Afford Anything - How to Overcome Procrastination and Perfectionism, with Stephen Guise

Episode Date: October 24, 2016

#48: Imagine that your goal is to build a flat stomach and stronger biceps. But deep down, subconsciously, you’re afraid you might fail. So you procrastinate. “I’ll work out tomorrow,” you tell yourself. “Or next week. Or next year.” As a result, you don’t make progress. But let’s flip the script. Instead of focusing on the result — your appearance — you focus on the smallest possible action. You create a new goal: Everyday, you’ll do a single push-up. You’ve designed a goal that cannot fail. The moment you commit to this goal, you drop to the ground and do a push-up. Congratulations. You’ve succeeded today. You repeat this everyday for a week. You build a new habit and new sense of self-identity. You’re the type of person who does daily push-ups. One day, while executing your single push-up, you figure, “Ah, what the heck,” and pump out a few more. One push-up grows into five, ten, fifteen, twenty. You focus on tiny actions, rather than their potential long-term payoff. Eventually, you get results. In today's episode, Stephen Guise, author of Mini-Habits, describes how the "one push-up" mentality accelerated his progress faster than a "100-pushup" mentality ever could. He explains why he decided to start focusing on actions, he shares the technique that he uses to conquer writer's block, and he talks about embracing "imperfectionism." Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but not everything, and how you spend your limited resources, your money, time, energy, focus, attention. How you choose to spend all of that day by day defines your life. Sorry, not to get too heady, but these are some important decisions that we have to make. My name's Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. In every episode, we explore how you can optimize your money, energy, time, career, attention, all of those things in your your life in which you can do anything, but not everything. We explore how to make better decisions and how to choose the path that's right for you. Today, we're going to talk about a problem that

affects a lot of people, procrastination. My guest on today's show is named Stephen Gies. He's the author of a book called Mini Habits, and I brought him onto the show to talk about some of his ideas on why we procrastinate and what we can do about it. Stephen and I talk about many ways to beat procrastination, which you're going to hear about in this upcoming episode. We also talk about perfectionism, which is closely related to procrastination. We discuss how to beat perfectionism,

how to become an imperfectionist, so that you can move closer to your goals. So without delay, this is Stephen guys talking about How to Overcome Procrastination and Perfectionism. You've written about how to defeat procrastination. And I think that this is a problem that a lot of people have to one degree or another. And in particular, you wrote a post that lists five different procrastination triggers,

fun, fear, overwhelm, your brain overheating, and responsibility. I'd like to talk about these. Let's go through these one by one. So things that might, let's start with just the problem. Let's start with things that might cause a person to procrastinate or might trigger procrastination. Sure. First, you mentioned fun. Can you kind of talk about that?

Yeah, that's just the classic shiny object syndrome where you're attracted to another activity that's more fun. Such as? YouTube is a pretty common one for me. And that's instead of doing something productive that, that's going to pay off in the long run. So just that instant gratification, that's always tempting, especially today when we have it on our phones, on our computers. It's really difficult to avoid it.

It's always accessible. Absolutely. The next one I thought was very, you know, that's the one that I think doesn't get talked about enough, and that is fear as a procrastination trigger. Yeah, fear is a very basic human trait. a possible human trait. And it's just there's so many things to be afraid of.

Like, I'm afraid I won't produce good enough content so I don't want to write. I'll fear that other people will judge me for what I do. There are a lot of sources of fear and a very common response to fear is to avoid it, which would mean avoiding the behavior itself. What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of failure? Afraid of success? Yeah, I would say both.

Success, I think, is scary to us because we're not there yet. We're actually more comfortable with the things we've experienced. And if we've only experienced, say, a job that we hate, we're oddly more comfortable with that than being wildly successful in some ways. So it's almost like fear of the unknown. Yes, exactly. What about the third procrastination trigger that you've talked about? and I'll list all of these in the show notes, is overwhelm.

So when we feel overwhelmed, we tend to procrastinate, which that sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, because if you're overwhelmed, that means you have a lot to do, and then you don't do it, which doesn't make sense. But it actually does make sense to the brain, because when you feel overwhelmed, it's not actually true overwhelm, I would say. I'd say it's more of an illusion of overwhelm, because being, Being overwhelmed is trying to do more than you're capable of doing in any given moment.

Really, the only thing we can do is focus on one step at a time. But when we know we have a lot to do over the coming minutes, days, weeks, whatever, we can put all of that pressure and all of that work on a single moment of our lives. And that's literally impossible to do. So your brain will basically overheat and you'll have to. to distract yourself with cat videos. So overwhelm often stems from not looking at the next small step. It stems from looking too far down the line.

And you could say it's looking at what you can't do instead of what you can currently do. Actually, that leads perfectly into the fourth procrastination trigger that you listed, which is you describe it as your brain overheating, but it's that feeling, that uncomfortable sense of all of the demands. Yeah, that's exactly right. And this can happen during work as well as before work. Overwhelm can obviously cause brain overheating because you're just thinking and trying to do too much at once. My brain tends to overheat as I work as well. And I don't think I'm unique in that. If you're just working very hard, especially mental work, I think is often more draining than physical work, for me anyway. But before I reach that point, I will often kind of feel it coming on. And before I know it, I'll just be watching YouTube videos or doing something just because I needed that distraction.

And it's almost like it happens without me really being conscious of it. We had Laura Vandercam on an earlier episode. And she said that if you don't take a real break, your brain will take a fake one. Yes, strongly agree with that. And then really quickly, the fifth procrastination trigger that you listed is responsibility. So just getting tired of the responsibilities that you have and starting to neglect them. Yeah, and you could tie this into overwhelm as well. It's just what we think is expected of us and what we expect of ourselves.

That can overwhelm us. And when we're overwhelmed, we tend to do something else. We seek escape. Exactly. So what are some of the solutions to that? How do we beat procrastination? The best way to beat procrastination is with limits, because limits basically address all of these, fear, overwhelm, brain overheating, and responsibility. If you place a strict limit on an activity,

whether it's reducing something to a small step you'd like to do now, or reducing the amount of time you intend to work on something, addressing them one by one, I think. it can be kind of fun to achieve these really small goals and get that small success. Let me pause you here. Before we go through that, can you describe what you mean by limits? Limits on behavior. Like, instead of just saying, I'm going to work on this project, you'd say, I'm going to do this specific step, like open up my word document and type 50 words. Is it better to have limits that are based on a given output like writing 50 words or a given time limit, like 10 minutes? I would say that depends on the situation.

Generally, if I'm really resisting something, then I'll need to just give myself the first step and say, okay, just open the word document and write a sentence or two or 50 words. if I'm kind of semi-resisting but not super strongly resisting, then I'll say, okay, I'll just work for 10 minutes. And it's really not that important. The most important thing is to get the process started because I'll plan for one step and then work for an hour, or I'll plan for 10 minutes and then work for an hour. The most important thing is to get started on the task

and let momentum carry you further. So putting a manageable limit on a task gives you that entryway. It gets you to that first step. Right, right. And it also addresses those procrastination factors as well. It reduces fear by reducing the size of what you're trying to do, especially because you're no longer thinking of the big picture, like, oh, what if they don't like it?

Or what if it's terrible? No, you're just thinking about doing this one little, part. You're not even thinking about the results of the action, which is another thing I write a lot about is not caring about results. So this is a way to do that in action. What do you mean by not caring about results? A lot of times it's easy to get dependent and attached to results. Like you won't want to do something unless you get a positive result. The problem with that, of course, is that results are rarely, if ever, guaranteed. And also that the process is what leads to results.

So it makes more sense to focus on the process anyway, if you really want results. So for example, instead of getting hung up on, I'm going to start a company and I want to sell X number of widgets within the next month. Instead, you focus on, well, I want to start a company and develop very good systems in place for how to manufacture widgets, how to sell them, how to handle customer phone calls and emails. You know, you focus on the building of the company and let the results be the natural consequence. Yes, exactly.

Let's talk about perfectionism, because that plays a large role in procrastination as well. You've written on your blog that in order to beat procrastination, you have to be an imperfectionist. That's right. And in order to be an imperfectionist, you wrote that you have to consciously redirect what you care about. You have to manage your cares. Yes. Can you talk a bit about that? I mean, results certainly sounds like one example.

What are some of the other ways that you can manage your cares? Yeah, that results is a big one. The basic idea behind it is to care more about the actual task and less about all of the details. of how the task will work out and what people think about it. I wrote a list here, don't care about problems, care about making progress despite them, or care about solutions if you're intending to fix the problems. Don't care about what other people think,

care about who you want to be and what you want to do. And here's a big one. Care less about doing it right. Care more about doing it at all. That in a nutshell is being an imperfection. It's saying I may not do this perfectly or even well, but I'm going to do it. And that practice really helps you do things better and quote unquote more perfectly in future attempts. Have you ever thought to yourself?

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Head to nerd. me slash paula. That's nerd, n-E-r-d-n-r-D-M-E-S-P-A-U-L-A. So how do you get to that state? Let's say that you want to develop that mindset, but you're having a hard time doing it. You know, in theory, sounds great. You would love to care more about getting it done than being perfect. But how do you actually change your mentality?

Practice, that's the only way. You practice by taking small steps, ideally small daily steps so that they become habitual and change the brain. That's, I think, the best way to practice because a lot of perfectionism is actually related to context. Like, you don't want to do this task because you're tired. You don't want to do the task because it's too big. We have all these reasons in different situations not to.

do tasks. So when you shrink the task down into something that's laughably small or stupid small, as I like to say, then that really cuts through basically every excuse because we're just talking about one push-up or writing 50 words or reading two pages in a book. And by doing that task, you're practicing imperfectionism, as I call it. That's extremely valuable. Not only for the activity itself, but for changing your mindset about how you approach life. So let's go to the one push-up example. Can you describe that? Okay, so let's say you would like to get in good shape, and maybe you decide to do that. You want to do 100 push-ups a day or even a full gym workout. The concept behind one push-up per day is that you're creating a goal that you can't

fail to do. And when you do it every single day over a period of time, you'll change your relationship with exercise, not just push-ups, but exercise in general. It'll go from a, oh, wow, I exercise today, like a special occasion. It'll change it into more of a mundane every day. Oh, yeah, exercise. I do that every day sort of thing. And that is the mark of success. When something becomes normal to you, that's when you know it's a part of you, a part of your identity. If exercise is your goal and it's part of your identity, like you say, oh, I exercise every day, it's not a big deal, then you've succeeded and you can get in great shape. Right. And again, it sounds here like you're focusing on the task and not the result, because instead of setting a goal that says, like, I want to be

buff and toned, you're saying, you're focusing on that task. I want to do a push-up. Yeah, exactly. If you cared at all about the result, you would not try to do one push-up because that is not going to give you an impressive result on any single iteration. Doing a single push-up on a single day seems almost worthless. So it's definitely not about the result. It's about changing your relationship with that behavior in order to get a

better result later. Right. Breaking down the procrastination barrier by virtue of forming the habit. Yeah, and there are actually two benefits. One is you break through procrastination in that moment by getting the behavior started. The first time I did one push-up, my first mini-habit before I had coined the term, I turned it into a 30-minute workout. And this was the same 30-minute workout that I couldn't get myself motivated to do 10 minutes before that. So that really opened my mind to the power of momentum and just getting the process started. And then I ended up with the big result that I was aiming for, a 30-minute workout. That's interesting to me that you say that because the big result was actually still a task that you're doing.

So the big result wasn't what the scale said or the number of inches around your waistline. it was to be able to do a much bigger task. Yeah, and that I kind of betrayed my mindset there. A 30-minute workout itself isn't that amazing either, but in my mind it had become this massive challenge, and I had a tremendous amount of resistance to it because it represented everything I wanted to do physically. I wanted to get in good shape,

but I knew I was lazy, lethargic, all of those things. So I let the weight of what I wanted to do affect how I saw that 30-minute workout. So there are layers of this at play. What advice would you give to any listener who is currently struggling with procrastination and perfectionism? What is one thing that they can do today

to help break through those barriers? If I were to put it in a thought, the thought would be, oh, I'll just do this. right now. This would be something very small and non-intimidating. Once you get into the habit of doing that and just starting things that you would like to make progress in, you'll find that you just make much more progress than the classic way of wrestling with yourself about trying to do this great, huge task today and get this big victory. Because as I experienced in my early writing career, one I did it that way. I would write maybe 3,000 words on one day, which is a great day. That's pretty productive.

But then I wouldn't write for the next four days. And it would just always be this huge, big war. And I've found that when you just make it a little bit more casual and just make your goals easy and your step small, you can stack those wins infinitely and make a lot more progress and change your brain in the process if you're doing it every day. Well, thank you so much. It's been great to talk to you. Where can the listeners find you if they want to read more of your work? My website is stevengyes.com, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-G-U-I-S-E.

And my book is Mini Habits. You can find that on Amazon or really any of the major book resellers. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Stephen. Let's review some of the key takeaways from this interview. First, if something is overwhelming, counterintuitively, it results in not taking action. It results in wanting to escape it or avoid it. So in order to avoid that feeling of overwhelm, break a task down into the smallest possible step, even if it's a ludicrously small step, even if it means doing one pushup or writing 50 words. Fifty words is nothing. There are many emails that are longer than 50.

words. But by breaking a task down into such a bite-sized digestible little step, you beat that feeling of overwhelm that triggers procrastination. And by doing so, by telling yourself, I'm just going to do one push-up, or I'm just going to write 50 words, or I'm just going to work on my business for 10 minutes, you build initial momentum. And once that momentum has begun, you might work on your business for an hour. Sometimes getting started is the hardest part. And so giving yourself the lowest barrier to entry to get started by making the starting point as painless as possible. You increase the probability that you'll move ahead and you'll ultimately possibly get better results than people who are obsessing over the scope

of what lays ahead. So that's key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two is to focus on what you yourself are going to do rather than what the result of that is going to be. So rather than focusing on, oh, I'd like to be a millionaire, or oh, I'd like to have six-pack abs, focus on the task that lays ahead. Oh, I'd like to invest an additional $200 a month. Oh, I'd like to practice yoga for 10 minutes a day. And by virtue of focusing on action rather than result, you are, again, surprisingly, more likely to ultimately achieve those results. It's a little bit of a paradox, but by focusing on effort rather than consequence, you up the likelihood of getting that desired consequence, that desired result.

So those are the two big takeaways that I got from this conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Head to podcast.offordainthing.com, where you can read show notes from today's episode, as well as subscribe to email updates for future episodes. If you enjoy the show, please head to iTunes and leave us a review. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pantt.

this is the Afford-Anything Podcast. You can browse past episodes either on iTunes or on our website, podcast.aford-anything.com. Thanks so much for tuning in. See you next week.