Shane Yadao explains how he beats procrastination by designing his environment and schedule to make it harder to slack off. He keeps moving after work, fills idle time with audio or books, and uses the frustration from occasional lapses to reinforce better habits.
How do you overcome procrastination? I think what comes to mind, and I think this is what I've done, is I put myself in positions to not be able to procrastinate. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think about, right, this, a body in motion stays in motion, right? So I realized what would make me start to procrastinate, right? So example, if I came home from work and, I knew I was tired, right? Most people come home tired. Some days I'd come more tired, come home more tired than others. And so I knew that if I came home, my natural tendency was to do the, ah, and kind of sit down and relax and procrastinate on the things that I probably should be doing while I'm kind of relaxing and procrastinating. So because I realized that, I started keeping my body in motion. I started setting myself up, so to speak, for success. I could just keep moving and not stopping. And I think that really helps. So whether it was that, things like that, or even creating an environment for myself that kept me wanting to do, right? So what was that? Making sure that I was listening, even though I didn't want to, listen to certain audios or read books. I would just start doing them even though I didn't want to do them, if that makes sense. And then it was crazy 'cause it would start to, it would perpetuate my desire to do more. You know, so just doing things because it was scheduled. And that's another thing, how do I stop procrastination is having things scheduled. I think most people, they just have such an open schedule that they give themselves the time to procrastinate. So for me at least, you know, and for us, I would say we scheduled our lives to where we had to, as we looked, you know, we looked at our calendars like we have to keep moving because there's something in there. Yes. You know, so yeah. Yeah.
And then so for me, the 3 steps to stop procrastinating was slap yourself and slap yourself and slap yourself. No, I'm just kidding.
1, 2, and 3. It works really, really good.
I mean, really, right? Like, uh, we, you know, we read so many books and information on how to or what not to do and all of that, but, um, it really was just being so frustrated with the results of procrastinating. Yeah, that eventually was like, just do it, Joey, you know? And it was just kind of like, you know, falling on your face, procrastinating again, and then being frustrated realizing the next time you don't want to be frustrated, you want to be prepared, and you just get better every time.
Yeah, I was gonna say, actually, to say we don't procrastinate, we'd be lying, right? Because there's things that we— yeah, there's times that we do. It's in our brain. Yeah, exactly. My alarm was set to get off for me to get up at 7:30, but I got up at 9:00. That's right. So it still happens. But exactly what you said, you learn from it. Yeah, you just learn from it. You realize the frustration of procrastination. Is not worth procrastinating. You just, you get better.
Yeah, especially if you like to do good work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
