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

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. I'm getting ready for the next Optimal Living 101 class on Procrastination 101 how to quit putting your life on hold and actualize your potential. And I figured I'd do another one of these overviews. First, I want to thank everyone for your support in coming up with this class idea and a ton of others. I asked you a couple days ago our members, what classes you'd like to see and he gave me over a hundred of them. Here are a handful of my favorites we'll be doing soon. We'll be doing classes on and again, we already have classes on Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101 Habits 101 and Relationships 101. So if you're a member, check that out. If you're not a member yet, what are you waiting for? In the future? We're also going to do balance 101 business 101 change 101 courage 101 creativity. Really excited about that. I almost did that one today but I decided to do procrastination. Didn't want to Procrastinate on Procrastination Exercise 101 Flow 101 Goals 101 I'm going to do by the end of the year so we can kick off an extraordinary 2016 learning 101 that one to be fun masterpiece days 101 which is really the foundation of everything we do is can we create Masterpiece Days. So I'm excited to unpack that in a class. Mastery 101 in General Mindfulness 101 Neuroscience 101 will be fun. Nutrition 101 a huge number of requests for that. Peak Performance Positive Psychology 101. Can't wait to unpack some of my favorite ideas there. Public Speaking 101 Resilience 101 Self Image, Simplicity, Sleep Big One Systems dealing with technology, wealth, et cetera. So Anyway, lots of 101 optimally 101 classes coming up. We're going to share at least one of those a month in our membership and I'm actually going to do more than that as we round out the year. Very excited about it. But let's get back to Procrastination 101. So as I'm preparing for this class, of course I went to the notes on the subject and the two primary procrastination books out there written by two of the leading research scientists. We're going to really tap into are the Procrastination Equation by Piers Steele and Solving the Procrastination Puzzle by Timothy Pischel. We have notes and interviews with and on both of those are just fantastic. And then also I checked out Rethinking Positive Thinking, Gabrielle Oetting Barbara Oakley's mind for numbers. Barbara taught the most popular class or one of them in history. Over a million students took her class learning how to learn and then of course looked at some press field. The Art of Taking Action, Another great book, the Tools and a bunch of other books I've now done. 300 notes, by the way. Kind of exciting. Hit that milestone yesterday. So with that long prelude, let's look at 10 of my favorite big ideas on how to quit putting our lives off and actualize our potential. First, let's start with zero idea. What is procrastination? Well, it comes from the Latin roots procrastinas, which literally means to put forward to tomorrow. So to procrastinate is to put something off until tomorrow. We know that, but it's kind of cool to trace the origins. Scientists describe this as needless voluntary delay that negatively impacts our lives. Right? So when you procrastinate, you're not just procrastinating on one given subject or project or whatever, you're procrastinating on your life. And it's a great way to basically throw away our potential to constantly live in procrastination. Now, I'm not telling anything new there, but it's a powerful thing to really get clear on. Procrastination, as Barbara Oakley says, is a keystone negative habit. And if you have the habit of doing that, it's really, really important to deal with it. It's also important to realize that everyone does it to certain degrees, right? So you're not alone. You don't need to shame yourself, which will be one of the big ideas we explore in a bit. But that's the basic idea of what procrastination is. Now, how do we most effectively deal with it? Well, we start by looking at the equation M equals e times v over I times D. Piers Steele came up with this equation on the motivation equation, and his book was called the Procrastination Equation. He essentially won psychology's equivalent of the Nobel Prize for this formula, which basically distilled all the research on motivation and procrastination into a simple little formula. Now, we're going to unpack that in depth in the class. But the basic idea here is motivation is a function of your expectancy times value over impulsiveness. Times delay, expectancy is basically your confidence, the fact that you think you can achieve the outcome you want. If you don't think you can achieve what you want, you're not going to be very motivated. Value is essentially are you fired up? Is this something that actually inspires you or could you not really care less? Well, guess what? If you aren't fired up about something, you're not going to have high motivation. So you need to have high confidence in high fired upness to start. If you don't, you're going to procrastinate. Again, we're going to go into detail on all of that. And then you need to look at your impulsivity. That's going to take away your motivation and how far away the goal is. You want to bring a goal back to as close to today as you can by setting up micro goals, which we'll talk about. So that's our equation. We're going to unpack that right now as we go over the overview. Then of course in depth in the class. So the second big idea we want to focus on is the importance of goals. So we talked about the numerator in our motivation equation, expectancy times value. Well, we're going to unpack goals in its own class. As I just said, we're going to do that in December, whole class. But we need to think about goals as we look at procrastination. This is the fuel that's going to help us have the motivation to move through the inevitable desire to procrastinate. Well, we want to think about four things as they relate to goals. These are roughly from Piers Steele's ideas in his great book. First, our goals need to be challenging. They need to be meaningful and they need to be feasible. Challenging, meaningful, feasible. They can't be out of control. You have to believe you can actually accomplish them. But they also need to have a lot of meaning and stretchy enough. Right? Then they need to be specific. We need to define what is going to occur by when. And we're going to do what by when. What do we want? What are we going to do? Get specific. Heidi Grant Halberson, who wrote the most popular blog post in Harvard Business Reviews history. She's one of the leading scientists on the science of success and goal settings. Her number one thing on her blog post of what successful people do differently is they're specific. They know precisely what they want to do and what they're going to do to get there. How about you? If you don't have specificity, you're going to have more procrastination. The third concept related to goals we want to get into is the. The fact that we want to create small wins. We want to set up dominoes. One of the things that makes us procrastinate more is delay. If the goal is so far away, it's abstract, you're going to have a hard time getting motivated. But if you can make that a domino, that's like chunked down to something you can get excited about now, that's a good thing then. The fourth thing around goals we're going to unpack is routines. You need to get in the consistent habit of doing what it takes to achieve your outcomes. Pierre Steele says predictability is our pal. Third big idea. We're obviously going through this quick because it's just an overview. We need to think about the fact that we need to just get started. Too often when we procrastinate, we're thinking that we need to do it all. So Tim Pischel juxtaposes, just do it. Well, that's a good way to overwhelm yourself. Just get started, he says, Just get started again and again and again. And too often we think that we need to feel like it. We need to have an attitude of inspiration in order to get something done. But the reality is, research has shown again and again and again that behaviors drive attitudes as much, if not more than attitudes, driving behaviors, behaviors drive attitudes. Just get going. We're also gonna talk about amazing research on what I call procrastipane. They've actually put people into a lab and looked at their brains. When they're thinking about something, that kind of stresses them out, and they actually have pain in their brains. But what's fascinating is they only have that before they take action. Once they do it, the pain goes away in their brain. So you just need to do it. And you need to reverse your desire and get excited about things that make you currently feel uncomfortable. Because you need to know that's how your potential is actualized. We're going to unpack that. The fourth big idea is process versus product. We talk about this a ton, but we'll unpack this some more. Process goals are a great way to deal with procrastination. So rather than say, I need to get something done, that's a product goal, I need to finish my homework, or I need to write a business plan or I need to fill in the blank, finish this book or whatever, right? That's a product goal. Finishing something. We want to focus on a process goal. I'm going to put 20 minutes of effort in. That's a process goal. Guess what you can repeat every day. If you repeated that process goal. Putting 20 minutes in of quality time into whatever project and you make that a habit, you will get to done. But if you focus on getting done, you might stress yourself out. Never get anything done. You need to just get started every day. Make it a habit. And you want to remember it's okay to suck. It's not okay to skip something. You can do that if you focus on process rather than product. The fifth big idea we're gonna look at in depth is if then planning. If this happens, then I will do this. This is a huge scientifically proven way to boost your motivation. It's called Implementation Intentions. You can use this in a number of ways. We're gonna help you identify your kryptonite. The things you do that are not good for your motivation. Where do you get stuck? Well, if that happens, then you're going to do this new behavior. Implementation Intentions. The sixth big idea we're going to look at is whoop. So we've talked about this a ton because it's one of my new favorite ideas. Gabrielle Oettingen, her husband actually came up with if then Implementation Intentions. And she integrated this with other research she'd done on something called mental contrasting. We're going to talk about that in detail in the class. But the basic idea there is just visualizing is actually a bad thing. It's detrimental to your motivation and to your ultimate performance. Literally, if you just imagine successful outcomes, it will diminish your ability to achieve them. She says you need to rub them up against reality via something she calls mental contrasting. When you combine mental contrasting and implementation intentions, you get woop. W o o p wish, outcome, obstacle plan. I'm going to coach you on how to go through that. It's huge. This is literally the science of goal setting and achievement. It's gonna be fun to do that. The seventh big idea is an awesome one. It will only take one minute. How often do you tell yourself, hey, you know, I'm getting to that project, but I'm just gonna do this first. It will only take a minute. I'm gonna check Facebook real quick. It will only take a minute. I'm gonna go post a Twitter update. Only a minute. Yeah, right. It's never only a minute. It's a slippery slope of nonsense that takes you off track. And guess what? You procrastinate. You wonder what happened to that 30min, three hours or three days or three weeks or three months. We need to eliminate those. It will just take one minute conversations. 8th Big Idea is deep work. I'm going to be sharing PNTV on Cal Newport's new book hasn't even come out yet, but it's called Deep Work and it is awesome. You need to get into a deep work state where you have no distractions. We're going to talk about the fact that multitasking is a myth. There's amazing science on something called attention residue and you're just switching between tasks and you can't do things as effectively as you can if you give yourself the space to do deep work where you create bright lines and you have pre commitments where you're not going to be distracted, you go into airplane mode, you turn the WI fi off and you increase your productivity by a ridiculous amount. Researchers say you can increase your productivity by as much as one month by doing something as simple as turning off your email notifications and quit splintering your attention. We will explore that more. The ninth big idea we're going to look at is your fundamentals. The number one reason why people say they procrastinate, according to research, is because they're tired. I'm too tired to get this done. You need to take care of your sleep. One of the other ideas we'll talk about is shut down complete. The most effective people in the world often don't work nights or weekends. They just know how to get work done via deep work and all the other things we're talking about. And they know how to shut down. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the importance of your other fundamentals. It always comes down to your physiological fundamentals at the most root issue of what we're doing here. Nutrition, exercise, sleep, et cetera. We're also going to talk about the fact that growth and mastery and getting over procrastination doesn't happen in a straight line. Too often we think that, hey, I watch a video like this or I read a book or whatever and I get inspired and I just go do what needs to happen and I become a better person. Now we know that that's absurd because we've experienced it enough. But we need to really, really realize that growth does not occur in a straight line. It's more of a zigzag pattern where you have success and then you fall back. You have success and then you fall back. Success, fall back, success fall back. But what's exciting is your highs get higher and your lows get higher. Wow. So ultimately you wind up way up here if you stay in the game. But if you don't have self compassion every time you fall short, you beat yourself up and you have shame. Then you're never going to get through this little zigzag period and actually see the growth. You're just gonna give up and go for it again and then give up again and go for it again, then give up again. We need to embrace the process of growth and change. You do that via self compassion. Shame is not helpful. Make it all a game. We'll talk about that some more. And then I always end these classes with the same idea. Our 11th idea here is practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice and practice some more. Put on your lab coat, get your clipboard and your little pen and just collect data. See what works. What doesn't work as you become a more optimized and actualized human being. So there you go. Procrastination 101. How to Quit Putting your life on hold and actualize your potential to put forward to tomorrow. M equals E times V over I times D. You need to get confident and fired up and reduce your impulsivity. Have goals that inspire you yet are feasible. Just get started. Focus on that rather than just doing it. Process versus product. It's much better to say I'm gonna put 20 minutes in then I'm get this done. Just get to work and the outcomes will take care of themselves as you focus on consistently showing up. If then deal with your Kryptonite via implementation intentions. Whoop it. That's gonna be fun. One minute. It rarely is one minute. So quit telling yourself that. Get yourself some deep workspace. Give yourself the benefit of fundamental optimization on your fundies. Remember the zigzags and practice, practice practice. Hope you got something out of that. And I'm really excited to unpack this. It'll be about a 60 minute class. We'll also have some Q and A integrated afterwards. I'm very excited about that as well and I cannot wait to share. Appreciate all your support. Hope you enjoyed. Here's to actualizing and enjoying the process. Have another awesome day. See ya. One more thing. Forgot to tell you where to go. BrianJohnson me. That's BrianJohnson me. Brian with an I slash membership is where you can sign up for all this stuff. Get instant access to all the optimally 101 classes we already have which is a General overview. Confidence 101 Habits 101 Getting Stuff Done 101 Relationships 101, Meditation 101. And then the 300 Philosopher's Notes, you get instant access to that. And then you get access to 10 new Philosopher's Notes a month. And what else do you get? You get a new class like this, and you get a ton of micro classes. We have thousands and thousands of people signed up already, and they're telling us they're digging it. So if you haven't joined yet, I hope you do, and I look forward to optimizing and actualizing together. See ya.