Heroic Interview: The Procrastination Equation with Piers Steel

You're listening to the Procrastination Equation, an Optimal living interview with Piers Steele and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Piers Steele. Piers is one of the world's leading authorities on the science of motivation in general and procrastination in particular. He conducted some amazing meta analysis of all the research out there on motivation and procrastination, distilled that wisdom into a really practical, funny, awesome book called the Procrastination Equation, which I'm excited to explore today and find some big ideas that we can apply to our lives right now. So, Piers, loved your book. Really appreciate you taking the time to chat.

I'm glad to be here.

So let's start with the equation. We might want to start with procrastination. Actually, do you want to define procrastination for us? Because I think you make an important distinction that it's not on all delay and then we'll jump into the equation itself.

Yeah, it can't be all delay. Let's say we want to go out sailing and all of a sudden a storm comes by. We have to put it off tomorrow. I don't think anybody would call that procrastination. Procrastination has a particular tinge to it. It's a negative tinge. And so that's the way it's been used historically. That's the way it's generally defined. And when you put it all together, it's putting off, despite expecting to be worse off. And that's by your own standards. So if you thought the delay was wise, you might use the word prudent. But if you thought it was something that's just going to cause you heartache later on and you should have done it now. That's procrastination.

Powerful distinction. So then walk us through. We want to do something. We know that it will create value in our lives, but for whatever reason, we aren't getting it done. Talk to us about the equation that you identified in your. I don't even know how much research you did, but all the meta analysis that you did.

Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. That took a long time. I literally got a degree, a PhD in procrastination because that's what I did my PhD on. And some people say it was research me search. And they say, oh yeah, it is. This is totally. Physician, cure thyself. Right. Heal thyself. But it worked, right? Surprise, surprise. I decided to study upon something that was dear to my heart. And I Compiled everything that's ever been done. I mean I went back to the time of Thutmosis III and had some hieroglyphs translated from about 2400 B.C. from 1400 B.C. and that talked about procrastination. So I did it all. And the thing about this you got to put together, right? This is almost like a meta analysis, is like a super systematic review. It also has some mathematical parts to it, but we don't have to go into that, but you have to kind of put it into a narrative. I always thought of it a bit like a reality TV show where they just, they just film and film and film everything. So at the end they have like literally 30,000 hours of footage and they have to edit that down now into a credible narrative. So you have, when you're doing all this stuff and have all this information together, you have to. It doesn't come pre organized. You have to figure that out. So then it's kind of. When I was doing this, there's a couple of people who had taken a stab at kind of creating a formula for it, trying to explain it mathematically. And my bit was just simply kind of noticing the overlap among all these different attempts and putting it together. And you actually can create an equation. Now I was warned that for every equation you put in a book, you have to say it. For every equation, for every mathematical equation you put in the book, you, you divide the sales by 2.

So if you put it in the title, you're even.

I know, I know, I know. Well, what can I say? I fell in love with it. I even wrote a poem about goes like this. Despite the prevalence of expectancy times valence, the evidence is mounting that you need temporal discounting for futility to assess your utility in its absence.

I love it.

There we go. And that's a little bit of a start to it. I get paid for this. It's okay. Basically it comes down to three things. You don't like the equation. Equation has a little bit of economics in it. That's expectancy times valence or value. And this kind of makes sense entirely is that when you put off things, if you don't have a good idea that you can be successful. Expectancy, if you have the confidence. Some people call it self efficacy, you're likely gonna. Motivation is gonna go down a notch. I don't know if I can do that. Then you don't feel like as much. That's right. I'm totally confident I can do that. You know, your motivation is higher. The other one of course is value or the amount of rewards even how you know. Typically we found that if a task was boring, people would tend to put it off. So that's the value part of it, the size, the reward. If it's a really big consequence, more motivation. Again. Okay, I'm thinking, did we really need science to tell you this? Okay, probably not. Probably you could have figured this out on yourself. But the last one is actually. And people tend to underestimate the power of this one because it's definitely the most powerful. It's the effect of time. And not only do we like rewards to be certain and we like them to be large expectancy value, but we like them to be immediate. And some people are particularly sensitive to when rewards are realized. And we call people who are sensitive to them, they're impulsive. And you can take. This is a mathematical. But you can go into neurobiology. And there's a nice duet between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system which causes this to happen. You see it in all animals. I mean there's even these studies by this guy Mazur who managed to study procrastination, rats and pigeons, which I thought was very cool. It's also being studied in the US Congress as well. So I kind of studying rats, pigeons in the US Congress go together. Yeah, well, but then, then you can put all these things together somewhat in a kind of a loose equation. So when expectancy and value get large, they go on the top of the equation. Motivation goes up. But when delay and especially your sensitivity delay, they're in the bottom equation. When they get large, motivation goes down being on the denominator. So essentially what do we want? We procrastination is wanting to have the motivation ahead of time. It'd be convenient to, you know, schedule it. You know, that's basically what motivation is to come almost like water out of a tap. You know, I'd like a large amount of motivation right now and really fits with my schedule. But we're not built that way. We have to depend upon the consequences being soon. And that happens just before deadlines. So we try and kind of get going ahead of time, but more often than not it's lackluster. It's like we get eyedroppers of motivation and then just before the deadline we get fire hoses of motivation and it's either too little or too much. We're just built that way. It's not wrong or right. It's just annoying.

Totally neutral. Neutral kind of annoying.

So 10 years, somewhat 700 some odd studies, 12 languages. Again, I did it all. Here's to academics and professors and people who like to obsess over things. So that was me. So that's how it came about. And then actually I wrote a kind of a good article on it. I got like an award, the George A. Miller Award for best piece in psychology over five years. That's a big one. I'm really proud of that. I'm not going to get. That's not going to happen again. At least it would be first in the world to have it happen twice. It's like getting two Nobel Prizes for this work. And it got released in. And it was a slow news day, I guess, and it went around the entire world. I was having fun with it. I like to have fun. So I was saying after 10 years, here's my three year study of procrastination. Because I actually originally thought it was going to take about three years. And the New York Times picked it up and the Financial Times, LA Times gone. Scientific America. Everyone was kind of, oh, this is really neat. And then after that, literary agents started saying, well, you've got to write a book about it. So I said, okay, sure, you got it. So all of a sudden I found myself with a book contract and you know, a deadline. And I went through it. I did my best as I could. So this is the. At the time, that book is exactly as best as I could possibly write it. And I think it is pretty good. I would only make a few changes, like in the author's note. At the beginning I was really struggling for credibility. I really was concerned about it. I wanted people to believe it. So some people say that came across a lot of self promotion. I said, oh, that's not what I was going for. I just wanted to be credible. I wanted people to kind of say, hey, you know, because there's a lot of books out there that were getting it wrong. There was a lot of ones by these clinical psychologists who were written back in the late 70s and early 80s and they're still out there, not going to name names, but they talk about it being a. Perfectionism being the source of procrastination instead of impulsiveness. And when you actually study it, like why did. And put all the pieces together, you do have perfectionist procrastinators. You do. But on average, perfectionists actually procrastinate a little bit less, but they feel a whole lot worse about it.

Let's go into that. So just to caveat and to frame my experience of the book, I Thought you wrote with a great, you established credibility, but you write with a great self deprecating humor. I laughed out loud a number of times. And it's really important, I think to ground it in the rigorous science and to really establish the fact that look, this is what these X hundreds of studies show. I think you did a great job with that. And then the word that jumped out at me more than any other perhaps throughout the book was impulsiveness. And you talked about it a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more about impulsiveness and how that prevents us from having the motivation levels we want? And then I want to get into some of your great ideas on how we practically increase our motivation and decrease the procrastination. But can you tell us a little bit more about impulsiveness? And I'll quote you, actually you have a quote that I think captures it so well. You say without impulsiveness there wouldn't be such a thing as chronic procrastination. What does that mean?

Well, there's a lot of ways of looking at this. I mean from a genetic level. There's a recent study just in the last. We got just in the last year by Gustafson and he does this nifty twin research. So you can look at twins raised together and twins raised apart. And they're raised apart not because of adoption. We could never get that through our ethics review board to separate them at birth. So we just have to wait. But you know, it happens. So they collect them lovingly, like each one a jewel, whether they're raised apart. And you get to make comparisons between how similar the ones that are raised together versus one raised apart. And get a feel. If there are still identical, then you know it's entirely genetic and had nothing to do with being raised in different families. And that's what they found with the impulsiveness. They found almost that of all the genetic component that leads to procrastination, 100% of it is due to impulsiveness. So you can be. There's other things, environmental things that go on layer on top of that. They have fancy words for it. One's called genotypic, that's your genetic component. And phenotypic, that's everything. So impulsiveness basically is another word for. It is sensitivity to delay. You can even think of it as being a bit more limbic system. A limbic system like things that are concrete here and now. It responds to immediate stimuli and that's just stuff in your environment. So it's a bit of A duet. We make plans in this long term, plans in our prefrontal cortex. And that's New Year's resolutions. What I want to do next Saturday, I want to go run it. That's a long term plan. It's all done in the prefrontal cortex. But when next Saturday comes around, you're here now you're actually in that situation and you're responding to things that you actually are experiencing. And so the limbic system gets involved. And Daniel Kahneman got this Nobel Prize for this in calling it system one and system two. But it literally has about 30 different names over time. Rational versus emotional. Even Plato wrote about it, talking about how the brain is like having the mind, like having two horses, one of passion and one of reason. Sometimes they pull together and one, sometimes they pull apart. And then you got Freud talking about the horse and rider, right? The horse is a great big beast, but very powerful. While the rider, the prefrontal cortex trying to control it as best as it could. So when we become very limbic in their decision making, we also become very short term. And we're looking for immediate pleasures and immediate beliefs. So we kind of know in our long term we really got to get to that rapport. We really should do this for the health. But right in front of us is Candy Crush or the Internet or YouTube or going out with friends for a drink. And in the long run you think I shouldn't do that prefrontal cortex speaking. And it gets trumped. But it would feel good now and I want to by the limbic system. So that's really the long and the short of it. That's what causes us to procrastinate even though we know we shouldn't and even though we struggle not to. The limbic system, this kind of older, you might think of the dog brain, the kind of dogsy squirrel woof. It can trump our better intentions.

I love it. Well, let's talk about how we kind of manage that because you walked through some great practical ways to do that. The first one I think is reducing the distractions. The first one I like to talk about is can you talk to us about your description of how to get a month of productivity a year by doing one simple thing with your email. Can you describe that for us?

Oh yeah, I'll describe and I'll give you an idea of why it works so well too. It's eliminating that stuff that the limbic system responds to, which is immediate cues. So if you have a ding, if you have a stimuli icon, you're now talking to the language of the dog brain, the limbic system, and boom, it goes off. I'm going to respond to that. It's a stimulus response. It's the simplest type of basically thinking we have, and it's a big part of who we are. Instead of trying to stop the impulse once it started, that's really difficult to do. The horse is already going off in that direction. If you could stop the stimuli from happening in the first place, you don't do it. Well, most people check their emails. Let's say last time I checked it was 50 times a day. And it takes 15 minutes for you, once you're distracted, to get back into full concentrated state. This means that nobody ever really gets to that point. I think the average manager gets about four minutes before they're distracted by something else. So everybody is basically going from one thing to another. And if you think you said, what am I most productive? He said, well, I'm going to concentrate and have long periods of uninterrupted time. That's what we find. We find that some people can do as well, multitasking. Most people can't, but a few people can. But typically multitasking is a strange type of habit because sometimes it gives you a lot of novelty and we like novelty. But the more you do it, the more you kind of habituate and then you start shaving your day into smaller and smaller pieces and the less productive you become. It's the only thing that the more you practice it, the less good you become at it. But this is the idea, it's called from the outside in, really. It's stimulus control. If you control the access temptations and the obviousness of them, then you can control your behavior. So it's very difficult to control the limbic system directly because it has direct lines of amygdala, which is the seat of emotions, and that's why you feel things so strongly. But the prefrontal cortex is the smarter of the two, so it can outwit it. So you can rid yourself of things that tempt you away from your line of work. This is exactly why computers, systems and laptops are so, I would say, poorly designed in that we play and work at the same place. So you are getting the same cues. And one other one is simply to kind of have a second logon. That is so you would have a logon for play and a logon for work and make sure that they have a different background and theme pack with them. Log off whenever you want to play. That's Fine. Just log off your work one, log on to your play one. And when you're on the log one, your brain will learn. It will learn. Oh, yeah, this is work time. Got it. And then it goes. And eventually you won't be even thinking about playing at that point. It just will happen naturally, which is what we want. We don't want to have to use willpower. We just want it to happen.

So good. We could talk about that for a weekend.

Yeah, we could. It'd be great.

Yeah. I mean, just the pre. Commitment is the phrase I'm familiar with with the willpower research of. You know, it's not. I love your stimulus control. Right. Control in the beginning. So to recap really quickly for everyone listening, simply turning off your notifications so you're not having to respond once the stimulus is triggered, which is very difficult. Just remove the stimulus in its entirety. And the stat that you shared was if you do that, you can add a month of productivity back to your year, which is nuts. And then I love your login idea as well of work play. And just train that dog so he knows where he's at and everybody will get along better with one another. I love to turn my WI fi off on both my computer and actually in my office, such that I have to go turn it on and deliberately walk through a couple of hurdles. And if I'm going to choose to do something other than what I said I was going to do offline. So I love all of that. And then I'd like to also chat about there's kind of reducing distractions to help with the impulsiveness. And then you also tell us about how we can reduce the delay so we make the rewards more immediate by creating what you called mini goals. And I loved your idea of a success spiral. And I use the phrase island hopping to describe how you describe the Polynesian explorers. But can you talk to us about why the success spiral is such a powerful complement to what we're talking about?

Well, if you kind of take on something that's too big, you just won't have a firm idea in your mind how to go about it. And that doesn't give you a lot of motivational energy or juice. Right. If it's all vague about what you're supposed to be doing, what's happening. So if you kind of get smaller line of cycles. In fact, there's actually. I even wrote one about Ivan the Terrible, who is this cyclist. And that's what he does. He has a series of line of cycles. I'm Getting to that place. I'm getting to that place. Not only that doesn't make it much more concrete, it also makes it much more doable. So you're increasing your kind of expectancy by breaking it down to these parts. And as you accomplish them, then you can also simultaneously build up a little bit more. Kind of just by experience. You legitimately have this knowing, have you done the last one? I can do the next one. So if we take it all at the same time and think about, oh my gosh, I have so much to do, then you've kind of. It's hard for us to grasp it. And so we kind of immediately downgrade our feelings of success. So sometimes it's just trying to, you know, it's all that adage of, you know, how to eat an elephant one bite at a time, right? Or there's hundreds of quotes like this. This is a motivational secret that a lot of people stumbled on. I even got quotes of it from Mark Twain. The secret of getting ahead is getting started. And to get started, you take a large goal and break it down to smaller pieces. I'm paraphrasing here, but that's pretty much it. This is also by breaking it down, as I mentioned, the way that the prefrontal cortex can talk to the limbic system. Prefrontal cortex, it's what caused civilization. We can start making plans for the future. And in the animal kingdom, we are super at this. Nobody can plan for the future like us. So we can do blueprints and we can do what we're going to be doing next year, but it still gives a problem of finding the motivation of when that time comes around. So you actually have to kind of talk about it or retranslate in the way it's going to understand. And the one way we did this is a little bit kind of motivational reverse engineering. We found out when people have the most motivation, it is just before deadlines, especially concrete, clear deadlines. People have a lot of motivation, okay? Those are naturally occurring ones. And it's kind of almost giving up your autonomy. If you're waiting for the world to provide them for you, they may or may not. It may be your schedule or not. So we said, well, why not regain control by creating artificial ones of your own choosing? Just like synthetic diamonds actually can be more pure and perfect, and that's how they detect them. Sometimes they're better than actually which occur in nature. You can create your own goals that are better than these naturally occurring ones. And these are short term because we like short term. They're somewhat challenging because you don't want to leave motivational energy on the table. If it's too easy, you basically kind of cut the salami a little bit too small. You want it enough that you can commit to it and you want to have them very, very, very specific. And that's where most people fall down a little bit. So let's say I want to go running on Saturday again. Yeah, it's a good plan. Saturday is a big time. I don't have an edge one Saturday. How about after breakfast? Okay, immediately after breakfast? Yeah, immediately after breakfast. Where am I running to immediately after breakfast? I'm picking on these shoes, I'm going out the door and I'm running 10 blocks east, 10 blocks west, 10 blocks, then back home. Oh, okay, that's. I get that. Says the limbic system. I've now expressed it in a way that it's actually I can respond to for good measure. If you want to make them approach goals, it helps too. That's the problem with dieting is that if you say, well, I'm not allowed to eat sweets, right? Well, okay, that's an avoidance goal. And the only way you can really benefit from that motivationally is by saying, well, I'm soon not going to be doing something which doesn't make a lot of sense. However, if you reverse that and make it approach Bill and saying, I'm going to eat more salads, right? Then you say this. Yeah, okay, I'm going to eat more salad this lunchtime. I'm going to eat a salad. That's something you can now have a goal around. Approach goals are much more responsive to goal setting than avoidance goal, which is.

A perfect segue into the next idea that I think you articulated so well, and I'm excited to hear you frame it in our chat. Now, mental contrasting, I thought of the dieters and those who lost more weight than others were the ones who had the vision, but also saw how hard it would be to eat more salad rather than the sweets. But can you talk to us about mental contrasting vis a vis creative visualization as a tool to achieve the goals we want to achieve?

Well, there was that issue around the secret, and that sounds like a powerful motivational tool. So we're scientists, we went and tested it, and you try vision boards and positive fantasies. And we found that the more people did it, the less successful they were, the less likely they followed through, the less likely it happened. Not always, but it was definitely a negative. We'd have three groups. I'LL tell you what the third one is in a second. But one group was the control group and one was the vision group. Consistently, doing nothing was better than doing this. This was actually motivational harm, motivational malpractice. But we found a third group which took the visioning, the creative visualization and just tweaked it a little bit. Just a little bit. Actually was the best group of it all. It was kind of like it was, you know, they're missing that enzyme that can actually made it all work. And that was after visualizing it. Contrast it with where you are now. And then you have a gap here and you have a gap between where you want to be and where you are. And people start getting the motivation to close that gap and doing things. So, you know, it kind of says, yes. It says, there isn't a giant genie in the sky that's going to grant your wishes.

I just plugged my ears, I didn't hear.

That's right. But to get yourself up and going and actually doing it yourself, this is a way of finding motivation. So one problem with positive fantasy is that it feels good, but it's almost a type of motivational pornography. So it takes the place of action. So imagery fantasy actually satisfies to some extent and actually reduces your motivational kind of state. So you're not actually kind of going about it as much. However, if you add this contrasting part, you get a nice pop in motivation. And this one woman in New York State, she's great. Gabrielle Ottingen, I think I pronounced her name. I apologize. Gabrielle. And she's done about 20 or 30 studies on this. They've also done it with this guy called Golwitzer who does this implementation attention. And they found that a lot of these motivational techniques stack nicely. So you can do one or the other, but both is even better.

Again, that's a weekend conversation that.

Yeah, weekend conversation.

So good. You know, the creative visualization. Let's not get stuck in the motivational pornography. Let's see that we get excited about it, then we bring it back to reality, see where we're at. And then you didn't use the phrase explicitly, but that necessity to act, I think is how you described Odingen's phrase.

Yeah, that's right.

Tension, right. Of, wow, I gotta do something. And that's what we want, obviously, is at the end of the day, that genie doesn't exist. Let's get ourselves to act.

I would like the genie to exist, by the way. I really would. I would prefer if fantasy Was it was kind of like, oh, that doesn't work.

He's on my vision board so maybe one day I'll be able to manifest him.

But it would be nice talking about weekend conversation. We are at the point right now where we have the fundamentals pretty much down. Right now the struggle is communicating, getting the word out because anybody with a marketing campaign can say anything they want. But if we are trying at the University of Calgary to actually have a self leadership course for year one where we focus on these principles but in terms of civic virtues, if preparing somebody to be a citizen of a country, these basic motivational fundamentals, I don't really understand why aren't they taught in high school?

Wow. I was actually commissioned by a prep school here in LA called Harvard Westlake to create a similar type of curriculum. We called it Optimal Living 101. And the idea was, look, we go from math to science to history, but for some reason we're never taught the fundamentals of optimal living. And it's exciting to imagine all the great people doing great work to do exactly that. And I have a lot of hope over the next 5, 10, 25 years more and more of this wisdom will get out. And due to your three year, ten year amazing work and so many of your colleagues, it's really inspiring to ground these scientific truths into a really fun practical application. Love to hear your thoughts on sleep and then recap goals.

Oh sure, sleep. I mean one of the biggest reasons that when we ask people why they procrastinated is that they were too tired. And there's been some wonderful studies about productivity and the amount of sleep and the amount of hours you can really effectively put in. That's your aid time. If we took out your day, I mean most people have like four or five hours of really high quality attention and these can happen during different times. Sometimes they happen from about 10 to 2. Now some people are time shifted, it's 9 to 1 or some people get a little longer than other people. That's lucky, they have high energy. But the thing is time limited. And if we just did our hardest work when we have the most energy, we could pretty much goof off the rest of the day. But we often spend that with meetings and email. The best part of the day are power hours. So one thing is to make proper use of when you have the most energy. Start scheduling your lower end stuff. Let's say you can do emails, I can do emails anytime. For when you don't have the same type of energy. Preserve that for your Hard work, but also try to extend the quality, quantity of that energy. Of course, that's sleep. And this is where sleep is a false savings when you kind of cut that back. Sometimes we have to. In an emergency, you have to stay up late. But your idea is to try and get back to a regular sleep schedule as soon as possible. The world's always trying to push you off it, off your game, and you're trying to pull yourself back onto it because once you kind of start sacrificing sleep, the quality of those energy hours go down and the length of them goes down and you try and make up for it with coffee. And that's, you know, though I love my coffee. Well, I have to, because I'm a bit of a night owl. But, you know, I live in a very early city. And actually being a night owl is another indicator of a procrastinator because it's actually technical term is morning larks and night owls. And through this morning owl, there's actually a scale, you know, the night owl, morning lark scale. And my circadian rhythms are off a normal workday. So I have. This is how my kind of joke. This is how barbarians conquered Rome. They were all morning larks and they didn't sleep in properly. And Goddess, when we're all sleeping, but I have to get up earlier than I would like. And it's basically a study in the area of chronobiology. So I have to get earlier than I like. And so I drink coffee to wake up. And then in the evening I have to try and kind of find my way to wind down, which is harder for me to do. You can even see it in terms of your. Some people have a internal clock and they've taken people and they put them in these caverns underground for like months and months and months to see what type of sleep schedule they have. And some people have a slightly smaller sleep schedule, like 23 and a half hours. So you're constantly kind of getting tired earlier. And some people have a little longer, like 24, 25 hours. So you're constantly kind of feeling, you know, that you want to stay up later because of that. It's some people who are night owls who have a little longer chronobiology are constantly kind of tempted to stay up later if they can. But if they have to get up in the morning all the time at the same time cuts into their sleep. So it's something I struggle with, but I have made good gains with it. In essence, I recognize it and I do try and not drink coffee past 3 o' clock in the afternoon. And I have a try and get to sleep at the same time. And I try not to. I try to read books and other relaxing things. Starting to wind down because TV will keep you up forever. And with that though, I can be more present awake during the day.

Awesome. To recap, as you said, being too tired is the number one reason. I'm quoting you now again from the book. Being too tired is the number one reason people cite for putting things off. If you're not getting eight hours of sleep a night, you are harming your performance during the day. You continue with how lack of sleep affects basically every performance. And it's challenging. I mean, we're so stimulated with so many options that it just takes a level of commitment and discipline. You suggest that we actually set the alarm for when we're going to go to sleep or cue the wind down routine, which I think is a brilliant idea.

Rather than wake up. Right. If you do it for getting to bed, you don't need one in the morning.

Yeah, that's awesome. Easier said than done, of course, but powerful. So then let's wrap up with goal setting. And you describe that again as the smartest thing italicized, smartest thing you can do to battle procrastination.

You're talking about Greg Dorn in 1982. He did a newsletter and he was talking about team, actually project management. And he came up with this ackerman about smart goals. And I've, I think there's like 80 different variations of them. Specific, measurable, achievable results, timely, something like that. And he was just spitballing, right? This is what, I'm a guy and you know, this is my kind of things. And it took off. I mean, people loved him. It was like, this is what the word. It was written like in a stone tablet. So it was the word of God. It came down, this is what we have to do. And it went everywhere. People love that acronym. Meanwhile, more quietly, literally like a thousand researchers were working on goal setting in the labs, just trying to do that, reverse engineering, teasing the parts, seeing when it works, when it doesn't. And I got to give it to Greg Doran. His smart was a good first effort and it was great, absolutely great for 1982 and the fact that he put in a newsletter and had something, so much success for him. Good. But why we're not using computers from 1982. We're not driving cars from 1982 unless they're classics. We can do better and when you put all this type of information together that what we know, it comes down. I try to get a NEEK acronym, but the best I could get was the CSI approach. So it's not crime scene investigators, but it's challenging to see specific for us, immediate for eye and approach. So challenging is that if you make an easy goal, what do you do when you achieve a goal or what do people do when they cross the finishing line? They stop. Stop. So if you made it too easy though, you might have more motivation for it. You would have stopped at the end. So you kind of left a lot of essential performance on the table. You could have had it more challenging off a bigger piece and still gone for it. So you want to make sure it is at the right level of challenging. This is kind of a bit of a gut feel thing to it. You want to be small enough that you can commit to it. Yeah, I can definitely do that. But big enough that there isn't a lot left over. Yeah, I totally can commit to that. But there's a little bit bigger. No, I'm not sure you want it at that point. And that's going to change from time to time. And where you are. Sometimes a 10 minute goal is perfect. I can do that for 10 minutes because then once you get into it, you find yourself, I can do that for another 10 minutes. But if you said I have to do it for an hour, you never would get started. Then you want to make it specific. And this is the language of the limbic system. You have to have that finishing line. You have to have an idea of exactly what you're going to be doing. The less specific you can make it, the less motivation you have. So this is sometimes even having an implementation intention, which is what actually cues you to get going is really important. So when I talked about running, it was after breakfast. That's the cue to get going. As soon as breakfast is finished, boom, I get going. Or at night, 9 o', clock, I get going. Immediate should be kind of more short term. And again, you have to play around with this. Some goals you can have it longer, which is great because then you're not making goals all the time. But for some small ones, again, that 10 minute goal works well. So the consequences should be in the short term. So you want to break it down short enough that you should feel it. And again, this is something you can play around with. It's going to differ from if you're doing something you really enjoy, you don't have to make it a short term. Goal. But if it's something like taxes, you know what, you might really break that down and just kind of, you know, I just want to open it up and take a look at it. And then finally, the approach, which we talked about. So this is something you're going to do. I do a nice one where I put up a slide. And on one slide I said, stop procrastinating versus get going, don't be tired versus have energy. One's approach, one's avoidance. And at the top, I said, stop making avoidance goals, which is odd. Yeah, it should be. Start making approach goals. But yeah. And then if you kind of follow those four principles, really what the trick is just going to be implementation. Those principles are right, but it is playing around and getting the degree of specificity, getting the right level of challenge. They will work wonders because a lot of people are doing the right things. But it's kind of like learning any type of sport is that you would benefit from. Reading a book is great. Please read my book. Please. But having a life coach or somebody else walk you through them and adjust your form a little bit is a wonderful compliment. And, you know, I always kind of. I can hope that more life coaches would kind of take up and base their important work on these kind of more scientifically established principles. Would actually kind of, I think, be transformative. I would want them seem to be a more kind of regulated and respected profession because I think they're in this day and age, they are an important part of making the world be able to get stuff done.

Yeah, that's awesome. And even for that matter, the therapists who are practicing and, you know, might be using some 1982 models. Right? That's right, 1902 models. It's like, look, we've learned a few things.

It's your mot.

Oh, this is so good. So much that we covered in this time together. Again, I appreciate you and how you've committed yourself to your life's work and how it's benefited us. I want to ask one more question to tide up and then point people to where they can learn more about you beyond the book. But if you can only share one thing, one idea with people listening, what would that be? And it might be something we touched on, but what would that one idea that you'd want to really stick and help transform people's lives?

I would say forgive yourself for it. It's natural. It's as natural as our love of fats and sugars. We're a product of 100 million years that we're looking for energy sources. We're also a product of 100 million years that fine tuned its motivational topography to the environment ahead. And we lived in a short term environment for thousands of years. So what we are is natural, it's just no longer adaptive. So we have to do something about it but take the guilt out of it. Just don't feel guilty about it, but do something awesome.

So procrastination equation. Check it out on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Like I said, really loved it. Same fun style and humor that we just experience now and then. Where else can people go to learn more about your work?

Piers I have a website, procrastinas.com procrastinator procrastination. Everything was taken. We went with procrastinates, the Latin route. And there's some surveys you can take there that'll give you some feedback about your procrastination and a few extra ones if you want to help science too because we're trying to look how this predicts other stuff.

Very cool. And I'm going to spell that for everybody. So it's procrastinat, which is P R O C R A S T I n u s.com procrastinas.com Piers, once again, thank you so much for taking the time and I'm thrilled to be connected again.

My pleasure.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview.

Please visit brianjohnson me for more.