Mastering Procrastination: From Delay to Action

This is episode 313 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we unlock the secrets of self mastery for leaders who want to elevate their impact in both leadership and life. Your journey to being your best so you can give your best starts here and now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Hello and welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast. I'm K. Schneider, your host and here I am with you to talk about something that I bet you do. I bet you do. This thing. It's all about procrastination. Procrastination. We're going to master procrast. Procrastination. We're going to master this procrastination and turn delay into action. I'm going to give you today 3 strategies and actions to really help with any area of life that you're procrastinating in. First, we want to understand it because I can tell you I have been a master procrastinator and rather I would like to master it instead of be a master at it. So I'm going to master procrastination and I'm going to tell you some of the strategies that I've personally used to make a difference in my life. When I was in university, I literally was the all nighter queen. Why? Because I would delay that essay. Delay that essay, Delay that essay until finally it was due the next day. And I literally would have to spend the whole night doing it. And it would be on one of those. I'd have to go to the lab, the. The computer lab inside one of the main buildings of the university so I could use a computer because nobody had laptops back then. And then you had to hope that the printer would be working because it needed to be typewritten and nobody did anything digitally at that point. And it was brutal. I would put myself through the worst all nighters trying to CR this essay in and ultimately I would actually write a decent product. So I was getting anywhere between A's and B's and getting these grades. I look at it, I could have given myself so much more breathing room, so much less stress, and probably gotten a better grade too, had I not been procrastinating so badly. It was just ridiculous. And now I look at it go, huh? I don't procrastinate like that anymore. But there are still areas in my life that I'm procrastinating. And I'll bet you are too. I'll bet you're procrastinating somewhere in your life that you don't want to be. So I can think of a couple areas. For me, one of them is the photos on my phone. I have so many photos on my phone from if you see the YouTube video, there's a fly that just landed on my nose. So good. One of the areas that I've procrastinated horribly is all these photos that have built up on my phone and they're on my phone specifically for the Wycliffe Lodge project and they're documenting the history, they're documenting the construction, they're documenting all of the things that we've done and the direction that we're going. So we have all this amazing evidence to put in these amazing story formats and yet I'm at risk of losing it all because it's sitting on my phone and I haven't put it into the shared Google Drive that I want to create. So unfortunately I've been procrastinating at this and putting this, this information, these images at risk because I'm not doing the work with it. There's other areas too. There's areas I want to have cleaned up that I want more organized that I just keep putting off, putting off, putting off and it's to my own detriment. So what is this procrastination? Are there different types of procrastination which. Yes there are. I will tell you all about it and why do we do it. So and then I'm going to give you these three strategies and in our. This is our topic for our coaching mastermind for our empowered team mastermind. This is our coaching topic for the month. We're going to go through more strategies and we're going to practice them. But I'm going to give you three that I think can help you right now. If you want to go deeper. Get in on our team mastermind and in on our topic this month because it's amazing. This is really life changing stuff. The stuff that gets us out of our heads, into our hearts and into action that makes a difference for our lives and everyone else's. So it's a really good thing. That's why I chose this topic. So what is it the general definition overall, is this a voluntary delay of an intended action despite knowing that there's going to be a negative consequence to not doing it? This delay is going to cause some problems in your life and you don't want it. So that's the general definition of procrastination. However, there's two different types that have been distinguished and this is by Dr. Joseph Ferrari. He's distinguished these really gone into what it means for people's lives, whether you're a situational procrastinator or a chronic procrastinator. Now, a situational procrastinator, this occurs in specific contexts. So it might be that you procrastinate only in the area of leaning or only in a certain area at work that might be your procrastination zone of choice. So it's a particular type type of task that feels overwhelming or unclear, but it doesn't affect every aspect of your life. Situational procrastination only affects a certain area, a certain context in your life. However, chronic procrastination is a different beast. This is more ingrained habitual behavior where one consistently delays tasks across many areas of life, often due to deeper emotional psychological reasons such as fear of failure or perfect perfectionism. You get this perfectionism behavior and then you just delay doing the thing because you figure it's too much or you're not going to get it all done and you're not going to do it right. That would be often the case for chronic procrastinators. Now, whether you're a situational procrastinator, which most of us are in some category of life, or you're a chronic procrastinator, and this is pervasive in all areas of your life, these strategies are still going to help you one way or another. So there's an example I'd like to highlight from research. This is where it's the. It's a fallacy. And this is from Timothy. The last name's Paykel. P Y C H Y L. And in this research he highlighted that there's this I'll feel like it later fallacy. And this is the belief that people will feel like doing the task later. In a study conducted with university students, Paykel found that procrastinators often wait for for the perfect mood or the motivation to start the task. And this approach not only delays the work that needs to be done or even the start of work which really needs to happen to get anything done, but it increases anxiety. So when we do even start the work or we're delaying it, we have this higher anxiety before we've even begun because we've delayed it so long, we're really shooting ourselves in the foot. And this demonstrates that this mood repair, procrastination is ineffective because motivation rarely arrives on its own. We don't just have this motivation fall from the sky and land on our laps and suddenly we've got it and then we're going to do the thing. So this feel like it later fallacy hurts us in many ways. We can go into research after research after research study, but I think you'd rather hear some of the strategies. So we're going to go into three strategies that I promise you, that have really worked for me massively. So the first one is breaking it down into smaller pieces. One of the things and one of the ways that I've done this, especially with the example of the photos that I mentioned, is simply by giving myself a time frame. If I've given myself a time frame instead of trying to tackle the whole task, then I know that I'm going to work on the photos for 30 minutes. And that works for me so much. And what it does is it builds this sense of momentum. I started it, I feel like I've gotten some stuff done on it, and now I want to keep going. That 30 minutes is the biggest gift I've given myself. And just blocking that amount off now, I just broke it into a smaller chunk with time. But you can easily break it into a smaller chunk by going through, for instance, if I'm giving that photos as example, I'm going to go through one month of photos, and that's it. And that's all I'm doing right now. That's all I'm committed to doing right now. And again, it gives that sense of momentum. So the research shows that overwhelm is a key cause of procrastination, and that's why breaking it into a smaller chunk has us not feeling so overwhelmed that we just can't do it all. Overwhelm. That feeling, that emotion comes from the perception that it's too much and there's so many things or so much that we aren't going to be able to handle it. So breaking large tasks into smaller tasks, smaller amounts or smaller time frames, those manageable steps reduce the feeling of overwhelm. Now we just need to start that process by having the thought of, I'm just going to do a small amount. I don't have to do it all at once. So then the action step is just picking one amount of time or one amount of the task that feels less overwhelming. And start with that. Write down the three smallest steps, just the tiniest steps that you can start with, and that's where you start and commit to 30 minutes, and then that's it. And then schedule when you're going to do your next 30 minutes. So that is strategy number one. Breaking it into smaller time frames or smaller amounts and that creates those pieces that are manageable instead of the overwhelming thing that you're avoiding, AKA procrastinating. So that's number one. Number two, we just talked about overwhelm. But there's another factor that happens massively in procrastination, and it's called perfection. And if you are stepping into perfectionistic behavior, then chances are you're avoiding doing the thing because you don't feel like you're going to get it right. You're not going to do it well enough. It's not going to be 100%. You recognize any of those phrases? Because that's what happens. It's people pleasing and perfectionism. These are behaviors that often cause procrastination. So shift the mindset to progress over perfection. That's the strategy, shifting to progress over perfection. So when we embrace elements of imperfection and prioritize with finishing a task imperfectly, instead of making it flawless, we actually have it done. Instead of having it flawless and never complete, never even being able to be flawless, then we've got something finished imperfect, but we've made massive progress. So the action step in this is finding the task where perfectionism is holding you back and committing to completing it. 80% good enough instead of a hundred percent. Embracing that imperfection allows you to move beyond and beyond the delay and into getting it done, leaving the procrastination behind. All right, that's strategy number two. Strategy number three. This one's really important, and I mentioned it earlier in Paykel's research, and it's the focusing on the action instead of the motivation. The fallacy of I'll be motivated later, I'll want to do it later. Later is when I'll want to get started or I'll have the feeling of motivation. That's the thing. That's a real problem. So instead, if we use our brain and focus on the action that we want to get done, a small action, like we mentioned earlier in the strategies, a small action that we want to get done, then we're not relying on the feeling of motivation. So Paykel's research shows that waiting for motivation leads to procrastination, but the motivation comes after the action. And that's the crazy part about it. We're waiting for motivation, but we actually feel motivated when we've taken action. It's a bizarre thing. We get more motivation from taking action, not the other way around. So the action step here is picking one task and committing to working on it for just five minutes to build the momentum. Because once you've started it you feel like, oh, I want to keep going. I'm so happy I actually did this amount. I'm so happy I got this much done. And it leads to the feeling of motivation. And that can create more momentum, thereby completing more tasks or more than we had done earlier. So that is the third one. Now I'm going to highlight another part of this. It's an overarching thing that you may see in these three strategies, and it's the management of our own emotions. When we have the feeling of overwhelm, we have an urge to take an action or an inaction. The action would be procrastination. The inaction would be to do, to not do the thing that we're supposed to do. So typically it's coming from a feeling of overwhelm. Now, what's precipitating that feeling is likely some level of thinking or mindset that says, I can't do it all. It's too much. How am I going to get this done? So thoughts or questions in your mind that are creating the state of overwhelm, thereby fueling the inaction or action of procrastination. So I'm highlighting this overarching management of emotions, which really comes from a lot, from managing our own brain, managing our own thinking, considering and becoming aware of the thoughts that we're having and whether we're choosing to believe that thought, choosing to honor that thought, and then that's fueling an emotional state. So I highlight that as the last major, major tip, major point so that you can realize that, wait a second, this is really stemming from my brain, my thoughts and my emotional state. And if I can become aware of those thoughts and manage that emotional state, then I'm in a specific state that can take more action overall. The call to action here is having that greater awareness that right there is all about what we're focusing on, so much of which is self mastery. That's the piece of empowerment environment. Really mastering our own emotional state and then taking one small step. One small step, One small step, one small step that creates the progress, that creates a little more of that feeling of motivation. And building upon each step creates momentum. I promise you, you will leave that process feeling empowered, feeling like you're getting more done. And now I'm feeling the motivation because I know what steps I'm taking next. Small actions that are going to make a big difference. You've got this. Keep being empowered. If you need those three strategies, listen again, write them down, share it with someone else who needs them too. You've got this. Go get it. Have a great day and a great rest of your week.

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