieving it. We're gonna talk about that in depth and apply it to your procrastination. 7th Big Idea is one of my favorites. It'll just take a minute. This is awesome. Tim Pischel talks about this. Oftentimes we get in trouble when we say to ourselves, we're in the middle of working or we're getting ready to work. And we say, you know what? It'll just take a minute. I'm just gonna pop into email real quick. Just take a minute. I'm just gonna go over to Twitter real quick. Or Facebook real quick. Or check out the news or whatever's going on in your favorite part of the world. Just a minute. Then three hours later, you wonder what happened. We're gonna talk about the slippery slope of it just takes a minute. The eighth big idea. We're gonna talk about deep work again. It's really important in this context. Cause this is how you deal with impulsivity. You fight the just one minute gremlins by doing deep work, by turning off all of your distractions, and in reducing your impulsivity so you can actually do what needs to get done. We're gonna talk about that and get some great strategies to help you rock it. Then the ninth Big idea. I promise we're not gonna make it through one of these classes without talking about your fundamentals, your fundies. Guess what the number one reason is. People give for why they procrastinate. What would you think? Think about that right now. What's your number one reason why you and why you think other people procrastinate? Research says, I'm tired, I'm too tired. I just can't get myself to do it. Procrastination comes in, you put it forward till tomorrow, when you think you're gonna have more energy. So researchers tell us, sleep, schedule your sleep. Prioritize your sleep. Because if you don't, you're not gonna have the energy to deal with all the challenges. We wanna get rid of the I'm tired excuse by setting up some discipline around our sleep schedule. And we'll talk about the other fundamentals as well know because they're impactful too. Alright. And then our 10th big idea is zigzags. We talk about this one a lot too. Life does not go in a linear pattern. You're not going to say, oh yeah, I'm going to solve my procrastination and do it immediately. You're going to zig up and you're going to come down. You're going to go up and you're going to go down. You're going to go up and you're going to go down. It's not going to be straight up. We need to embrace that process, get the fact that's how it goes and have self compassion. We'll talk about the research tied to self compassion and procrastination which is fascinating, but we want to embrace the process, get a little bit better day in and day out as we figure out how to conquer procrastination so we can quit putting our life on hold and actualize our potential. All right, that's a quick look at the 10. Let's jump straight in. So if you enjoyed that quick overview, I think you'll love the full class. Become a member and get instant access to this class. Plus a bunch of other optimal living 101 masterclasses and over 300 philosopher's notes and a bunch of other goodness. It's only 10 bucks per month. I think you'll love it. Join thousands of other cool peeps at BrianJohnson Me Membership. It's BrianJohnson Me Membership.