025: The Joys of Precrastination

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as well as as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello my friends. How are you doing on this fine day? I am here ironically recording an episode on Procrastination at the last minute. So this just makes me laugh because as I shared in episode 24, Missing Mojo, I have been missing my podcasting mojo. And there's a couple reasons for that. There's been a lot of life ups and downs, a lot of shuffling around through Airbnbs this summer, not to mention total and complete immersion in the Free Time book which I'm so friggin excited to share with you and kind of a systems failure. And when that happens, when I fall behind or have not solved the structure of something like the podcast, well, my mojo goes out the window. And I'm guessing yours too. Just today I recorded my very first episode under the new format. It's punchier, it's got some really fun questions at the end. It was with my dear friend and one of my favorite business friendors, Mike Michalowicz. We had so much fun. So I shared in the last episode how one of my other really great friends who I just adore and respect so much, that told me, you know, you really gotta tighten up your podcast. It's not there yet. Why don't you really hone in? If your mission is to free people's mind, time and team for their best work, make sure that every interview achieves that. Be more specific, be more targeted, record in less time. Don't you don't need to drag it out for 45 minutes or an hour. Now some of you may like those longer conversations, but I had a lot of fun today trying to fit the interview into 25 minutes. That said, we had some very entertaining banter that kind of it was before I officially kicked off the show, but Mike said, are you recording? Because this is juicy stuff. This is entertaining. There's a very mortifying search result that he told me about under my name on Amazon. Now I'm telling you so you can go find it. We also talked some of the inside numbers on publishing and the decision to self publish. Go with a hybrid as I'm doing or traditional publish and and I'm releasing that full unedited extended version of the interview on our private Insider BFF podcast feed. What's that? You say there's a private podcast feed? Yes, and I've done a terrible job of telling you here on the freetime podcast about it. This is one of the many failings that while I've been in hermit mode working on the book, I've not let you know that this community exists. These are some of my favorite people. It is a really tight knit group of of heart based business owners. I do a live Q and A call with hot seats once a month and one thing that we transitioned to when I launched this free time podcast was the ability for me to create a private feed. So if you can't make the monthly calls live, you can still submit questions in advance and then the episodes if you will, the recordings get pushed out to a private feed. I can also release special content such as this hilarious conversation with Mike Michalowicz. I just put that out today on the feed. So as soon as you join us you'll get access to the full archives there. You can learn more@itsfreetime.com BFF and of course that's where I share all my behind the scenes nitty gritty about life in the book and how I'm organizing the book and all the things. I may even bring back a forum aspect which I shut down our last forum on a not to be named ginormous social network that I just did not feel in alignment with. Especially the origins of that company, especially with the values of heart based business. But I've heard great things about Circle. I'm getting excited. I just feel like I really, really want to create a space where heart based business owners can connect with each other. If I do recreate this forum because we had one for five years momentum, it's not going to be heavily moderated by me. I don't think it's a surprise to any of you here listening that social media and keeping up with notifications is not my forte. It's not my strength. However, it has been so helpful for me and others in the past to be able to get feedback on ideas, to understand what people have tried to create. Polls. If you want people to weigh in on the title of something that you're doing or which podcast cover art should you use. So that. That is what I miss from having transitioned off that jumbo social network. It's been good to take a break and sort of reimagine things. As I shared with you in earlier episodes, one of my mantras for this year was radical reimagining. Everything is up for grabs. So this is my plug. If you want to join us in insider bff, it is tons of fun. I love this group of people so much. I've known many of them. They've known each other now for over five years. But if you're new, we just welcome you with open arms. I mean, it's. I'm very shy when I join things like this, and I'm honestly a lurker in chief, but I can tell you right now, this group is so warm, so welcoming. It's just a blast. Join us@itsfreetime.com BFF and now onto the official part of today's show. So as a result of my procrastination on this episode about precrastination, that means that I'm recording with the sound of rain in the background and riders pitter patter up and down the hallway. If he's not that he was just laying here, now he's like panting running up and down the hallway. But he was just laying here and he's so cute. Michael just took him outside to play Frisbee and so he's all out of breath. And I figure, you know, what is it the worst thing in the world if you have Ryder panting the sound of my happy dog. I get so happy if he's just laying in the same room as me. So that's. That's what's happening in today's podcast soundscape. And now let's talk about procrastination. So it's really funny because first of all, I love this word. This word is kind of defined almost in a negative way. So the official definition is a person who has the urge to get everything done in advance. The term was coined by psychologists in 2014 to explain why some people do things sooner than they really need to be done, even if it costs them more time and energy. I got that from a website called precrastinators.com Some of the examples they gave and I will tell you, I'm married to someone who thrives on last minute deadlines and all nighters and he would be the first one to tell you that doing things too early doesn't serve the project. He believes that like a fruit ripening, just the fruit's not ripe yet. If you try to pick it too early out of sheer determination to just check things off of a to do list, it's not going to be as robust, it won't be as ripe. To stick with the fruit metaphor, let me share a recent example of this with you. Free Time the book is going to come out March 22, 2022. That will be shortly after the south by Southwest conference. Now I know that in the times that we're in, who the hell knows if we'll be able to meet in person or not, if I'll be able to make my way to Austin or or not. But I think I will. I launched my first book, Life After College at South by and it was such a joy. All my Twitter friends came to life. They had been These small tiny 1 inch squares on my computer and I got to meet all these people in person for the first time. I freaking loved it. The serendipity of just walking down the street, running into someone, they tell you where they're going, you turn around and go have coffee with them. Too good. I did an event for Pivot. I did a keynote for For Pivot, I hosted the Comcast Social Media Lounge two years in a row and the Pivot event I did led to speaking engagements for the rest of the year. It was such a positive thing, just so directly in line with my intended audience. It's a big application, by the way, to fill out to speak at south by Southwest. There's it's something called the Panel picker. I'll put the link in the show notes and then people have to vote for your talk. So hint, hint. I may ask you to help me to help vote for the talk when when the panel picker goes live. It's a pretty intense and detailed application that one has to fill out. Not just the name of the talk, who it's for, the description, your bio samples of your past work speaking resume of past events. It's, it's a lot. There's more than even that. So I sat down one day and I I spent a couple hours and start filling it in and it wasn't due for three more weeks. But as I was sitting there knowing that I've been so immersed in the book and missing all kinds of other things that are just out of my awareness because I'm so focused on the book instead of sleeping on it, everything that I wrote and then checking everything or spell checking or sending it to a friend or my dad who often will copy edit things for me, I just said, screw it, I'm hitting submit right now. And no sooner did I hit submit, then that red squiggly little line showed up in my Google Doc where I had copied everything over and I have a typo. I misspelled the word bureaucracy in the talk description because I was saying that who is this for? It's for business owners who want to bust bottlenecks and bureaucracy or something like that. Oh. So as soon as I hit submit, I realized, dang it, there's this glaring typo. They say very clearly that you cannot edit your talk after it is submitted. So I wrote to the team, I haven't heard back, and I'm like, you know what? This is the problem with procrastinating that, that, that I get so obsessed where I didn't want to forget to hit submit. I didn't even want this hanging over my head anymore, the deadline, what I needed to do that it just in a, in a fit of almost stubbornness, I just said, just get it outta my plate, I' sure it's fine. And then boom, there's a typo. So if I had not panic, procrastinated, it wasn't really panic, it's just this. I cannot have another thing hanging over my head and I actually would rather have procrastinated and have a misspelling than miss the deadline altogether, which I just felt I was at risk for. With all the different life things swirling around, boom. This is what happened.

More than this, this example where it kind of goes haywire. I think procrastination is a great skill and, and often the reason I'm mentioning it here on the free time podcast is that it has to do with systems. It has to do with structure and project management and planning things in advance. I have always believed that when launching something, whether it's a book, a course, a program, every single thing that can be done in advance should be so that when the launch weeks approach, you're not losing your mind, that you're not doing things, whether it's drafting emails, drafting thank you messages that could have been done weeks, if not months ago. When you're launching something, you have to have all your attention focused on in the moment, responding to new things that come up Requests that come in in the case of launching a book Podcast interviews. Those are things that yes, you can even record podcast interviews months before and then ask people to release them only once it's closer to the launch date. But there's so many unknowns that can come up during a launch that it's a very intense, high pressure time. This is why I really believe in even if your to do list is a hundred items long that months prior, you gotta start looking at it and go, what can I do? What can I do? What else can I draft? And of course engaging your team in this too.

We'll be right back just after this.

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What sparked this episode today? This topic is a New Yorker article called Clocks Ticking. Can Deadlines Bring Us to Life? By Rachel Syme S Y M E Not sure how she pronounces that. She's talking about a new book that came out called the Deadline Effect, so I'll link to that in the show notes. But I just have to read you these two paragraphs from her New Yorker article, so pardon the slightly long excerpt, but I think you'll find them as entertaining as I did. Rachel writes My relationship to deadlines, like that of almost everyone I know, is full of contradictions. I crave them and avoid them, depend on them and resent them. Due dates form the rhythm of my life as a journalist, and there is some comfort in these external expectations. But a deadline is also a train barreling down the track, and you're the ones strapped to the rails. The time sensitive obligations that add both structure and suspense to our lives. Tax returns, loan payments, license renewals, job applications, event planning, teeth cleanings, biological clocks can inspire nauseating dread as much as plucky action.

As the last day to complete a task approaches, we all respond to the pressure differently. Some well adjusted, diligent people jump in figuring that the anxiety of an unpaid bill or an unfinished project is far more painful than the difficulty of sticking to a sensible schedule. But others, like me, live in blissful denial, at least until the last minute, when, fueled by adrenaline, caffeine and self loathing, we bolt to the end, vowing that we'll do it all differently next time. We won't. And still others, like Murphy, dismiss deadlines altogether, believing them to be at best imaginary and at worst anathema to creativity. Murphy is the author of the Deadline Effect. So this is Jenny again. Isn't that just so good? I'm curious, what are you? Are you a procrastinator or a precrastinator? Are you happy? Some procrastinators are really happy. I learned that on Myers Briggs when I did the certification that typically if you're a J the last letter, you love checklists to do lists, you like to get things done early and you hate deadlines. They give you tremendous anxiety knowing that you haven't finished something, it's hanging over your head and that peas perceivers. On Myers Briggs J is judging function. The perceivers tend to work more like bumblebees buzzing around, kind of going in circles, exploring, thinking, and it's only at the very last minute that they get their motivation and their drive to get something over the finish line and that they work really well with deadlines and that that's what helps them thrive. So I'm curious what you are. I'm curious if you're happy with it and I will share that I do think there's a time for both. So with working on the free time book we are on a super crash schedule. When I had the meeting with portfolio I knew that even 2023 pub date was optimistic that it would take us probably, I don't know, at least a month of back and forth shopping the book, working out contracts. They weren't interested by the way and at that time it was called delightfully tiny teams. So they will be surprised. The book has evolved since even that meeting. But I also knew that no matter what publisher I went with we would be looking at 2023 at best. So part of the reason I decided to go hybrid A it just fits heart based business and the ethos of free time, agile, independent, I would have full creative control. It just felt like the spirit of this book. And I also knew that we are riding a major trend wave of people working from home and starting their own businesses and pivoting out of jobs and pivoting into self employment and I don't, I don't want to miss it. So I had this fire in my belly like get this book out asap. And that meant that I was writing it really. I started drafting it late December. I started writing 100 words a day with my friend MBS and holding each other accountable for that. I worked on the proposal and sample chapters. January, February, March. But April is when I signed on the dotted line. I said, we're doing this hybrid publishing with Idea Press and that means that this book will go to the printer on September 1st. So the writing at the time of this recording, it's the last days of July. It means that the book goes into typesetting next. So I have to finish all editorial updates. I had to write, developmental, edit, copy edit, proofread the book, the manuscript between April and the end of July.

When you look within that project plan, it means that every single week there are big deadlines that either me or one of the editors on the team has to hit. And in this case it's hard to procrastinate when it's already a crash schedule. And sometimes I was procrastinating because there's. I have a lot of anxiety in life and in this process and sometimes I just couldn't even bear to look at my book, even though I knew that I needed to make a certain amount of steady progress every day. Sometimes those breaks are good too. Taking time away, getting perspective, renewing, refreshing my energy. But I've found that even with my most diligent efforts, I'm still up to the minute. I'm still down to the wire of what I need to send to somebody. And oh my goodness, it's so nerve wracking this stage that I'm at right now, right before I hand the text over to be typeset, meaning laid out in the actual indesign file. It's like, is every word correct? Is every piece of punctuation correct? I don't know, is every story, does it need to stay? Is the book too long? Is. Oh my God, the questions are endless. They feel never ending and they're so nerve wracking. So in a way, I don't want to procrastinate on this. I want to get it right down to every word, period, comma, colon, you name it.

I take you on that behind the book tangent to say that when you have big projects and really tight timelines, there's really no benefit, I would say, to either pre or procrastinating. I mean there are, there are benefits to both, but it's kind of. You have to keep moving at a very steady clip. Meanwhile, what's interesting with the example of a book project is that I can also look at the launch date six months ahead, seven months ahead. I think every author feels that, as I think Seth Godin said it, but it's a Chinese proverb. You know, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Barring that start today. And then Seth has modified it like the, the best time to start marketing a book was three years ago. Barring that start today. Even the timeline that I'm on of having really six months after I turn it in is going to be super short. There's going to be a lot to do. So as soon as the book goes to the printer, my main focus, in addition to this podcast will be every single thing I need to create to have a successful launch week way out in March of 2022, which we all know is going to be here before we know it. So creating ads, creating quote cards. Right now I'm getting blurbs and permissions for people who are in the book, writing email sequences that say the book is out, pre order your copy or go get your copy on Amazon. I will need to record the audiobook. I will need to create pre order bonuses. Who knows what those are going to be. So I see precrastination as very, very important to preserve energy during the launch itself and also to preserve sanity. Yes, of course my procrastination comes from a little bit of neuroses and a little bit of anxiety. But it's also a way to not stress the team. I don't believe that the team should be overly stressed out because the owner is procrastinating. Now sometimes I do this to my team unintentionally, I think I said earlier, but it is Thursday afternoon and I'm recording the episode that's gonna go live tomorrow, Friday morning at 5am of course I don't wanna wake up at 4am nor do I think you wanna listen to my voice with the 4am Frog sounds and vocal fry like this. But here I am. And you know what? I'm paying for it because. Because of my procrastination, it means I have to do all the editing myself, prep the show notes, myself. Every single thing that we have in our life of a podcast production process is getting sidestepped. And it means that I'm not doing other things, like I'm not editing the final, final, final edits on my book. So there you go. There are very real trade offs to procrastinating. There's an article I'll also put in the show notes from the Atlantic. Precrastination worse than procrastination. So I just think it's really interesting. And not to mention the book itself, which I gotta check out because I don't know where I fall within it. But the deadline effect, that's the one that the New Yorker article referenced. There's a category called time voyeurism, which is knowing how people spend their time. And I just think that's such a funny term. I do share in the book free time, how I do my batching and how I structure my days and my weeks. And anyway, time voyeurism, it's like, I also think we can look at how do people approach projects and timelines and, and my question to you is, if what you're doing right now is totally working for you, amazing, and please share it with us. Leave us a voice note. It's freetime.com ask. Tell us what works for you. But if the way that you're working right now is not working and you're procrastinating, because I would say that probably creates the most stress of all. Look at what support structures can you put in place? What systems would allow you to still somewhat save things till the last minute, but still get a little more support or a little more distance? For example, the article talks about how sometimes newspaper magazine editors tell their writers that things are due a week or two weeks early. I did this with the hybrid publishing team at Idea Press. I said, listen, I want us to coast into every deadline feeling good, feeling calm. I want us to just, if not be early for every deadline on our project plan about this book. So when I asked the project manager who creates the initial timeline they're using Asana, my team and I use notion. I said to her, please be really abundant in terms of working backwards. You know, be aggressive in terms of what's due, when, so that we are coasting to the finish line with ease, and that there's plenty of margin around every single date. There were some dates that I missed. I was two months late of getting her the information she needed to get the Amazon page up. So I. I still don't know if it will be up by the time this episode goes live, but I do know that it will be any day now. That was an example where I was waiting for so many moving parts, endorsements from people, social graphics, the COVID thumbnail to be finalized, that I just, I just couldn't meet that deadline. But the question for you is, what structures, what systems, what team support can you put in place where either you're tricking yourself of what the deadlines are or you're giving yourself enough buffer to procrastinate? Or in the case of things like this podcast and writing, sometimes it's helpful to do your thinking in advance so that when you sit down to write or to record, you don't have to think and record or think and write. The thinking has already happened when you're working, walking, driving, showering, et cetera. You've already come up with, okay, what am I going to talk about, what am I going to write about? Or whatever it is that you are working on. For that reason, I also really like collection buckets, collecting ideas, collecting topics, collecting tasks that you're going to need to do for a massive project so that you can really see what is my energy like today and how does that inform what I want to work on.

At the end of it all? Even with our best attempts to procrastinate, I will be the first to tell you that sometimes life events and my anxiety and just other things completely consume me and I can't do a damn thing. And those are the times that I'm most glad to A have A team, B have systems and automation in place in the business that help things not fall apart while I'm offline, and C to have creative margin in my project plans because as my friend Laura pointed out, she's like, maybe you're just the type of person that you need six months of total retreat before you create your next thing or go your next direction in business. And I will, I will admit, I'm not. I'm not really good at just powering through my down times. I need time away, I need space, I need quiet. And that's part of it for me with precrastination is that I kind of avoid life events that sort of take me out and, and really deflate or dishearten me. You know, these things happen. It's. Life is complex. I'd rather create some space so that when these things come up, it's okay and there's room to take the time that I need. And there have been other times where I can't do that if I'm hired for a speaking event. I remember years ago, 2013ish I was like snot nose crying in the morning over a breakup and then had to get on stage in in front of a couple hundred people and deliver this event. That's one of those situations where rain or shine, you gotta rally, you gotta get that energy up, get on stage and perform just the same way that I would on my best days. But for anything that is asynchronous, any creative projects, that's that's the consideration today is what can you possibly create in advance and what structures can you put in place to give you some more margin around the deadlines themselves? I would love to hear what you think about all of this. Leave me a voice note@itsfreetime.com Ask and don't forget if you want to join us in our insider BFF community. It's going to get only more exciting as we lead up to the free time book launch next year. It is such a wonderful group of people and you'll be supporting the podcast too, which I really, really appreciate. You can learn more and join us@itsfreetime.com BFF thank you so much for being here for listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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