SOLVED with Mark Manson - How to Stop Procrastinating, Solved

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and modern research, we break down why we delay the things that matter most—and how to actually stop. This isn't a “just set a timer” productivity talk. We’re diving deep into shame, identity, perfectionism, culture, and why procrastination is ultimately a *skill issue*, not a moral failure. We cover things like: How humans have thought about putting things off for over 2000 years, the real reason you avoid the most important tasks in your life, why “I work better under pressure” is (usually) BS, why self-compassion is actually more motivating than guilt, tons of practical, research-backed strategies you can start using todayAnd much, much, much more. We also put together a free companion guide with all the takeaways, references, and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here : https://solvedpodcast.com/procrastination Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁠⁠ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁠⁠⁠https://www.purpose.app⁠⁠⁠ Chapters 08:20 CHAPTER 1: What exactly is procrastination? 1:04:25 CHAPTER 2:Freud's Influence on Psychology 1:59:20 CHAPTER 3: Time Management 2:34:22 CHAPTER 4: Importance of Task Completion 2:59:22 CHAPTER 5: The Role of Technology in Procrastination 3:28:09 CHAPTER 6: Introduction to the RAIN Method 3:40:21 CHAPTER 7: The 80-20 of Procrastination Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amazon presents Laura versus Fruit Flies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Welcome to Solved, the Self-Help podcast for smart people.

My name is Mark Manson, three-time, number one New York Times best-selling author, and this is my co-host and longtime lead researcher, Drew Bernie. Now, Drew and I have been in the personal growth and mental health space for a combined 30 years now, and we've had enough. We've had enough of the bullshit, empty promises, and fake solutions. Every episode of Solved, our goal is to create the most comprehensive evidence-based value-delivering podcast. on earth on that specific topic. And today's topic is procrastination. Now, the catch of solved is that whatever topic we cover, our goal is that it is the last time you will ever feel a need

to listen to a podcast on that topic. And this is the last time we can make an episode covering this topic. Therefore, our promise to you is that if you make the commitment to get through the entire episode and implement the advice, your procrastination will be solved. Drew, I have two things to say before we get started. Okay. Before we solve procrastination for the entire world.

You're welcome, everybody. First thing is, so listeners don't know this, but this is the second episode that's going out of this podcast. But this is actually the first one we're recording. And ironically, we procrastinated this episode like three months. How many months did it take us to shoot this thing? Pretty close to that, yeah. So be confident, listener, that your hosts are experts. Very familiar with the topic you're about to discuss.

Yes, exactly. And then the second thing I want to say is just I want to get in before all of the comments from people who are going to say, oh, I'll listen to this later. You're not funny. You're not clever. We've made that same joke. I've been doing this for 15 years. Every time I create any content around procrastination, the first comment is always

Oh, I'll get to this later. And I'm like, you're very cute. Those people haven't even made it that far yet, though, this far yet. No. That's true. So, all right. So today is procrastination. We are solving procrastination.

Just a reminder to the listener, the whole premise of this podcast is that this is the last podcast that you should ever have to listen to on this topic. Drew and I and our research team have gone just absurdly in depth researching, trying to understand this topic. This episode is absolutely comprehensive. It is everything you need to know about procrastination and then some. You're probably going to want to vomit when you hear the word procrastination by the end of this. But the goal is that you don't have to ever listen to anything about procrastination ever again. You don't have to read another book. You don't have to take another seminar. It's all here. So first, some statistics. Procrastination is something that pretty much everybody struggles with.

This is not surprising. 95% of adults report procrastinating at least some of the time. To me, the most surprising part of that stat is who the fuck are the 5%? Yeah, show me that. They're liars. Who are these superhuman robots that never procrastinate?

Yeah, I think 5% of people are liars. 42% of adults report procrastinating regularly. And then 25% of adults report being chronic procrastinators, which essentially means that you are just literally procrastinating everything all the time. Anything you try to do, you end up procrastinating. That's a shocking amount, 25% of people. So this is a huge problem.

This is like this is a massive affliction that, you know, gets to us all. So some of the things that we're going to go through, procrastination as a topic is really interesting because it is such a common human occurrence that there is thought. on it going back 2,500 years. So we went back 2,500 years and we're going to cover basically the entire corpus of human thought and approach towards procrastination since the beginning of civilization. And it's actually kind of surprising because a lot of things that we take to be true or a lot of our assumptions of what procrastination is are relatively modern.

They're not, they're pretty recent. And people in the ancient world or people in medieval times wouldn't necessarily agree with us. and how we approach the topic of procrastination. Ultimately, we're going to get to the bottom of what is procrastination, what, like, fundamentally, like, what is happening in your brain, what is happening psychologically when you're procrastinating something, when you're not doing the thing you know you should be doing, and why does it happen?

Why is it even possible, right? Like, if I know something is good for me, like, why is it possible that I can choose not to do that? That, that kind of doesn't make sense in a certain philosophical way. Of course, we're going to cover all the latest research on procrastination. We're actually going to cover the entire history of research on procrastination because a lot of it got it wrong. And a lot of the conventional wisdom and typical self-help advice today is based on that old research that got it wrong. And the new research says something's quite different than maybe what you're expecting. And of course, we are going to go through at least a dozen different tactics and strategies that the listener can implement.

to help lessen procrastination in their lives. I think if there's one thing that I've learned preparing for this episode, Drew, is that I don't think procrastination is ever something that we just completely get rid of. I think that it is, it just seems to be kind of a side effect or a cost of being humans who have agency and have complex brains. We'll get more into that, but I do think it is incumbent on all of us to do all the things that we can to lessen or mitigate the procrastination in our lives. And I do think that is very much attainable for most people relatively quickly. So before we get into it, anything you want to add, Drew, what are you most excited for? I mean, this is, what are you procrastinating? Oh, God.

I mean, you hit the nail on the head. This is a very common, very pervasive problem. And we all struggle with it. And I think there's just, there's a tragedy, kind of a tragic side to it as well. because, you know, what else is there to do but do the things you want to do in life, right? And then we put those things, those very things off. So I think a lot of people are going to find, there's just going to be a big nod fest going on while you're listening to this. And, yeah, I'm excited to get into it because it's something I struggle with quite a bit. I don't know if I'm a chronic procrastinator, but there's chronic strains of procrastination that I sometimes run into for sure. Sure.

I have a lot of experience with this just being an author, a self-employed person. for my entire career. So we'll get into that. And you mentioned something, which is like kind of the tragedy of it, is that what we'll actually discover later on the episode, is that the proportion of procrastination is actually directly correlated to how important we see a task being in our lives. So it's like the more important the task is,

the more likely we are to procrastinate it, which is so screwed up. Right. Like, that's so unfair. Why does that happen? Yeah, we'll dig into why that is. But yeah, it's fascinating. But before we dive in, there's going to be a lot of information in this podcast. And between me and you and our research team, I think we went through like, what, 13, 14 books and 100 research articles.

So to help everyone get through this, we've put together a companion PDF guide. It's 65 pages includes a full summary of the show. All of our citations and references has book recommendations, and it includes some practical takeaways and lessons. well. So if you're listening to this, you can get the PDF guide for free by going to Solvedpodcast.com slash procrastination. That's solvedpodcast.com slash procrastination. The link is also in the description if you want to get it through there. All right, let's get started. Okay. So let's start off with a couple definitions first because it, I was actually surprised how hard it was to actually pin down a technical definition of procrastination. And even

the one that I chose, as we'll see, there's a little bit of wiggle room with it. So there's a researcher named Peter Steele up in Canada. He did a big meta-analysis in 2007, which is basically what a meta-analysis is for listeners, is that it's when a researcher takes all of the relevant studies or data and then kind of like finds a way to combine them into like a super study. So this guy, Steele did this in 2007, and he crafted this definition of procrastination based on all the research at the time, which is this. Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily delaying something

despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so. And when I look at this, I kind of like break it down in the three factors. So the first factor is an unnecessary delay, right? I think this is important because prioritization is not procrastination. Like if my plan is to write a script this morning, but then my wife gets in a car accident and I have to go to the hospital. Like, that's not procrastination because something more important has now interfered. It's only when the delay is completely unnecessary and fabricated.

The second one is that there are negative consequences. So a lot of times when you delay something, there actually are not negative consequences. There are plenty of things that you can delay and there's actually nothing that immediately, there's no immediate feedback that makes you feel bad for that. I think this is why so many people procrastinate things like working out or eating well because that feedback loop is so insanely long. You know, it's like 10, 20, 30 years before you actually experienced a repercussion for that decision.

It's very easy to convince yourself that like there is no downside to eating the pizza tonight and sitting on the couch for another day. And then finally, the third factor is despite knowing. And this is where it gets tricky. Like, I actually found this whole definition very interesting because all three of these factors are ultimately subjective. Like, who says a delay is unnecessary? Who's to decide what's necessary and what's not necessary, right? Who's to say what a negative consequence is?

Like, you say potato, I say potato. And who says that you're aware or that you know? My personal experience is that most of my procrastination is I'm usually bullshitting myself on all three of these. factors. I've convinced myself that there is no negative consequence that's going to happen, or the negative consequence is very minor. It's not a big deal. I've convinced myself that the delay is actually extremely necessary. Like when else am I going to be able to watch this Netflix show, if not for right now? And then of course, I bullshit myself of saying that I'm aware, I know that this is going to cause a negative. It's like, well, who knows, right? Like maybe, you know,

a book will write itself. Right? It happens all the time. I definitely ran into this too. And talking with people about this, you know, kind of prepping with this and just talking with people around my life too, I definitely ran into this. They're like, well, is it so bad that you put this off? There was a lot of that that goes into it. So yeah, it's very subjective. It's, yeah.

And it is, there's a whole question around this of awareness and knowledge, which is actually very much, well, we'll get into that. We're getting a little bit ahead of myself. So the other thing that kind of surprised me, and I guess, well, I guess it makes sense is that there is a cultural element to this that I think is worth discussing at least just for a few minutes, especially because I know the audience for this podcast is extremely international. So it turns out the procrastination is, to a certain extent, culturally defined or culturally

relative. There are some cultures where showing up late, it's not a huge deal. Turning something in late is not really judged or viewed as something negative. It actually reminded me, so I lived in Brazil for a few years. is Brazilian and it's one of the things that drove me crazy as an American down there is that if you if you ever do a business meeting with a Brazilian First of all, they show up like 20 minutes late Then they spend the first 20 minutes like talking about their weekend and Telling you about like their kids soccer game and

You know asking you what kind of beer you like and and then it's like not until like minute 45 that you actually get to the thing that you're supposed to be talking about And what's interesting down there is that if you ever like try to cut that time down, they see it as impolite and rude. Like, they see you as doing something wrong. Whereas coming from American culture where I'm like, dude, I was here at 10 a.m., it's 1045. We still haven't even, like, talked about the business thing. I see it as rude that they're, like, wasting my time. So this concept of time and punctuality is very culturally dependent.

And what I found interesting, there's a social psychologist from the Netherlands named Gert Hofsteed who did a bunch of work on just like cultural factors. I think he called it, I think it's called Cultural Dimensions Theory or something like that. And he talked about how certain cultures have different orientations towards time and they have different understandings of like what is something that's done on time or not. So some cultures very much prioritize. So like Western cultures or like Anglo-Saxon cultures, very much prioritize like following the clock. Like if I say we're going to do a thing at 1130 and you show up at 1135, to me, you've now delayed things unnecessarily.

It's causing negative consequences, so on and so on. It's procrastination. Some cultures, if you say 1130 and they show up at 1140, as long as they show up in a way that's like, feels justified or is like emotionally consistent with the people around them, it's not seen as being late. You know, it's like, oh, well, yeah, we were going to be here 15 minutes ago, but like, I was hanging out with my brother and my cousin and we were having a great conversation. And so it just took longer.

And like that's seen as a completely justified response. And so it's interesting that, I guess, coming back to the subjectivity of procrastination, And some cultures see it very strictly in terms of task getting completed on time. And some cultures see it more in terms of like emotions and relationships. Like in Brazil, if I don't sit there and kind of chit-chat for 20 minutes, that is seen as some sort of productive failure. Because I'm not doing the work to maintain the relationship with that person. Okay. Anyway, it's just very interesting.

We're not going to spend a ton of time on this. But like I said, I'm bringing it up simply because. Because we do have a big international audience. There are going to be people listening to this in Latin America and the Middle East and the Mediterranean and some of these places that are not so rigid with the clock itself. They're more kind of emotional, social and emotionally based. And it's just worth considering. And I think it really just comes back to, I think, probably a more effective way to just frame this entire discussion is why do we consistently fail at doing the things we wish we could do? Right.

Like, we have things that we know are good for us and we want to do them, yet we don't do them. Let's go back. I think the best way, I decided the best way to do this is to just go start at the beginning. So the first recorded discussion of procrastination and what it is and why it happens does start with Plato. He has a few dialogues that get into it. The first one is called Protagoras. There's a quote from Socrates in there.

He says, surely no one goes willingly towards the bad or what he believes to be bad. Neither is it in human nature so it seems to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of the good. Plato puts forth like a really interesting argument. He kind of argues that procrastination like doesn't actually exist. They're like if you're not doing the thing, it's because deep down you actually don't think it's worth doing. If you thought it was worth doing, then you would just go do it.

And it's kind of interesting that the earliest take ever on procrastination is like super spicy like that. I wouldn't expect that. I would expect something like, you know, I don't know, start small or, you know, like give yourself a little reward, a piece of candy if you like if you do something that you've been putting off. And Plato's like, no, no, it's impossible to do something that you don't think is the best thing to do. Which I think just into like our gut intuition, everybody's got intuition, it's just like that doesn't feel true. Does that feel true to you? Absolutely not. No.

Like definition you brought up earlier and we'll get into that a little more too, but despite knowing part, right? I just, I feel like anybody you talk to, they've probably got at least a handful of things in their life that like they know are good for them and they don't do it. Exactly. So Plato's full shit. No, that's, so, okay, I'm being facetious. The interesting thing about Plato is, so almost all of his work is written in the forms of dialogues. And those dialogues revolve around, it's usually Socrates having a debate, a philosophical debate with some other prominent person. And in most of the dialogue, Socrates just kind of like clowns.

the person. And there's a lot of ambiguity around Plato's work for a couple of reasons. One is it's sometimes unclear because Socrates was a real person and Plato was somebody who like followed and learned from Socrates. So especially in the early dialogues, it is hard to differentiate between what Socrates thought and what Plato was just reporting what he thought versus like what Plato actually thinks and he's just putting his words in the Socrates's mouth. So there's a lot of ambiguity around that.

And Socrates had a reputation for being a bit of a troll. The second piece of ambiguity is that sometimes Plato would just create a dialogue to just kind of raise points and play with those ideas. And because it was a conversation between two historical figures, it's sometimes unclear if he actually believes what he's writing. So later on in the Republic, which was actually seems to be very clearly Plato's thoughts and ideas, he kind of backtracked a little bit. And the Republic is the first place that you see this idea of what he called the tripartite

soul. And he basically says that the mind is divided up into three different parts. And it's actually pretty incredible because this idea still persists today. Like you still see it all over psychology and philosophy today. So the three parts of the mind is he called the rational, the spirit, and the appetitive. One way to think about that is that there's like the animalistic self, the part of you that has hunger and impulses and cravings. There's the emotional part of yourself. That's the spirit, right?

It's the anger. It's the love. It's the passion. It's the joy. It's the sadness. And then you have the rational, which is like the calculating and the logic and all that stuff. Plato's argument is that he used the metaphor of a chariot, which is that the rational part of yourself is like the driver in a chariot and he has two horses in front of him. One horse is the animalistic appetitive part of yourself.

The other one is the spirit emotional part of yourself. And it is your job to guide those horses in the right direction. But they're wild horses. And so sometimes they're going to buck and they're going to run and they're going to try to go in different directions and it's going to be chaotic, right? And in the Republic, Plato said that it is essentially what procrastination is or back then they called it a crazier. Basically, this experience of not doing the thing that you know you should do is when essentially your horses don't go where you want them to go. It's like, hey, we should go to the gym and the horses just start going towards the fridge for another piece of cold pizza. And you're like, wait, no.

And then next thing you know, you're there. And so I feel like that is a little bit more relatable and a little bit more understandable. But I think the takeaway from Plato is that he ultimately saw a crazier or procrastination as a knowledge. problem. It was your problem isn't that you don't have willpower. The problem isn't that you don't have discipline. The problem is that you just aren't aware enough of the repercussions of your choices. He kind of puts forth this argument that like if people were just more knowledgeable and educated on what their choices were causing in their life, they wouldn't make those choices. And I personally think this is a very idealistic view.

I think it's it feels nice. I mean, there's something to it clearly. Like, knowledge certainly does help probably at the margins. But I also just think it's, I don't know, it's two like roses and rainbows. It doesn't match my personal experience. And I don't think it matches most of the people that I know who really struggle with procrastination and not doing the right thing. But it is, it's a nice, it feels good to believe. It feels good to believe like, oh, if I just understood what I was doing when I was going back to the fridge instead of the gym, then I wouldn't do it so much.

And you actually, like, you still see this a lot. It's funny, I'm not going to name names, but I was on social media the other day. And I see this stuff all the time. So this is a very prominent person in our space posted this. They said, your entire life will change when you realize that you have to sacrifice short-term freedom in order to earn long-term freedom. Instant gratification will kill your dreams. Ed has over a quarter of a million views and 7,000 likes, right?

No shit, Sherlock. Right. Right. Like everybody knows that. We all know the information. We all know that. Like, it's not, you're not moving the needle by telling us that. I think there is a part of ourselves, a very idealistic part of ourselves, that just feels like if we were reminded of that, then it wouldn't be so hard.

It would be a little bit easier to get up early in the morning and put on your workout shoes and start with the hardest task of your day and all those things that we wish we could do. So that's kind of the first school thought we're going to return to it quite a bit. It, like most of Plato's ideas, they never really go away. It's interesting, we actually, you and I talk to pretty much the most prominent researcher on procrastination in the world, Fuchsia, Surrah. And even talking to her, she brought this up multiple times. This never really disappears, but it starts, it starts with Plato. The second school thought I want to bring up. So around the same time, the Buddha was doing his thing.

And Buddhism has an interesting kind of spin. off of the platonic idea that I think is worth talking about just briefly simply because I think towards the end of the episode when we talk about interventions and tactics and strategies, there is a little bit of the Buddhist approach that I think makes sense. So Buddhism saw procrastination as ignorance of oneself. Plato saw it as like an ignorance of the consequences of your action. The Buddha saw it as an ignorance of your own cravings and desires, not understanding what your own motivations were, which I think is a really interesting twist. And I actually think there's

probably a lot more value in the Buddhist approach. Like, I just know from my own life, you know, as you know, I went through this huge weight loss journey over many years. And a big component of that was like really understanding where my food cravings were coming from. What was causing my distractions when I couldn't focus or get any work done? And sure enough, usually there's like some emotion underneath the surface that's like driving things and becoming aware of that or mindful of that and then learning how to how to deal or negotiate with that emotion is super useful. So I thought like the Buddhist twist on the ignorance as on the procrastination as a knowledge

issue. I actually think there's it carries some water. Sticking with Eastern philosophy, just want to touch really quick on Confucianism. I'm not I'm by no means an expert on Confucianism, but by the little bit of research I did it didn't seem like there was a whole lot directly written about it But the interesting thing about Confucianism is that there's so much emphasis put on Accountability and social pressure Everything in Confucianism is kind of written in such a way of like you have to do the right thing To honor your family your society your your country your emperor whatever

There's a nugget in there as well that's actually really important and useful that we will come back to much later, but that social pressure and accountability is like a legit thing. This finally brings us to Aristotle. So Aristotle and the Nikomaki ethics wrote quite a bit about ecracia or procrastination. He wrote quite a bit about why people don't do the things that they should be doing. And I have to say, dude, like as somebody who has studied the psychology around this for a decade, going back and reading Aristotle's take, I'm like, oh, he nailed it. Like, the dude just nailed it. Over 2,000 years ago.

Yeah, like, 2,300 years ago. It's just like in one chapter, just like, here's why we don't do the things that we know we should do. So Aristotle essentially, here's like the super condensed version of what. what he says. Aristotle essentially saw procrastination as a skill issue. He said like any other skill, we all are born terrible at it. And then as we grow older, we develop and practice and habituate ourselves to it. And anybody can learn to do it. Anybody can practice it. Anybody can develop the skill or discipline. And like any skill or discipline, some people are naturally extremely gifted at it and some people are naturally not gifted at it, right? What's also interesting

about this view is that he kind of puts his middle finger up to Plato. He's just like, dude, we all don't do the things we know we should do. Like, we all know we should do certain things and we just fail to do them. Look around you. Yeah. Seriously. Like, it's like, wake up, man. But what I like about Aristotle as well is that it's, there was no moral judgment or shame attached to it. This is actually what's super unique and interesting. and like way ahead of his time. With Plato, it was, there was a little bit of like, well, they're not doing the right thing just because they're ignorant. They're uneducated.

They're not as privileged as you and I are, right? They're not as enlightened as us. You know, in the Buddhist view, there's, if you're not doing the right thing, like, you got to get right with yourself, dude. Like, you know, sit on a mat and meditate for a few years and, like, figure out what the hell is going on in your head. You know, the Confucius system, it's like you're dishonor. and your family and you're screwing up society, like get your shit together. Aristotle's like, hey, man, we all struggle with this. This is a journey for all of us.

And it's something that any of us can get better at. Any of us can practice it. We can develop the right habits. We can develop the right skills. And you can improve upon it. And so I think the first takeaway around all of this is that ultimately there are, like, there's a little bit of truth in everything that each of those schools of thought said, there, you know, some of it is knowledge of the repercussions that are going to happen if you,

I don't know, stay up to 4 a.m. on a Tuesday night. Some of it is understanding your own internal awareness and emotions and, you know, what's motivating you, what's driving you. Some of it is finding good accountability systems and social pressure to, like, nudge you in the right direction. But ultimately, this is a skill issue. It's something that you can learn. It's something you can get better at and it's something that you have to try to get better at. So I'm curious, Drew, have you seen your procrastination as a skill issue? Because I certainly haven't most of my life. I'm curious what your experience. Yeah, I think there is just a lot of that self-judgment that goes into it. And I've always thought, yeah, if I just knew a little bit more, had the right information at the

right time, then I would be a better person. So, you know, more. thoroughly corrupt and bankrupt in my ways. But yeah, it's interesting that each one of these kind of schools of thought took one angle at it. And it's like, yeah, you got that right, but you got this completely wrong. Yeah. And I feel that within myself even too today. So yeah, definitely.

I think I started seeing it as a skill issue relatively late in my life. Yeah. I would say like well into adulthood. Like I have vague memories in my 20s of like starting my first business and just being like incredibly upset at myself for playing too many video games or not being able to finish a work task in the amount of time that I allotted for myself. Like just really chastising myself and beating myself up over it. And I feel like that's that's the default for most people.

Like there is a shame and there's a moral judgment. And what I found super fascinating and surprising is that that moral judgment is, is for the most part didn't exist in the ancient world. You know, Aristotle saw a crazier or doing the right action. He saw, he had a whole ethical system around virtue, right? The virtues were like the right way to live. But Aristotle was very aware that like nobody is virtuous all the time. The virtues are never achieved.

They're just something that you work towards and you get better at over time. And everybody's going to screw it up. Everybody's going to fail to a certain extent. And so the only thing you can do is just try to fail less. And if you look at the Stoics, there's a very similar vein there, right? It's like you should try to be virtuous. The Stoics were a little bit more platonic and that they saw it as more of a lack of like a knowledge problem. But it's still the same attitude of like nobody's virtuous all the time.

Nobody gets it right all the time. Just get up each day and try to do your best and try not to dwell on your failures and things like that. And it's so fascinating, like, going back and looking at those takes because that doesn't feel like anything I heard growing up. Right. I heard that you are, you are a immoral piece of shit who's irresponsible and is failing yourself and failing your future and failing your family. And, like, it is, there's so much moral judgment, especially, I guess, in Western culture, but I think Eastern culture as well, there's so much moral judgment wrapped up. and your ability to be disciplined. You know, like I think about people who are obese or overweight.

Like, one of the huge judgments against them, it's not about the unhealthiness. It's about the apparent lack of discipline, right? Like, I've been around people who have said really mean things about overweight people. And it's, it's never about the weight. It's about the like, why can't they control themselves? Why can't they like keep food out of their house? Right.

How would you let yourself? go to that extent. Right. Yeah. And we have similar judgments, like, if somebody loses their job or if somebody doesn't make a lot of money, it's, there's like a moral judgment. It's, and we just, we joked about it earlier, right? It's like, if I showed up an hour late for this shoot, you would judge me.

Yes. Yes, I would. Yes, you would. So it's interesting that that didn't always exist. Like, that, that is, it's started. somewhere along the line. And drum roll, do you want to guess where it started? I have a good idea.

I'm going to why don't you go ahead. I'll give you one. It starts with a crisp and it ends with a Giannity. Yeah, yeah. One of the seven deadly sins, right? Sloth. Exactly, exactly. So interestingly, there's actually kind of a particular moment in time

that I think you can point to where you can actually say, this is the moment that procrastination and a failure to act became a moral problem. It became a shame-ridden failure that signifies that you are a piece of scum, essentially. Right. So the story actually starts in the late 4th century. St. Augustine of Hippo was born in what is present-day Tunisia, and he would go on and become basically the most important theologian of pretty much anybody who, didn't live during Christ's time.

And, but it's interesting because Augustine, he was born pagan. He grew up, he was a rich kid. His parents were like aristocrats. He was kind of like that douchebag with a Ferrari in high school. Like he just not a care in the world, screwed around, partied all the time, was drinking a lot, seeing a bunch of different girls. Just life was on easy mode. But the interesting thing about Augustine was that he was very smart.

And he was very philosophical. And so he became curious about a bunch of different religions and, I guess you'd call him cult throughout his early adult life. He kind of dabbled in a bunch of different schools of thought. Now, the interesting thing is that the Roman Empire had just converted to Christianity, maybe 50 years prior. And you have this gigantic empire. And what essentially was kind of this fringe cult religion, which was Christianity, suddenly becomes the state religion and is now expected to be followed by like tens of millions of people. So there was kind of this vacuum of strong theological knowledge that didn't exist at the time. There was like an early opportunity to fill that void, that theological void.

Like they needed like very smart people to kind of like create frameworks and philosophical ideas that. the masses could understand and implement into their lives. And so Augustine would end up filling that void to a great extent. And he would be the one who would take Christian thought and combine it with Plato and kind of turn it into early Christian theology and the Catholic theology as we understand it today. But the way he went about that is super fascinating. So he was this playboy. He's screwing around all the time.

And he's like drifting, you know, from this religious sect to this religious sect. And by the time he gets to his late 20s, he becomes pretty self-loathing. Like, I think he's, at this point, he's self-aware that he is a very smart, talented guy who's been handed every privilege and advantage in the world. And he's done nothing with it. He's like absolutely wasted everything. So this goes on for a number of years. And he's just, he's really looking for something to commit himself to.

And all the while he's like kind of disgusted with himself. He's like, why do I keep doing that? Why do I keep drinking? Why do I keep hooking up with all these women that I don't care about? And like, why can't I just get my shit together? And one day he's sitting in a garden and he's reading and he hears a child singing outside saying, pick up the paper. and read it. Pick up the paper and read it.

Singing this like little lullaby or something. And so he happens to look down and he sees a parchment paper. And he's like, huh. So he picks it up and he starts reading it. And it's Paul's letter to the Romans verse 1313. And it says, Let us behave decently. As in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness.

Not in the sexual immorality and debauchery. Not in dissension and jealousy. And Augustine claims that he converted to Christianity right there on the spot. He was like, this is it, this is a sign, drops everything, immediately goes to seminary, trains to become a priest. And then within a couple of years, goes on to become the most prolific and successful Christian preacher in the Roman Empire. He gave, I think, 2,500 sermons or something like that, of which like half are still around today. He was just like a prodigy of preaching, I guess. Yeah.

But what's super interesting is that he has this personal history of like he was kind of this, he's like this playboy wasting his life. And then he finds God and God saves him, right? Like he doesn't drink anymore. He doesn't fornicate anymore. He doesn't screw around anymore. He's like very diligent and disciplined and he's working his ass off and he's like achieving his potential.

and he attributes all of this to God. So in his book, the Confessions, he talks about Eccasia. He talks about, he gives an example of when he was a boy of stealing fruit from a local market. And he talks about how he stole the fruit. He didn't need the fruit. He wasn't hungry. He didn't need the money. He wasn't going to sell it to anybody else.

He stole it for the thrill of it. He stole it because it was something exciting to do to kind of impress the other boys that he was hanging out with. And he looked at that and with the very platonic lens, he said there was a lower desire. They're the lower values of the excitement, the thrill, impressing the people around him. But then there's this higher level value of fairness and justice and not being selfish. And his argument was that any time we sacrifice that higher level, value for the lower level value, that we succumb to our animalistic impulses or urges or desires at the cost of kind of the higher level, rational, intellectual, spiritual values,

not only is that a failure, that's a sin. That is, you're not, you're not violating yourself. You're not violating your family. You're violating God, because God's will is that you do these other. things and you are failing God's will to indulge your animalistic behaviors and impulses and cravings. And as soon as God enters the picture, shit gets moral really quick, right? Like, it's, it's, if you're suddenly, it's like your procrastination or your failure to do the right thing for yourself, it's not about failing yourself. Like now you are actually sinning and

becoming a corrupt individual. And that is shameful and you should repent. And the only path to salvation is to surrender yourself even further to God and to Jesus and to give even more of your life over to the church. And so this is where you see the shame indoctrination really began. And without getting into like too extensive of a commentary on Christianity itself, it was interesting reading Augustine in this context because I couldn't help but but view it as like a it's like a multi-level marketing scheme or something where like it's basically like you create the problem for for people and then you sell them the solution right so it's it really felt like you know Augustine is basically going around and taking this experience that we all have and we all already kind of feel bad about and are a little bit sensitive. about and he's like, hey, that thing that you feel bad about, that means you're a piece of

shit and God, God hates you. And the only way he's going to stop hating you is if you come to church and confess all your sense. I'm like, man, that is, that's like, that's aggressive to say the least. And look, we're not here to comment on religion or make any sort of like theological arguments. but let's just say from a mental health point of view, not optimal. Right. Not optimal.

From a productivity point of view, also not optimal. Okay. Yeah. So we can't. We'd get into the shame stuff then. Yeah. I mean, I do some of that right now. Because like I said, I think it's a big misconception that most people have.

Most people, what I have found is that a lot of people are afraid to relinquish that self-judgment. Right. Because they're afraid if they go easy on themselves, quote, unquote, then they won't do the thing. Right. Right? And it's like actually the research says the opposite. The exact opposite. And this happens a lot. Yeah.

So I think this is like a useful place to make this point and kind of discuss like why this happens or what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they do find that exactly. That people who experience a lot of shame, especially around things like procrastination or any things that they deemed to be character flaws, they actually end up putting things off more. They don't end up doing them more. And it's because that shame creates this kind of motivation for avoidance around these things. You don't want to feel that shame. And so you just avoid doing it all together in the first place. And you get this very, very vicious cycle that goes along with it. So there's this self-judgment cycle that comes with it, right? You feel ashamed for delaying that this shame makes you uncomfortable.

And to escape that shame that you feel now, you further procrastinate. You delay more. You distract yourself. You give into those lower values. that Augustine talked about. So that's, the studies around this have really found that it's the exact opposite. This doesn't happen all the time, but a lot of times it will be, yeah, we have these intuitions around, oh, I need to feel this way in order to get things done.

Or I think my brain works this way. And so I'm just going to keep doing this. When it's like step back, there's actually a kind of deeper issue going on here. Avoidance is really what comes from that self-wothing and that shame. Yeah. Well, at least to me, some of the most interesting research that I saw around this was actually a workplace research. So they actually, there are a number of studies that they, like, looked at how shame-based

the feedback is in certain workplaces. Oh. And then they tracked employee productivity and also absenteeism, how many people stuck around, basically looking at, like, who has the asshole boss and, like, how do employees respond to that asshole boss? And surprise, surprise, shame-based workplaces. They did one study on nurses in a hospital, and they looked at supervisors who would like shame the nurses for their mistakes and for not completing all their tasks or whatever.

And sure enough, those nurses showed up less often to work. They got through fewer rounds. They spent less time with the patients. And they quit more often. Yeah, I think some researchers, too, on terms. interpret that as you are violating your sense, someone's sense of autonomy, too, right? If you shame them, you're saying you're a bad person and you don't have any control over whether or not you can do something about this.

Yeah. Whereas if you're much more gentle and much more compassionate about it, you're like, okay, this is how we fix it. It goes back to the skills thing, right? I was just going to say, we're going to come back to seeing procrastination as a skill issue a little bit later. And it is mind-boggling to me, though, that, like, that got lost. Yeah, for thousands of years.

Yeah, when it was the norm before. Yes. That was just how people thought of it. And then it completely got destroyed. Right, because it is what you do see in this whole kind of Christian era through the medieval period and everything. It's just like, if you don't do the right thing, it's because you're a bad person. If you can't get your work done, you're a bad person. And you screwed up and I don't want to be around you, right?

Again, I still feel the residue of this, you know, like growing up in a Western culture. And I know people who grew up in Confucian cultures experience this a lot too because that is also very shame. Yes. It's less about God. It's more about family. When you grow up in that, it's so hard to escape it. And it is like I still catch myself, like judging people. Oh, 100%.

Yeah. Just being like, oh, look at that guy. Like can't even get his shit together. You know, like what a joke. Yeah. Judging other people or judging yourself too. again, going back to the shame thing. And this isn't just applicable to procrastination, but anything where you kind of have this kind of self-loathing or self-criticism that's very loud inside

your head, it will create avoidance, not approach. Right. And so that's something to keep in mind all throughout this. So what is the opposite of self-judgment or self-shaming? I have self-acceptance, right? Yeah. Self-compassion. Okay. What does that look like? Well, I hate myself, Drew. Right. How do I stop? Well, make the self-loathing stuff. Pretend I'm your friend, Mark. Okay. If you heard me saying that, you would be like, whoa, dude.

Yeah. God, take it easy on yourself, right? Totally. This is kind of the standard advice to a lot of people. When you want to be more self-compassionate and kinder to yourself, treat yourself like a friend. Step back, detach yourself a little bit from the whole situation and be like, okay, what's really going on here? how can I be a little bit more understanding of my own actions? Yeah.

And knowing some of these reasons, having some self-awareness around these reasons of why I'm doing this and being like, okay, I need to address these. Let's move forward. Yeah. Which I think is kind of the way things were, even with Plato and his maybe a little bit muddied of thinking around procrastination, I still think there was a lot of that prior to this whole injection of shame into the culture around getting things done. That would be an interesting exercise.

I mean, if you're listening to this and this is something that you really struggle with, that could potentially be a really useful exercise of like write down your self-talk around this stuff. And then go back later and read it and just probably be horrified by it. I've been there. But it's one of those things that we don't notice it when we do it to ourselves. And that self-compassion does, that creates that space for approach. like I'm saying, instead of avoidance. So if you're, if you know you're in a safe space, you know, in your own mind,

that opens up a space for exploring what's actually going on and then taking action. Whereas, again, the shame just creates a lot of avoidance around. Yeah. The thing I like about self-compassion, too, is that it's not, and this is a point I made in subtle art, is that, you know, it's the flaw with self-esteem as a metric, in my opinion, is like it's, it became through a lot of the research, it became a measurement of how people felt about themselves when they did good things. Right.

Whereas like what you really want to measure is like how do people feel about themselves when things go bad. Right. Right. And that's where the self-compassion comes in. It's like, okay, let's actually measure how you treat yourself when nothing is going right because that's actually probably a better or more accurate metric of your mental health and your well-being and your life satisfaction and all that stuff.

So the other thing that's interesting with the self-compassion research is that a big component of it, a big step in it is finding shared humanity. It's funny because it's just, again, thinking about this, 95% of people. That's what we opened with, right? Yeah, like literally a survey asking people, do you struggle with procrastination? 95% of people said they do. Like, I don't, I'm not aware of any other problem that scores that high. Yeah, I can't. Yeah.

Yeah. So. Yeah. And I think it's about 5% of the population is considered psychopaths too. So maybe that's where the 5% are. I don't know. They're just, or they're like, androids that are secretly walking among us.

It was so interesting, though, that when we were talking to, to Fuchsia, Surrah, like, I actually asked her. I was like, do those 5% actually exist? And she said, absolutely. Can you imagine? What that must feel like? I wonder what, like, there's some downsides to that, though, too, right? Like, sometimes you need to prioritize and sometimes you need to delay.

Like, what if you're jumping into things a little too much? So maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's on a bell curve or something. I don't know, but that, yeah. Okay, getting off on a little bit of a tangent here, but like, to me, a certain amount of procrastination. Yeah, like an optimal level of procrastination is probably not zero, right? Because there is a certain weight that comes with, like, really, really important to in your life and that that weight is intimidating and ensure as a human you find ways to delay it or put it off or avoid it in this way or that I kind of like that I don't know

maybe maybe I'm being irrational here and like kind of playing the same game with the with the shame stuff where it's like I'm afraid that if I don't procrastinate something it means it doesn't have weight or importance but like I don't know I kind of like that there are certain things in my life that intimidate me a little bit that make me anxious because it signifies to me that I'm doing something very worthwhile. And I don't know. Yeah, I worry that if I had zero procrastination that I would just kind of see everything. Like you said, a psychopath. I would just see everything in my life is just another task to be done. And you just get on with it. And you don't, you know, what's the point in stressing over it? I would be curious. Any listeners

out there who, well, I don't know why they'd be listening to this. But like, if for some reason you are one of these freaks who does not procrastinate, I'd be very curious to hear. from them, like what their experience is or why, like what is your thought process? When there's a really important task in front of you, what is the emotional experience of that task? I'd be very curious. I actually just thought of something related to the self-compassion as well, something else. Like, it's funny when we're judging ourselves. I think we get very skewed perceptions of what's actually normal. Like, I remember I used to feel this back when I was writing all the time, which is like, I would set a goal for myself, right?

Like, I'm going to publish three articles a week of at least 2,000 words apiece, right? So 6,000 words a week, which is a really good clip of writing. And then if I didn't hit that expectation, I would judge myself. But then I'd go talk to other writers and they're like, man, I'm lucky if I get like 300 words in an entire day, right? So it's like our understanding of like what is normal and expect. and like reasonable can often get completely warped in our own heads, especially when we're judging ourselves. And so it's, again, it kind of comes back to that subjectivity thing.

Like the same way we can kind of bullshit ourselves in one direction and tell ourselves that, oh, yeah, I can, you know, I'll do it tomorrow. It's not going to be a big deal. We can also bullshit ourselves in the other direction by saying like, oh, you're absolutely a horrible person. You know, you only worked out for 90 minutes. You should be working out for two hours because you're just lazy if you don't do that. So it's just, it's useful to understand, I guess, that our minds are just crazy and

wrong in all sorts of different directions. And it can screw us up. Especially when looking at ourselves. Yeah. I have to say, in prepping for both this episode and the last episode, I'm like, dude, Aristotle got everything right. Yeah. Like that guy nailed everything. Play that against a lot of credit. But Aristotle, actually, yeah. Between happiness, values and virtues and this stuff, self-discipline and ecracia and procrastination and everything. Like Aristotle nailed like half of psychology before there was such a thing as psychology. So shout out to Aristotle. So in like the 12th century, there was an Arab scholar living in present-day Spain named Averroys.

And he translated, he was the first person to translate Aristotle into Latin, back into Latin, which gave Europeans access to Aristotle again for the first time in almost a thousand years, which is mind-blowing. And sure enough, quietly Aristotle started to go viral within European universities and among European scholars. It was just mind-blowing stuff to them. Keep in mind, too, that it wasn't just the psychology and the happiness and the virtue stuff. Aristotle, like, literally invented the scientific method. Basically, all of what is modern science started with Aristotle as well. You start to see the scientific method begin to show up and around this time people are thinking

about empirical observation, experimentation, documenting what they see, trying to measure, understand things. I mean, I don't think it's any coincidence that Galileo and Coperticus show up within a generation or two after Aristotle is translated back in the Latin. Of course, predictably, the church has this horrible reaction. They try to ban it. They say it's heresy. But there's a young student at the University of Paris at the time by the name of Thomas Aquinas.

And Thomas has like a very unique and interesting talent, which is he became famous very, very early in his life. He was a prodigy. I think he ended up going to university when he was like 15 or something. And he studied theology, became very successful very quickly. and he became famous for being very good at taking people who were on two opposite ends of an argument and finding a way to synthesize them. Finding like the common threads and finding a way to like make things make sense for everybody. So he studies Aristotle. His mind is blown.

But the rumbling's going on around is that the church is like not okay with this. But in his mind he's like, this stuff is so powerful. world-changing, there's got to be a way to make this synthesize with Christian thought and theology. And so that became his life's work. And eventually he published Summa Theologica, which was his magnum opus, which was essentially that. It was bringing Aristotlian philosophy into the Christian umbrella in a way that people can understand and that was acceptable to the church. brought, it essentially brought Europe out of its medieval period intellectually into kind of

what would eventually become the Renaissance and the scientific revolution and everything. So I can't overstate how important it is to bring back the idea that this is a skill issue. This is not a character issue. This is not a theological issue. It's a skill issue. Procrastination is a skill issue. And it's interesting. There's this concept in psychology.

called self-efficacy, which is basically a belief that you can get better at something. And it's fascinating because self-efficacy strongly correlates with success in almost anything you do. Essentially, the more you believe you can get better at something,

the more likely you are to get better at that thing. And I don't know, I just, like, everything I know about psychology, I don't think it can be overstated the importance and the impact of bringing self-afficacy back to the public, that belief of like, we can be better. We can do things in this life that are better, right?

Like, I really do think kind of old-school Catholic theology is like, it's fatalism. It's like God decides there's this kind of cosmological war going on between heaven and hell. we're all caught in the middle. All we can do is just ask for forgiveness, right? Like, there's nothing. We're all sinners. We're all doomed. But like, if we pray enough and ask for enough forgiveness,

then, like, things are going to turn out all right in the next life, not in this life. Because this life is going to be shit. It is shit. It's got to be predetermined. Yeah. So I think just reintroducing self-efficacy back into the population. It's just like, I can't.

I can't overstate how impactful that probably was. And then sure enough, like a century or two later, you get the Reformation. You know, when Luther hammered the 95 Theses to the door, he was essentially saying that, like, we have control over the outcome. We can decide. We can improve our relationship with God. We can improve our lot in this life. We don't have to depend on the clergy.

We don't have to depend on the church. There shouldn't be an intermediary between us, right? And sure enough, as Protestantism arises, this is what they become known for, right? It's the old Protestant work ethic. Because the idea is that if our salvation is up to us in this life and we have control over it, then whoever works the hardest is the most likely to be saved, right? Like God gives fortune to people who work hard and deserve it. And so you see these kind of philosophies emerge like Calvinism where there's a huge amount of moral value attached to industriousness.

That if you are diligent and hardworking and, you know, do all the right things in this world, you will be rewarded in this world and in the next world by God. And you deserve it. So if you have nice things, awesome. You worked for it. You deserve it. So on the one hand, we've brought self-efficacy back into the equation. We've brought, you know, procrastination as a skill problem back into the equation. That's good.

But on the other hand, we still have the shame, right? Because now it's like if you work your ass off and things aren't going well for you, well, God still is displeased with you. God does not look on you with favor or fortune. You must be doing something wrong. There's still a moral attachment to material success, to your ability to do what you say you're going to do or accomplish things in the real world. And in fact, because there is so much moral and theological weight placed on, I guess,

worldly outcomes, these early Protestants, you get this kind of insane perfectionism. And I think the group that really illustrates this is like the Puritans who came to America. They were hardworking. They were diligent. They believed that, you know, if you did the right things and if you worked really hard, you would get what you deserve and God would smile on you with good fortune. But holy crap, they like judge the shit out of each other. Like, there was an insane amount of perfectionism self-induced onto those communities, right?

And it makes sense because it's like if you're, if your worldly status is now being attached to your moral superiority or inferiority, it just adds that much extra pressure to everything you do. And so I think this is actually appropriate because I think, as we'll talk about later, like a huge component of procrastination. fascination is perfectionism. Is this feeling that you're not allowed to fail? That you, if things don't work out the way you want them to, then that is some sort of moral reflection on you as a terrible person. And so I'm curious, like, I know you are a recovering perfectionist. I'm curious how this is like come up in your own life and what the research says around

this. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely perfectionism. It feeds into procrastination, what they find in the research, and I can vouch for that very much so in my life. Again, the research shows that perfectionism, it's just another form of shame, basically, that causes you to avoid the things you need to do. It's an avoidance mechanism of sorts. It creates a lot of anxiety around certain tasks, so you end up avoiding them that way.

You're so afraid of failing that you just don't even want to. approach the task to begin with or you come up with all sorts of mental gymnastics ways to to avoid those. So I need to wait. I need to have more information before I do this. I need to be better at this. So we're into the skills set now. Yeah. I need to be better at this. I need to have the skills in order to do this. And for that, I need to step back and develop these skills. That's an evil loop that I've gotten caught up in before. I'm like, I need to be better at this before I go do the thing. Right.

And so then I spend all my time trying to be better instead of doing, like actually, like, doing the thing is what will make you better at it. Right. But instead of actually just doing the thing, I try to do all this other stuff. To prepare for everything. Exactly. Do research. Nothing.

This goes right up into today. This happens in all sorts of productivity systems. People, you know, like, oh, you need to just have the right system in place or have the right information in place and you'll get there. And that can very much feed into the very common problem. of perfectionism. So what I'm hearing so far, it sounds like the story so far is that if I was to really simplify this, is that we avoid things that are unpleasant, no, duh, often the mechanisms

by which we judge ourselves or the expectations we place on ourselves around that avoidance only makes us feel worse and therefore avoid even more. Yes. Right? And so shame is one component of that, like that's one form of it. It's like the more ashamed I feel of my inability to do the things that I set out to do, the worse I feel about doing them, therefore, the more I avoid them, and you get in this downward spiral.

Similarly, with perfectionism, the unrealistic expectations that you set on yourself are make the task so intimidating and unpleasant that you find ways to avoid it, which then makes you feel even worse and expect even more of yourself and then you end up in another kind of shit spiral. Let's transition into Freud. I actually have a cool little tidbit to like swing into the section. You want to kick it off. Okay. Yeah.

It's actually really fascinating. So Freud went to university in Vienna in the mid-19th century. And at the time, like, psychology didn't really exist. Right. It wasn't really a thing. So Freud had a professor. His name was Franz Brintano. And Professor Brintano, his kind of obsession, and the thing that he would eventually become most known for, he was really in the Aristotle.

Okay. And he loved the kind of subjective, what we would call today the psychological side of Aristotle, but he also loved the scientific side as well. And at the time, mostly Aristotle's scientific stuff was studied and it was like the virtue stuff was, I guess, less prominent. But Brintano had a theory, which is he believed that you could take Aristotle's scientific method and you could potentially apply it to human happiness. And he called it an empiricism of the psychology. And he taught this idea in his courses. And Freud was one of his students. I did not know that.

Interesting. There you go. So this would have been late 1800s. So it was 1860s, 1870s? Okay. Yeah. Interesting. I did not know that.

Yeah. Freud is a fascinating, kind of say the least. And yeah, whenever you bring him up, there's going to be a lot of, a lot of dicks. A lot of dicks come out, right? A lot of dicks and mothers. That's right. That's right. To say he was controversial is an understatement. He got a lot of things right. He got a lot of things wrong, some fascinatingly wrong and just spectacularly wrong. But the mark he left on Western thought and on psychology is undeniable. You can't, you can't deny that. So we would be remiss if we did not bring up Freud in all of this. There's a few ideas that Freud introduced into the larger kind of intellectual culture at the time that we need to be aware of that are pertinent to procrastination.

Okay. So first we want to talk about the pleasure principle versus the reality principle, right? Okay. So Freud, he thought that we are basically just driven by these two principles. One he called the pleasure principle, which is we seek out pleasure and we want to avoid pain. This is from birth. This is just part of our nature. Anything that's pleasurable, we gravitate towards it.

Anything painful, we avoid it. Very basic, okay? Then he said, as we mature, though, we mature into what he calls a reality principle, where we realize that just indulging in whatever pleasure comes our way can be detrimental to us, especially in the long run. So we start to realize this as we mature. And actually, one of the marks of maturity that he saw or that he outlined was that we live more by the reality principle. Right.

So again, it goes back to this. Our evolution, like I mentioned previously, was such that we will prioritize pleasure in the immediate term over long term. benefits that if we delay gratification, right? So that's the first one. Procrastination then can kind of be seen as giving into the pleasure principle over the reality principle. And this can happen chronically or it can happen just in the moment like that. Okay. So that's the first idea we need to think. We need to be aware of when it comes to Freud. And then he also has, if you go back to your psych one or one, he has the model of the psyche too, the three part. Again, the three parts. Yeah. Very platonic of him, right? You have.

the id ego and super ego okay anyone go through each for one of those sure for everybody okay so we have the id right and the id is like this it's some people who have the lizard brain i guess that's probably an oversimplification but it's basically your drives for uh a lot of it is for the pleasures that we have eating sex you know whatever but joyful experience you might want to uh indulge in hedonism basically yeah you have the super ego then though too which is kind of the opposite of the which is all these moral standards that we obtain through socialization in our childhoods, through the people around us, our teachers, our parents, our siblings. We start to form, as we mature, we start to form this idea of what it means to be a good

person, to do right, to be morally superior to others, or just to act morally out in the world. That's the super ego. And then Freud had this other idea of the ego, which is kind of the mediator between the two. Like, you need to satisfy some of your base urges, right? You need to eat and drink and have sex and all of those things in order for the species to survive and thrive and propagate. But we also need to temper that in some way with our moral understanding of the world. Yeah. And that's the ego comes in and says, okay, I have a plan how we're going to get satisfied both of these.

And the whole Freud said when these things were in balance and the ego was doing its job, then we had mental health. and whenever. It's out of balance, we're screwed. It feels very similar to the chariot. Very, very much. The chariot driver with the two horses. Like you said, Plato, he'll come up all throughout Western thought. He's everywhere. And he's everywhere.

Procrastination then, kind of through a Freudian lens, is giving into, like I said, giving into the id, when the id can overpower the superego or the ego, I guess, and the super ego is kind of left out to dry. That is, you know, Freud's a, you know, I never specifically address procrastination, but a lot of his people after him did, a lot of his students did the psychoanalysts who were the Freudian psychologist. They addressed procrastination through this lens. Another thing he brought up to and brought to our awareness, I think more, was the defense mechanisms. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, I was going to say because it doesn't the ego, isn't part of the, when the ego is mediating between these two things, right, the social obligations and the cultural values. versus the animalistic urges, doesn't ego kind of, because like when people talk about an ego, we usually think of some sort of like self-identity or self-image. Yes. Right. So isn't, is the mechanism for mediating those two things? Like, is it kind of this mental construction that happens?

Like, how does that all map out? You mean in terms of like how the ego mediates that relationship? Well, I'm imagining that the mediation between those two things. that happens through the construction of this self-image, right? It's like, this is the type of person I am. This is how I act in these situations. And then once we've constructed that identity, we need to protect it. Right.

Yeah. So the ego does. It very much forms our basis of self-identity, what you're saying, and how we navigate that pull between the two horses, right? Yeah. The ego is sitting in between in Freud's view. The ego sits in between the pulse to be morally. it's superior and good and pure versus, you know, a base creature of nature.

Yeah. Right. So, yes, the ego very much navigates that and say, this is how I act in these certain situations. These are, here are my morals. Here is how I get what I need out of life and want to. Yeah. So absolutely.

Yeah. So I want to make a quick point here, or quick interjection because I always find this super interesting, like in conventional wisdom or typical parlance. Like if you're just hanging out with a bunch of random people and somebody's being an asshole, you're like, man, that. That guy's got too much of an ego. He's got to get rid of his ego, man. Or if you go to like a meditation group or, you know, go to some woo-woo, you know, incense-burning temple here in Malibu.

Like, they'll tell, like, oh, we're here to dissolve our ego, get rid of our ego. It's interesting if you actually go back to Freud, you don't want to get rid of your ego. That's not what he wanted to do. Yeah. It's like your ego is actually really important. It's pragmatic. Yeah. It's like, actually, you just want to have a good ego.

Right. Like you want to have a functional ego. Right. Instead of a dysfunctional ego. Because a dysfunctional ego is probably giving in way too much to either the social pressures or the animalistic urges. Whereas a functional ego is able to balance everything effectively and manage itself. Right. Right. And it can manage shame, for example, too.

So, yes, you can, there's good ego to have. Ego is not a bad word in the Freudian, yeah. Parlance, right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But it does, what happens is when the ego comes under threat. Yes.

that can be a problem. So this is where the defense mechanisms come in. Okay. Right. So if you, if there is any sort of threat to the ego, threat to yourself identity or threat to your view of yourself, I'm a good person, this is how I act in these situations, then these defense mechanisms can kick in and protect your ego, right? And that's where some problems can come just as they relate to procrastination.

A couple of common ones are, which we've already mentioned, rationalization. Right. We rationalize. Well, one of them is I work best under pressure, which I want to really talk about that one. Okay. Or I need the adrenaline of a looming deadline or something like that. Yeah. That we rationalize our way out of actually taking action towards our goals.

Yeah. Okay. Another one is intellectualization. One I'm very fond of, which is we've already mentioned this one too. Research. I need to research this more. I need to just, I need more information.

AKA this entire podcast. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I need to listen to more podcasts. I need to listen to a five hour podcast before I can do this. Right. So that one's very much in our real house where you,

you think you just need more information or you need to stop and understand it more in some way. Right. So that's a very common. That's, I mean, as you know, Like one of my favorite things to say is, is that learning more is a smart person's favorite way to procrastinate. A hundred percent. And I mean, I think a lot of people listening to this will relate.

I do. I mean, for sure. So they'll relate to that. Another really common one, too, is just denial, which we've already mentioned this one too. It's like, ah, it's not that important. Yeah. I'm just going to put it off. It's fine.

Yeah. What's one more day? What's one more day? What's one workout? What's, you know, that sort of thing? So those are some common ones. What those are designed to do in the Freudian school, thought is to protect this ego, the self-identity that we've constructed over time.

Yeah. So the ego is sitting in the middle, trying to balance all these pulls that we have, and then all of a sudden something comes along to threaten that, we need to protect that. That's what the idea of the defense mechanisms are. And that's, I mean, for all Freud's flaws, I think defense mechanism are definitely one of those things that he brought to the cultural conscience that we absolutely needed. The funny thing about Freud to me is that He got the big stuff right Yeah, he got the details horribly wrong

Yeah, and the details are horrible And not only horribly wrong, but like hilariously right So and it's because they're hilariously wrong That's what everybody focuses on and remembers But like the ego is just, it is such Like everything you just described is so profound And tracks, right? And it is like it is such an incredible insight into human nature

And not only like, you know, talking about these defense mechanisms and protecting ego, like not only do we protect the ego, we protect our ego as if it is our physical body. Yes. Oh, yeah. You like revolt back into yourself. You will have crunching. You will have physiological responses to an ego threat the same way you would have responses to a physical threat. You will have emotional responses to an ego threat that track exactly as the emotional responses you would have to a physical threat. it is so incredible, like such an incredible realization. Yeah, because we all need, we all need a sense of a self-identity to navigate the world. And so it is very threatening. You have this kind of, humans have this need to explain things and make sense of the world. And one way we do that is through a self-identity. And when that gets threatened, that's very, very scary, like you said.

So I do think that that's one of Freud's biggest contributions, definitely just in psychology in general, but around procrastination especially is when we get defensive. And like you said, you'll feel that in your body. You'll feel yourself recoil whenever your ego is threatened in any way. So I think this raises an interesting point of self-definition as a component of procrastination. And I've noticed this in my own life quite a bit where it's like as soon as I decide, that I am something, suddenly the emotional valence around that thing becomes way more intense.

Right to the surface, yeah. Yeah. So like, before I wrote subtle art, I didn't really see myself as an author. So I just wrote a book. It was just kind of like, oh, this is just another thing I'm gonna do. This is like one of like five things I'm gonna do over the next few years.

But then all of a sudden it takes off and I become socially known as an author, which then affects my self-periodess perception of myself of like, oh, I guess I'm an author now. And as soon as I am quote unquote an author, now writing is a completely different experience for me. Because now this is the thing that I'm supposed to be good at. This is the thing that I'm most known for. This is the thing that I'm most respected for. I've been most rewarded for. And so that is a much more intimidating experience. And it actually took me a number of years to like revise that self

definition and remember like, yeah, dude, you weren't always an author. Like you, you, you, you You just kind of like decided one day that like, oh, I guess I'm an author now. And then like that added a mountain of fucking stress to my life. And like I can just as easily decide I'm not an author. It's just like one of many things I do. And suddenly as soon as I, that self-definition switched, a lot of that stress went away. James Clear talks about this a little bit in an atomic habits about how like the ultimately the only thing that makes a habit stick over a long term is when it's adopted as an identity.

Intentity, yes. Yeah. And it's that adoption as an identity that is, that's the ego, right? It's like when you go from a person who is, happens to be running three times a week to a runner, or you go from a person who is taking a painting class to a painter, right? It's like once you define yourself as I'm a painter, then suddenly you don't need willpower or discipline or to overcome procrastination to paint because that's just the thing. you do, right? So anyway, I fucking love this topic. But there's, you're saying there's stakes

attached to that as well, too. There's stakes when you attach your identity to that. And so would you say from your transition to being, well, I'm just somebody who's going to write a book to I'm an author, you haven't written a book in a few years, Mark? Have you been procrastinating on this because it threatens your identity now? Or I think, well, it's funny because it's, it's, I let go of Okay. I let go of that identity. It did cause me an immense amount of stress. And this isn't to say I don't like the books that I wrote.

It's just that like I wouldn't have necessarily written them when I did or the way I did if I had had a different self-identity at the time. And by freeing myself of that identity, part of freeing myself is realizing that like I don't have to write a book. Like, I'm not just an author. So I can write a book if I want. And I'm sure I will write a book again soon, but I don't have to. It's not the thing I do, right? It's like if you and I decided like, we're podcasters now. Yeah.

Right. Like, this is who we are and what we do. I got caught up in that for a little while. I'm sure. I'm sure. It's tough. Like, it's, it draws you in. And I guess this is kind of coming back to like the ego intermediating,

between, you know, the social pressures and the moral values and then also kind of like the animalistic instincts. Like, we have a fundamental drive for social acceptance and social approval, right? And so it's like our, our ego's, part of our ego's role is to like take that social acceptance and be like, yeah, I'll be that. This is what rewards me socially. This is what gets me respect from the tribe. I'm going to be that person, right?

And so it is a natural reaction. But when you decide that that's who you are, it adds a whole another layer of, I guess, of stakes. Yeah. Like, I'll say this. I think adopting, coming back to the James Clear thing of like adopting a habit as an identity, he is correct that like if the goal is to just do the thing, then adopting it as an identity essentially solves that problem.

Yes. Because it's like, if that's who you are, that's just what you're going to do. And it's going to feel like, it's going to feel weird to not do it. The trade-off of that that I think is not mentioned in that book is that when you adopt a habit as an identity, you are now adding a whole layer of social pressure, judgment, validation to that. So it's like if we decide now, like, we are podcasters. Like, now we're, that's the yardstick we're going to start measuring ourselves with, right? If you decide, I am a runner. Well, yeah, now it's not going to be hard to get up and run in the morning.

now you're going to be judging yourself by how your run went every morning. Yeah. So it's like you you trade. God, it never ends. It never ends. You trade one problem for another essentially. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Well, yeah, okay. Yes. I do think, again, Freud and his conceptualization of the psyche, the three parts and the defense mechanisms and all that, that's useful in terms of, yeah, tying yourself identity to what you do, how you behave in the world. obviously that is that that's now in the zeitgeist and now very much a part of our culture too. I think the other thing though too is Freud was one of the first people to really emphasize childhood. Yeah. How our childhoods affect the way we develop into adulthood. It's funny when I was in college and I was taking psychology, I think I was either a freshman or sophomore at the time.

So I was taking pretty lower level psychology classes and was talking with somebody in my dorm who, wasn't a psychology major. And they're like, oh, you're a psychology major. Major tell me about that. And I was like, oh, we're going over Freud right now. You know, I'll tell them all this. And I get to the part about childhood. And I'm like, oh, yeah.

And Freud, you know, he's the one who kind of came up with this idea of that childhood, you know, affecting us as we get older. And she goes, well, doesn't everybody know that? And I didn't have a good answer at the time. I was like, well, yeah, it's really obvious, isn't it? And I didn't have a good answer at the time. But no, actually before Freud, nobody thought that, like, it was just you were just a bad person, period. You are what you are.

You are what you are. There was nothing from your childhood or the way you were raised that was necessarily like indicative of why you are the way you are at this point. Even the concept of parenting, yes, is like less than 100 years old. Yeah. Yeah. Which is mind-blowing. Yeah.

Well, I think, yeah, probably a lot of that was parenting. And, well, it was probably more of a collective effort than it is now. So, yeah. It was a collective effort. Also, like, half of your kids died before you age of seven. So it was just like, well, like, obviously, obviously God had something to say about this. Exactly. God decided.

Yeah, yeah. But Freud did he introduced the idea of parenting styles and the experiences we had in childhood and how they affect our development throughout our lives, all the way into adulthood, right? Right. A few of these, now this came from some of his contemporaries. It wasn't directly from Freud, but they took these psychoanalysis principles and they applied them to parenting and procrastination. There are kind of these three big ideas that I came across anyway.

One of them being when your parents kind of equate love with achievement. So this gets into the perfectionism thing. Definitely. This can kind of encourage someone to develop a more perfectionist personality. Well, and this ties into the confusion. 100%. But parents who set these unrealistically high expectations on their children, you'll often get children who are kind of perfectionist and big time procrastinators

at some point at least in their lives if they don't manage it well anyway. The child feels fear around taking any sort of action around the failure and procrastination then as an adult it will manifest in a way as to just avoid that emotional pain. Through the Freudian lens, what you're doing when you're procrastinating if you had these types of parents is that you're avoiding those memories of being chastised for not doing the right thing or for not for not doing a good enough job right another one is kind of internalizing parental anger so if you grew up around very reactive parents who got angry whenever you did something wrong you know you spill the milk or whatever it was and they immediately got on you about that that a child according to the Freudian

school of thought would internalize those that anger from those parents and they would feel directed towards themselves. So again, the procrastination is avoiding any situation in which you could fail. And so you you, you, you've already internalized that anger and you just want to avoid it altogether. Again, it comes back to the avoidance a lot with these. And then the last one I came across with parenting anyway, there's two different parenting style. So you have permissive parents or authoritarian ones. Yeah. And on the permissive side, if, if, if you grew up in a very kind of like rules-free environment more or less, you, according to the Freudians, again, this produces a nervous underachiever, right? They feel overwhelmed by self-imposed deadlines

or work or whatever it is. They, so they're like, wow, that's just, that's too many rules, too much structure. I'm just not, I'm just going to avoid it all together. Yeah. The flip side being authoritarian, where you grew up in a very strict household with lots and lots. lots of rules. And to the psychoanalysts, they think that there's like a rebellion against that, right, for some children. Yeah. So whether these are, you know, whether that's actually what's going on or not, that's obviously the topic of debate and we'll go over some of this. But again, the idea that the way we were raised affects the way that we developed throughout our lives. And specifically around procrastination, it does have, it could have an effect this way.

now, is it because we're like avoiding those emotional memories, like deep emotional memories that we want to avoid? I don't know. It's funny because the parent thing, I mean, there's definitely something to it. It's so hard to know where that line begins and ends. How much of that is just personality, natural disposition. How much of that is like how mom and dad treated you? Like it's such a fuzzy area. The boundary between those two things is very fuzzy. It is funny. I had never heard that permissive parent thing. Yeah. And the, what did you say it was?

The timid underachiever. Yeah, nervous underachiever. Dude, that, that fucking, I feel called out. Oh, really? My parents were super permissive. Yeah. Like, grew up no structure, no rules. Which, you know, was a real double-edged sword.

Like, there's a lot of things that I think it forced my brother and I to develop a lot of traits, self-reliance being a big one, right? Independence. Yeah. comfort with autonomy, comfort being alone. So there are a lot of things that I developed at an early age that I'm actually very grateful for. But it is funny. Both my brother and I were spectacular underachievers.

Pretty much up until maybe my second year of college, I was very much an underachiever. And it's funny. I had a really good friend in high school who called me out on my bullshit once. and it was like very uncomfortable. It was one of those moments where like somebody says something to you and like because it hurts so bad

you know it must be true. Yeah. But like I, you know, I used to be a pretty arrogant teenager. You know, I was a smart kid who never did his homework. Yeah, okay, yeah. So it, I think I was like just talking shit once

and I said something. I was like, you know, I, if I really cared, I, you know, I could easily get an A in that class. And then I think my friend was like, well, why don't you do it. And I was like, it's not worth my time. And he was like, he said, no, I think you don't do it because I think you're afraid of trying and then not actually getting the day. And he said, you'd

rather not try it all. And I, kicking the stomach. Dude, it was like, fucking getting stabbed in the chest. And I was like, whoa. I had no comeback for it, you know. But I think there really was something to that. Like, I very much, there was something about the permissive environment that maybe as a defense mechanism, I had a very inflated perception of my own ability and potential, and actually doing anything threaten that. Ah, yeah. So if I actually did try in a class and didn't get the A,

I'd have to reevaluate my ego. I'd have to reevaluate how I see myself, and that was just too scary and too, so it's just easier to smoke pot and not do your homework. Which is interesting, like, you know, you mentioned the pleasure principle, segueing into reality principle. I imagine, I'm not aware of Freud talking about it in these terms, but I imagine, like, part of that process, part of it looks like almost ego flexibility. Like, developing an ego flexibility, like, when I think about my younger self and I think about young people in general or immature people in general, they have very rigid egos. They have very, like, I think what people mean when they say you have a big ego or you need to get rid of your ego.

What they mean is that your ego is rigid, which is that you have a self-perception that is not open to new information, right? Like if you fail at something or something doesn't go well, instead of reevaluating how you see yourself, you blame everybody else. Right. And double down on your own your self-image. And so I think that ego flexibility. is actually what we should be going for. And I think that is also a skill that we naturally develop as we get older. I definitely find that I'm much better, you know, at 40, I'm much better at kind of looking at myself and being like, oh, yeah, maybe I wasn't as good at that thing as I thought I was.

Whereas, like, you know, when I was 20, that felt cataclysmic to have that thought, right? So super interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. One thing, too, about the whole parenting thing and Freud's view, I think sometimes they get a little bit pigeonholed when they think about this. Because when you were telling your story about permissive parenting and how it affected you, I had a friend who had a very permissive. She was the daughter of a single mother.

Yeah. And her mother just let her do whatever she wanted. And she resented her for it. She wanted this structure. Interesting. Yeah. And she became a very high achievement. fever, actually. So it was the other way. So I just don't think, like a lot of times with Freud,

I think they have these neat little like explanations for it. Just so stories. Yeah. So there's that. Again, though, the larger takeaway, I think, is that he did find these kind of big categories of influences on our behavior that nobody had really thought about before. Yeah. And brought them to the surface. To the surface and the cultural conscience for sure. Yeah. So just a quick reminder before we move on, if you're starting to get a little bit of information overload, we do have a PDF guide for all of this and all of the solved episodes. So just go to Solvedpodcast.com slash procrastination to get a full episode guide

with accompanying notes, takeaways, references, and citations. We break everything down, help summarize all the most important information and offer next steps if you want to start implementing what you're hearing. And, of course, it's free. So just go to Solvedpodcast.com slash procrastination, The link is also in the description. All right. Anyway.

So yeah, speaking of other frameworks, behaviorism. This is the big psychological breakthrough that comes right after Freud. Yeah, kind of during Freud even, too. Oh, is it? A bit of a backlash, I would say. So 1930, John B. Watson, kind of regarded as the father of behaviorism, although there were some people performed. But he comes out with a paper called Psychology as the behaviorist views it.

Okay. And right from the get-go, like the opening line is psychology as the behaviorist views. it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Kind of like a slap in the face to the Freudian psychologist at the time. It really is kind of a backlash that's going on. Watson and the other behaviors at the time, they see all of this like, oh, you know, your dreams, your dreams, your childhood, your internal states that you want to like really navel gaze at, right?

They saw this as wishy-washy. It wasn't useful. It wasn't helpful. Also keep in mind of the time, too. of what was going on. Like Einstein is like kind of starting to become a name that's known and physics. And there's all these breakthroughs in the material sciences at this time too. And the behaviorist wanted to take that kind of philosophy, which was kind of rigorous scientific method, and apply it to the psychology.

Very much in contrast to the Freudian psychologist. Which is just sit and talk for hours. Sit on couch, talk. Let's get under all these unconscious motives that you have. The behaviorists were very much the opposite. Actually, like almost exactly the opposite. They said, no, we should not be studying internal mental states at all. We should only be concerned with what's observable.

What's observable is behavior. So that's why it's called behaviorism. Gotcha. Watson also went on to say in that same paper is that the behaviorist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. So this is where it's because what was that going on is with all of these studies with animals were starting to be incorporated into the body of literature that was going on. And the behavior saw all these parallels between even a rat or a mouse and a human being and how they can be very similar in a lot of ways.

I feel so objectified, Drew. Well, that is exactly what the behaviors should try to do, though, was to make this an objective, rigorous science. They wanted to really get at the heart of things. And they thought if we could only just study things like a, physicists, studies atoms and particles, then we could get to some underlying truth around behavior and psychology and human nature even so. So that kind of puts it in the historical context of what's going on.

You know, there's Watson was very much influenced by Pavlov and the Pavlov's dogs, you know, you ring a bell, give the dog food after a little while, the dog hears the bell, it just starts salivating. Yeah. That was kind of the forerunner to this strict behaviorism that came in the early 20th century. That kind of conditioning, the Pavlovian conditioning was called classical conditioning by the behaviorists. They saw that as you're pairing this neutral stimulus, which in this case was the bell, to a natural stimulus, which was the food. And then you get this kind of innate response, which was the salivating.

Yeah. Okay. Would this be like the behavioral manifestation of the neuroscientific idea of like what? fires together, wires together? Or those different things? Well, I mean, later on, that's how it would be explained. Okay. And that was the classical conditioning side, though.

Yeah. I think what you're starting to get out a little bit more was the operant conditioning. Okay. Which is what the behaviorists really, like that was their big kind of breakthrough was, okay, you have these classical conditioning experiments where you can make a dog salivate at the ringing your bell. So what? But actually when you introduce learning, which is really, it's really, relevant to the procrastination story. When you introduce learning into the equation, then it becomes

what they call operant conditioning. Okay. Okay. And this was really, this really took hold. Watson kind of was dancing around it, but it wasn't until Skinner came along, BF Skinner. Burris Frederick Skinner was his name. I did not know his real name. I was a psychology major. I did not know BF Skinner. I would go by BF, too, if that was my name. Yeah, it's kind of a dorky name for sure. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Burris. Yeah. But this was the idea of operant conditioning where you learn through a series of rewards and punishments.

Yeah. Okay. Now, Skinner, I don't know how much we want to get into. How much do you want to get into Skinner? He's a fascinating dude. Okay. Okay. From a young age, he was very inventive.

He was always trying to come up with like new little inventions and contraptions. And he had a very mechanical mind, which would later produce the Skinner box, what we know it as a Skinner box, right? You put the rat in the box, it pushes the lever, it gets a tree. It learns very quickly that pushing the lever gets a tree. Skinner actually found that you could get rats to do all sorts of things. He used rats, he used pigeons. Those were his two main animals.

But he found that you could get them to do all sorts of different, very complex behaviors with just simple rewards and punishments. Okay. Now, so he invented the Skinner box. He taught them to, he introduced the idea of shaping behavior as well. So just little increments of, you know, get the route to press the bar. Okay, now get the route to press the wall and then press the bar, that kind of thing. And you could get these complex behaviors out of all of that.

This is what, again, was called operant conditioning. Skinner even got to a point where he coined the term radical behaviorism, which he thought even like internal states. could be the result of rewards and punishments, okay? We're going to know that here in a little bit, but one of the reasons he thought that was because you could do some pretty complex behaviors with these simple animals and get just through a series of rewards and punishments, right? So, for instance, he taught pigeons how to play ping pong.

He taught them how to, quote, unquote, read. It was more like a word recognition thing. But they could still, it was kind of like reading. He's like, you know, now this is, if I can teach a pigeon how to do these simple word recognitions, then taking a brain from a human, you could do the same thing, just reward and punishment. This is what this word says. You're rewarded through that through a little dopamine in your brain or whatever it is,

and then you learn how to read. So he's like, all these complex behaviors can be reduced down to this very, very simple idea, which is you kind of like the wire together, fire together. Sure. You repeat what you're rewarded for, and you don't repeat what you're punished for. So to a behaviorist, procrastination really does just kind of. come down to what you are rewarded or punished for. And in the case of procrastination, they would say something along the lines of, you know,

you are, one, you're rewarded for the delay. You're anxious about whatever task this is. And then so in order to remove that anxiety, you just don't engage in it whatsoever. So there's your reward. Or the punishments aren't grave enough for you. We've kind of already touched on this too, right? Like, it's the consequences so far down the line that you're not even, it's not even registering with you. You've discounted it.

You discounted it completely. So it's really just a series of, they just see it as a series of rewards and punishments. And that's what all animals, not just humans, but all of us are subjected to. That's like the law of nature for a behaviorist. Yeah. Yeah. So the solution for a behaviorist would be give yourself a worse punishment for not doing the thing? I think also a lot of.

So a lot of... Or reward yourself for doing the thing? Well, both. Okay. Using punishments and rewards in your life strategically, right? And this has definitely influenced a lot of the modern day productivity space. Yeah. There's even a law called Skinner's Law.

So like make the thing so unpleasant not to do it that you just do it. Yes. Like that's very much used in a lot of modern day productivity schemes and systems. I mean, there is something to that. 100%. Again, there's something to it. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's, I think about it a lot in terms of friction, like adding and removing friction to certain behaviors.

Yes. Right? In my environment, making it easier to do good, you know, it's like if you don't want to eat junk food, like just don't bring it in the house. Right. Right. So you don't have to make those decisions in the first place. Or if you want to do something. like if you want to pick up a new habit, like sign up for classes and get that accountability

and convince a friend to go with you or whatever so that like not doing it becomes way more painful than doing it. It's funny because it sounds so simple, but this is like, for me personally, this is one of the strongest levers that I've ever pulled. Definitely, yeah. For my own behavior. Yeah. The environmental design is very much influenced by the behaviorist school of thought.

Yeah. The modern day environmentalist design, even go back to James Clear, setting up your environment and in such a way that rewards and punishes certain behaviors that you want, that's very much comes from the behaviorist school of thought for sure. And also, there is, even though they were a reaction to Freudian psychology, there is still kind of that pleasure principle that they carried over into behaviorism. They acknowledge that, but they say, that's it. We don't have to go any further than that.

And we can just, we can shape our lives and even society through a series of rewards and punishments. Yeah. And yeah. So procrastination to them is really, again, it's in terms of rewards and punishment, but there's, you know, there's kind of like there's a reinforcement of delay. Like I already said, you, immediate indulgences that are in your environment are just easier to reach for. So we will reach for them. There's ineffective punishments. It's either distant or it's not a strong enough punishment.

for us to not procrastinate on any given task. Previous conditioning, though, too. They also bring that in. So there is a little bit of, you know, if you were, if previous experiences of procrastination went unpunished, then you're just more likely to do it, right? So if you're in a job and you don't really face a lot of consequences for not getting something done, well, you're just going to continue doing that. That's a behaviorist view.

And then there's also they have this negative reinforcement loop, which, you know, you're There's greater anxiety as a deadline approaches, right? And it can make finishing that task more relieving. Like, the more pressure you put on yourself, the greater the relief you experience once you do finally do that. Well, it's funny because one of the people I talked to in preparation for this podcast was Tim Urban, who has the most watched TED talk of all time about procrastination. He's a chronic procrastinator, too. And it's funny because I've been friends with Tim for over 10 years, and I know him very well.

And he is, he's a chronic procrastinator, but he's also like, I don't know, I've known a number of people like him where it's, they get in this pattern where you kind of mentioned this earlier, that they, they feel like they thrive under pressure and they need that pressure cooker experience going on around them, right? Like that's what actually gets them to perform. And so they continue to throw themselves into that situation over and over again. And, you know, doing the work weeks ahead of time and not stressing or worrying about it at all, like that's not a very interesting emotional experience. It's kind of boring and requires, you know, a lot of forethought. Whereas waiting to the night before, having this super extremely stressful event. And then, like you said, the relief of accomplishing that stressful event, that can easily be something that you can easily be something that you can.

condition into yourself. That's 95% of college students right. That's what it is. That was a lot of my college experience. Totally. Me too. Probably at least. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I would get an assignment and I'd be like, oh, the all-nighter for this is going to be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could pull it off so you did. Yeah. Like you again, you were rewarded in in these ways that you don't even realize you're being rewarded, right? Which is a good example is the relief of that stress that you put yourself under. But it's a self-reinforcing stress there. It's just self-imposed stress, I should say. The Volkswagen Atlas is a 7-seat powerhouse that actually makes sense for real life.

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Thriving under pressure. You know I've talked a little bit about this. I know you have a bone to pick with this. I have a huge bone to pick with this because I feel like I'm one of these people. Right. And in talking to people around this, like I would say, oh yeah, we're doing this big long podcast on procrastination. And everyone's like, oh, I need this. But almost all the time, or a good number of people immediately would say, oh, but I thrive under pressure.

I need the dead. I need the pressure of the deadline. And I have thought a lot about that. And I think that's just bullshit. To say that you thrive under pressure. You're calling out our entire audience. No, no, no. Look, I understand that it's motivating.

I understand the pressure is motivating. You don't need that. This is the more common thing about here. I do my best work under pressure. And that, I think, is total bullshit. Okay. There are people who thrive under pressure. I get it.

Like a situation comes up that, like, something needs to get done and people are boom they just snap into that get shit done mode right that that i totally believe in that's that's that's not that's something separate that's not what i'm talking about when people say i do my best work under pressure i'm always my immediate question is compared to what right compared to not doing anything at all because that's the only work you do sure it's your best work but it's the only work you do i i don't i don't agree with that at all i feel so attacked right now i get it Look, I get as sometimes you just have to.

Sometimes there's just so much going on in most people's lives that they use that pressure to get things done. I get that. Like, there's just, there's only so many hours in the day. That's fine. Don't tell me that's your best work. When you're fearing the negative consequences of not getting something done, that's your best work. Are you really going to tell me that's your best work that you can produce? Let's back up the truck of just a couple, a couple feet.

Okay. I hear what you're saying. Yeah. I don't think you're. wrong. So here I'll kind of delineate what I think you're right about, which is that the people who say that, they have probably not had a healthy working experience. Because what you're saying is, is like, okay, if these people budgeted their time, let's say they have an assignment due in two weeks, right? Okay. Okay. If they were diligent, they budgeted their time, they're like, okay, I'm going to spend an hour to two hours a day every single day. And then the last day, you know, I'll have most of it done or whatever. and they'll have time to rethink things and go back and change things and do further research and like dig in the other stuff. Yes, they will probably have a much better result with much less stress. I guess maybe this is the funny thing, is that budgeting of time and following that schedule and following that plan, they don't see that as part of the work.

They see that as something different. And so that it's all they experience is maybe they try to work on it a week ahead of time and they're like, this is boring, this sucks. Yeah. There's no emotional stimulus happening. And so they lose interest or they don't try very hard. And then they get two days out and they start freaking out and panicking.

And then that forces them to like really focus and put in a lot of effort. And so they get that emotional stimulation, which then gets channeled into the work itself. And then, yeah, sure, the work that they do then is much superior. to like the half-assed attempt that they had a week prior. Okay. Okay. So I agree with that, yes. I can see how that is probably their experience. And I can also see your point that like if they were very diligent and budgeted out their time, like say two weeks in advance and did a little bit every day and really thought were thoughtful and considerate about like the work they were doing.

Yes, they would produce a much better outcome. But they've never had that experience. They've never. That's my point. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Compared to what? Yeah.

No, you are correct in that regard. But I think I think the point that you're kind of like subtly raising here is that a lot of people I guess maybe mistake the emotional stimulus for the work.

Right? Like it is that anxiety-fueled frenzy where they get a ton of stuff done and they are super focused that they associate that with good work because it is enlivening. it's exciting, it's stimulating, and they are way more focused on a task or a goal than they usually are in most circumstances.

So in their mind, they're like, yeah, this is, I'm doing great work right now. So I guess what I'm saying is it's more of a skill issue. Like, if they knew how to budget things out well in advance and do a little bit every day and like thoughtfully look at their work every day, they would agree with you. Yeah, but it's like, I guess I'm just agreeing with you, but I'm like softening. There's a nuance to it. I'm like, I feel so attacked that I'm like, you're now recoiled. Your ego is being attacked. Exactly. My ego is being threatened.

So, no, I think it's just, I think you are, I think you are directionally correct. I do think it's a little bit more nuanced than I guess I'm kind of like diplomat. As somebody who was that person. Yeah. For a lot of his life. And I have been too. that's it. I'm including myself in this too. I get that. I mean, okay, if you're, if you're saying I do my best work under pressure, again, what I think you're saying is I do my best work when only

the threat of the negative consequences are on the line. And not only that, but I'm limiting myself to such a small time window that you're going to tell me that like all your first ideas, if creative work especially, all your first ideas are going to be your best ideas because because that's all the time you have to put down or to work out in whatever creative work you're doing? I don't think so. Some of this might come down to, I agree with that. Some of this might come down to the type of work as well. I mean, here's the counter argument is that pressure, a lot of pressure is derived from high expectation, right?

So when the caliber of the work is not expected to be that high, you don't feel the pressure. And so you don't try very hard. But when the caliber of work is expected to be extremely high, that's a lot of pressure. And so you try a lot harder. I mean, I think most people have had a, I mean, maybe this gets it a little bit into a discussion of expectation and procrastination. But like, I think most of us have had an experience at some point in our lives where like somebody has come to you and be like, hey, Drew, I need you to do this thing. And the first time you hear it, you're like, that's impossible. And they're like, oh, and by the way, I need it in like four days.

And then you do it. And you're like, holy shit, I could actually do that, right? So it is like, I'm just going to throw. that element out there. I'm not saying it's not motivating. I'm not saying you shouldn't like leverage that when it does happen. I just don't think you should rely on that to produce your best work. That's what I'm saying.

I 100% agree. Thank you for bringing in the nuance. I was very angry about that one. And now you've softened it. I do agree with that. You were on your soapbox and I managed to kind of kick it out from under you. From the behaviorist point of view, though, too. Again, going back to those, what you're fearing is the negative consequences.

Well, they've, I mean, a lot of studies have shown that, you know, punishments aren't really as effective, at least not, they're effective in the short term. They're not effective in the long term, right? Rewards are more effective, I think, in the long term. Part of that, I do think goes back to something I mentioned earlier was about agency. We think we, when we're just being punished for something, we don't feel like we have the agency to actually make decisions. But when there's rewards on the line, we can choose whether or not we like that reward. Yeah. And I think that's something that came out of the behaviorist, well, an interpretation of. the behaviorist view anyway, that I think is actually very useful for people. So where do you think behaviorism went wrong? What did they miss? Because everything you're describing, at least in the context of procrastination, I'm like, yeah, that works. Oh, yeah. That works.

Yep, that works. So what did they fall short on? Yeah, I mean, all the environmental design stuff, I think they nailed definitely. I think though, even though Skinner later in his life came to this, what he called behavioral radical behaviorism. which was that even our mental processes and cognitions could be reduced to rewards and punishments. I don't think they ever fully showed that. And I think they ignore a lot of the emotional states and cognitive internal processes. Not only do they ignore them, they explicitly ignore them. So we're

not going to worry about those kind of things because some method will come along where we can explain it in terms of rewards and punishments. So they ignore that. We can also, we can override our sensibilities around rewards and punishments too, which I think is a cognitive, again, an internal cognitive process that happens. That gets overridden by these principles of just simple rewards and punishments. I wonder what Skinner would think of David Goggins. Oh, that's a thought experiment, God. What would he say about David Goggins?

Yeah, where he's just constantly self-flagellating and punishing himself, yeah. Putting himself through the most pain that he possibly can. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe they would say that it's kind of a higher order of operant conditioning where he gets some sort of reward out of it eventually. And he's just conditioned himself to to experience that reward over time. See, I, in the context of Gagons, I see the Freudian ego explanation is more effective. And I mean, I mean ego strictly in the Freudian sense, not as like, oh, my God, Gagons has an ego. But in terms of it's like, Goggins has built an identity around doing incredibly hard and painful things.

And so to maintain and preserve that ego that he's built for himself, which has served him extremely well in his life. And he's like rewarded him in many ways. But to maintain that ego, he like needs to get out and fucking punish himself. It's kind of what we were saying that it's like when the habit becomes the identity, you have to do the action. It feels it more painful to not do the action than to do it. Right.

And so it's like Goggins has built an identity. around doing incredibly difficult painful things. And so he has reached this fucking crazy place where he probably feels weird not doing painful things rather than doing them. Well, he was also socially rewarded for doing those things too, right? The culture he grew, he kind of forged all that

was Navy SEALs where that was socially rewarded. Totally. So the behaviorists would say, ah, no, there's actually a big behaviorist lens we can put this through. It doesn't have to be reduced to identities. So is the behavior, I mean, I like to, maybe I'm naive, but I like to try to see everything as like a puzzle and see where everything fits together.

You know, I guess are we seeing the behavior, the behaviorist perspective is kind of the interaction between the super ego and the ego, like the rewards. It's like how the world is rewarding you and punishing you and how like. I suppose you could see it that way. Yeah. I mean, I would say that the behaviorists saw human nature as finally tuned to social rewards. Yeah. And so those are big, big rewards that have very high valence, very high salience when you think about them. You will approach those a lot more readily. Yeah.

So, I mean, anything, just with operant conditioning, anything can be turned into a reward almost, right? The operant part is that you're learning about these rewards or punishments. So almost anything can, like with the Goggins example, punishment can be its own form of reward at some level. And so I think even the behaviors would go so far as to say that, yeah, it's all just comes down to this seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, you know. I think really, though, the big takeaway from the behaviorist was these practical tools that we've kind of already talked about.

Yeah, the environmental stuff. It's so useful. Getting up, teaching yourself about the rewards and punishments that you're being aware of the environment and how it rewards and punishes you in different ways. The refrigerator example with a junk food is a good example of that. I think that's the biggest takeaway. And even today, all of the productivity systems and gurus who preach the kind of environmental and only environmental side, they draw from a lot of this. But they're not wrong. It's just not totally right.

It's incomplete. Yeah. So I think we're getting closer. This is part of the puzzle. Yeah. The rewards and the punishments, along with the identity stuff from Freud. Yeah. Sure. That's all there. The skill stuff we got from Aristotle. We're starting to build a little bit of a picture where, okay, these things fit together. It doesn't have to be a war between all of these things and we can take the best parts of it. And I think that's, I think that's where we're headed with it. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, let's move on to the next thing then, which is time management. Ah, yes. So as we move into the mid-20th century, it's actually interesting to me that there is so much credence to what the behaviorists were saying. Like all this environmental design stuff, it actually does work for productivity. Yet what we got was a bunch of time management consultant bullshit. So how did that happen? Well, okay, let's put it a little bit in historical context here.

So, yeah, the early 20th century. century, you have the Freudians and the behavior is battling it out. What changes, though, as we start to get into the middle of the century, so starting the 40s, 50, 60s is there's a big shift in the economy, right? The post-war economy shifts much more towards kind of the knowledge work, the beginning of the knowledge work, especially getting to the 60s, think of like madmen, you know, the agents, corporate drones, corporate drones, all of that starts. So people start going from the farms and the factories. We have been urbanizing for, you know, several decades since the Industrial Revolution

started in the 1800s, slowly urbanizing, and we're getting a new economy out of this. Knowledge work becomes a thing. Yeah. So, the ad agencies, the design, designing products for consumer products for the masses, all of that starts to crop up, right? So if you think about that, that's a very different work environment, right? You go from a factory or a farm, you know exactly what you need to do. What's right in front of you.

It's very tangible. If you're in a factory, especially to somebody else is telling you exactly what to do, you don't have to think about it. Whereas if you're getting into more creative work in the new knowledge economy, now you have all of this, there's all these tasks that are nebulous, kind of, and even the end goals a lot of times are nebulous. It's creative work. They're not really sure what you're producing.

You're given a little bit more autonomy, too, in those spaces. And so now you have to manage your own. time. Okay. Up until this point, too, like I said, a lot of the things you were supposed to do had kind of been outlined for you. Somebody else told you what to do for the most part, for the, the average worker. Now you're managing your own time and you need a way to organize all this and decide what do I need to be working on right now? And so for a lot of the industry, I don't know if there were gurus around this time, but this is kind of their predecessors, they thought, oh, well, these people just need to be taught how to organize their time, how to manage their time.

So this is where kind of the time management philosophy really starts to take hold and rise to the collective conscious. Yeah. There's a lot of the like techniques that come out of this too, at least started here, even the ones we use today, Pomodoro techniques and time boxing and all that. And we can get into those here in a little bit. But that's kind of, that sets the stage anyway, the historical stage for the time management crowd. Okay. So you had your bone to pick like 20 minutes ago. Okay.

This section is going to be my bone to pick. Yeah. Because I just think most of this is nonsense. I'll pile on with you, I think, for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a few observations here. First of all, is this is a very subtle Plato back with a vengeance type situation,

which is like we have all these office workers. We have all these worker bees. they're at their desk, they're typing, they're doing things, but like the output is completely unpredictable and a lot of people are underperforming. What's the problem? Oh, they must not know the right things, right? And I find it so interesting that repeatedly throughout history, that is our default. Like, it's like if I just knew the right system, if I just knew how to organize my time,

if I just knew how to use my calendar, if I just knew how to use my calendar, if I just knew how to to time box my week, you know, like it, then everything is going to be fine. And I don't know, it's like, what is so seductive about that? It's simple. It's simple. You can point to one thing and say, oh, I just need to know how to organize better. I just need to know how to manage my time more effectively and box this little bit of time over here for this little thing and this little thing over here. Yeah. It's a simple story. It's also, I would say it's unemotional. Yes. Like, It's very rational. Very, very rational.

And, you know, we just talked about, you know, with Freud and Skinner, like, we just spent 45 minutes talking about how defense mechanisms and resistance and rationalization and, like, all these excuses that you come up with and how uncomfortable it is. And it's exhausting. It is exhausting. Like, emotions are fucking exhausting. But there is something alleviating. There's something relieving about just being like, well, I just need to get the right. calendar system or if I get the right morning route like these days it's the morning routine right because everybody's self-employed so it's like I just need the right morning routine and

then and then my day is going to be great I'm going to get so much done I think here's a spicy take I think 90% of the time this is just another subtle form of procrastination 100% I agree with that it is it is let me study the techniques and systems that are going to make me more more productive so I don't actually have to go be more productive yeah because being productive is that actually uncomfortable and scary and all these emotions start happening and I don't want to deal with those. So let me study this calendar system and try to get it down. Absolutely. And exhibit A, look at how many productivity apps are out there. Those are all come from the time management kind of philosophy. They start there at least. And correct me if I'm wrong, because you did

more research on this section than I did. But like, most of the research around this stuff is like not. There's not a whole lot of there. Oh, yeah. No. They tried to do some research, I think, kind of in the 70s is when they're just like, we're not finding anything here. Yeah. And just anecdotally, too, look at it, there's people who are highly organized professionally, personally, whatever, they still procrastinate. So it is not just about the system. And that's speaking from somebody who's tried every system. There is after everyone, but I've tried a lot of different systems. I have my little system. I do have a time management system. Don't get me wrong. Right. I think, too, if you go from somebody who's never had to, it's just been told what to do at all times,

And you just tell them, okay, now go do whatever you need to do without any structure. Yeah, they probably need some time management skills. Right. Absolutely. It is nowhere near the underlying cause of what causes people to not get things done. Yeah. Some of the tenets of time management, you know, setting clear priorities and goals. Well, sure, okay.

Yeah. People often, they underestimated how long tasks would take. So getting better at managing your time. Sure. Yeah. Struggle, you struggle to structure your day. and so you end up working on less important tasks over more important tasks. So prioritizing.

Sure, all of these things, obviously you need to have those skills. But it's not getting at the root cause at all. But there are still going to your point to just recently. Actually, I tried a new system. Yeah. A new way of kind of capturing my to-do lists and organizing my time and even timeboxing and stuff like that. And it was AI enabled.

So, of course, I was really excited to try it. when I tried it, it was very disappointing because I'm like, oh, this is just the same the same shit I've already tried, just be packaged and they put AI in front of the name of it. Yeah. And so I got on a forum and I asked them about a couple of things. I'm like, what about, you know, X, Y, and Z? And somebody immediately jumped in and they were like,

they're like, look, this community and the team for this app are just so dedicated and devoted. And they had this long, long response to my thing that had nothing to do with X, X, straight getting shit done. But that's where that's where this leads though, too. You're right. It's another form of procrastination. Like, I learned so much from this app.

That was one of the lines I said. I've learned so much. I don't want to learn about an app. I just want to get shit done. Right. Right. So that, I think that is the big risk with this.

These apps and other systems and people who wrote books on this, they've made a lot of money and we still haven't found the time management solution. Because they're feeding that seduction, that, that Plato seduction of like, if I just knew the right thing. I mean, this kind of dovetails into just the self-help industry in general. I'm sure this is going to come up on a lot more episodes of like people thinking knowledge is the solution when it's really like it's an emotional problem. I'm kind of spoiling the ending here, but like procrastination is an emotional problem.

And sure, knowledge can like nudge you slightly in this direction or that. A framework, a time management framework, you know, a certain. system that you build for yourself can nudge you in this direction or that. Your environment nudges you in this direction of that. Ultimately, it's an emotional problem. I have a couple thoughts. One came up just while you were talking, which is, like, yes, you are correct. I think every productive person develops some sort of system for themselves. What people mistake is that that system is not the cause of their productivity. It's the effect. Yes. Right? You learn what your personality is, what your proclivities are, what your

emotional pitfalls are, the things that you get anxious about and that you worry about and that you stress about and the way you like to get things done and the sorts of things you like to do first thing in the morning versus last thing in the afternoon. And you build your own system around that to optimize for yourself. And eventually, once you spend enough time doing it, you know, you get 10, 15 years into your work life, you've figured out pretty well what works for yourself and what doesn't. And that does make you very effective on a day-to-day basis. But then other people show up and they're like, oh, what system do you use? And they just assume that like if they just adopt your system that it's going to work perfectly for them, yet, you know, a lot of

people who built multi-million dollar businesses around that. So that's the first thought. The second thought, I thought what you said, you know, while you were describing knowledge work, you raised a really good point that I hadn't really thought about before, which is, you know, in the industrial economy or agrarian economy, the measurement of the output is like predetermined, right? Like if you're a factory worker, you go in, your boss is like, hey, I need 50 of these widgets per day. It's very tangible, yeah.

It's super tangible, and it's very measurable, and you know what your progress is. So it's like, you know, if you break for lunch and you only have 22 widgets done instead of 25, you know you're behind schedule. And so you know to like catch up in the afternoon. When you go into knowledge work, as you pointed out, A lot of it's creative.

A lot of it's intangible. A lot of it is like, involves negotiation. It involves like, you know, discussing committees and meetings and dealing with clients and, you know, taking somebody to a golf course and like all this stuff that is completely unmeasurable. What I know about human nature is that things that are not legible or measurable or are uncertain, they generate anxiety. And I imagine that there are lots of people in the knowledge work world. I know I experience this all the time in my own work. I'm sure you do too. Where it's like you want to feel like you're making progress on something.

Yes. You can like spend days or weeks on something. It is not necessarily clear to you that you've made any progress whatsoever. And so I've noticed it that on projects like that, I start measuring my time. You know, it's like books are a perfect example because books are a perfect example because books like literally take two years to write. So there are whole stretches in the middle of a book where you actually don't know if you're making any progress or not. Like you're like, this entire chapter could end up deleted, right? You know, like everything I've worked on this

month might be for nothing. So that doesn't feel good. So what do you start doing? You start measuring the hours you put in. You know, you start measuring like, okay, I did, I've done 11 days in a row of at least three hours a day, right? So it's like, I'm doing a good job. I'm a good author. Right. Are you? Yeah.

Same thing with to do list too, right? Yeah. I keep a to do list and stuff. I love checking things off. And sometimes I'll keep their completed task list there so I can see it and it looks tangible. I'm making progress on something. But am I?

I don't know. Or am I just checking boxes? Yeah. And it can get to that. Just that box checking can become its own. little task of your own. A conditioning, right? Yeah.

There are, you know, a number of things. I mentioned a few of these that already came out of this era, or at least we're inspired by this era that we still even used today. One of the kind of famous ones amongst the kind of productivity crowd anyway, like the Eisenhower matrix, right? Dwight Eisenhower was president after World War II. It was this time frame. It was very popular.

So we had this quadrant, right? On one side you had, what was an importance? And on the other side was urgency. So it could be highly important and highly urgent, low on each. You get these four quadrants. And he said the quadrant two, which was important but not urgent, were the tasks that typically got procrastinated on. So his advice was to do those first.

Not bad advice. Don't get me wrong. But it still hasn't solved the problem of why is it not urgent? Why is it not important, right? I was just going to say, like, that's just the 1950s Eisenhower version of that tweet I read at the top of the show, which is like, you know, you have to give up short-term freedom, the game, long-term freedom. Like all of your dreams are behind sacrifices.

It was like, well, no shit, Sherlock. Like, this is, I know this. This is not helping me. So I don't want to dog pile on this stuff because like it is useful information. Absolutely. It's just not sufficient whatsoever. Like, it is not the solution. Right.

You shouldn't start there. I think a lot of people where when they're like, okay, I need to get a system together, I need to get something together where I can get stuff done. They'll start here. I don't think this is when you start. this is when you're optimizing what's already worked. Right. Right.

Yeah. Find something that works first and then that go to this kind of stuff. Like I said, I've tried all the different systems, all the big ones. And you made this point already, but it does ring true for me too, is that I took, the one good thing from doing all that is I took the things that worked from each one of those and made it my own personal way. I just don't think there's any one system out there. No. Because every time, again, like this one app I just tried to use recently, I'm like, oh, this is it. This is the one.

myself already like falling into that trap and it's like, oh no. There's no single system out there that's perfect for everybody. Yeah. And even even if you find a system that works for you today, like three years from now, it'll be slightly different. Three weeks from now. It's going to be different. I can almost guarantee you that way. Once you think you found the solution, it's, yeah, there's something hiding around the corner that you didn't plan for. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Okay, but there are, okay, there are some good things like we said. There are some good things that did come out of this. So providing structure and clarity around what you need to do, that is a useful step.

Yes. Obviously. I think another thing that came out of, well, kind of a behaviorist view, but also the time management crowd was breaking things up into smaller chunks. And we'll talk about maybe a little bit later why that's useful. It's not because it just manages your time better. It's because it gives you a better emotional container for it, right? Yes, correct.

Yeah. Yeah. I also think, too, one benefit I got out of all these different time management systems is the ability to accurately assess how much work I can get done in the day. I think that did actually come from trying and failing over and over and over. Because, for instance, you know, I time box and I am by no means perfect at it and I change it constantly throughout the day even too. So I'm not a rigid time boxer.

But I've gotten a lot better about, okay, it used to be like I'd have 10 things on my to-do list and I try to time box them all and it's like, I'm on thing two by three o'clock in the afternoon. And I'm like, okay, I got to be realistic about this. So there is kind of, even though you're approaching it from the more cognitive, quote unquote, rational side of your brain, I think there's some benefit in the time boxing systems and methods that you can get out of that. Again, it's not the base underlying cause, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, I think a lot of this stuff is useful at the margins, right? Like what you just described, like gaining an accurate assessment of which part, what parts of your job take what amounts of time.

Like, that's something that is just, it's good to learn that over time. Like, ultimately procrastination is an issue of going from doing nothing to doing something. Yes. Even if that something is completely imperfect. Whereas I feel like time management is just taking somebody who's already doing something and just helping them do it slightly better or more efficiently or in a slightly shorter amount of time. And so, yeah, it comes back to what you said earlier. It's like, this is not the place to start. This is not even the place to like go second or third.

Like this is the place to go, you know, when you are, when you're moving along and you're doing a lot of things really well, but you're just kind of wondering like how can I fit more stuff in or like how can I be more efficient with my time? Then you start taking a look at this stuff. Yeah, for sure. Do we want to risk going into some of the things we do? Do we want to throw those out there? It might be a useful exercise for somebody with all.

of the caveats and the warnings we've already issued. But sure. Yeah. Why don't you go first because I'm weird. Yeah. Yeah, we already know that. No, but it actually, it might be a useful segue as well just because, you know, as someone with ADHD, like my productivity function is like strange.

Right, right. And so people who other people, people who are listening who maybe have ADHD and are, because I know procrastination disproportionately, people with ADHD, you know. struggle with it. So it might be useful to get into that. Okay. Okay. So why don't you go first? Yeah, sure. So I mean for me, I try to keep it as simple as I can. That's one gripe I have with

so many of these apps is that they get complicated way too quickly. They usually start out fairly simple and then I think what happens is they kind of get a like an audience capture a little bit. They're like, give me this feature, give me this feature and then just keep adding things. So one of my principles is to keep it as simple as possible. Have something, have a to do list of some kind.

I use Notion. That's what we use the team so I put all my tasks into a personal database that I have and there's a way to organize it. But then on a daily basis, when I'm trying to decide what to do, I do time box. Okay. For me, this works. Yep. Because, again, I, I, the most useful exercise out of all of this isn't like, okay, this is what I need to get done.

Now I'm going to go get to it. It's thinking about, okay, realistically, what can I get done in this amount of time? And after you time box for a while, again, like I was saying, you get better at this. And you get better at estimating how much time any given task is going to take you. Just describe really quick what time boxing is in case people don't know. Yeah, sure. So time boxing is you use some sort of system. In my case, I just use pencil and paper.

I actually use Cal Newport's time boxing journal that he has. You could use any journal to do this. I just like his, this way it's formatted and everything like that. Essentially, the way I do it is I will write down, you know, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock. down one side of the side of the paper. And then I make a box around any given, say it's a one or two hour time box from 8 to 10 o'clock, let's say, every morning.

And I put down whatever task I need to get done. And I'm saying, I'm allotting two hours to this task, or whatever it is. And so I give myself those two hours, and I'm only going to work on that during those two hours. Now, life happens. And this, it's not a perfect system. And so, like I already mentioned,

I will revise this throughout the day. I'm like, okay, this task took longer or something came up that was urgent that I needed to do address. Why like Cal's notebook two is because there's different columns for that. You can change it as you go. Essentially, though, what the goal is is to plan out your day ahead of time so that you have something to aim at and say, you know, I'm working on this. Am I doing what I said I was going to do? Yeah. It's kind of like an internal accountability system a little bit.

And again, it also just keeps you very realistic. Like, you know, you have an 8 to 10 hour workday every day. What can you honestly get done in that? And then it also, for me anyway, too, it does give me that, okay, I actually did get something done. This is what I can look back at it and say I use this time block to actually get done what I said I was going to get done. Okay.

So I use a combination of to do this and time boxing. I use a calendar to, obviously, we have a shared calendar with the team. I also have my own personal calendar. I look at that pretty much every day. What do I got going on? Any events? I got dinner with friends. I'll put that in there.

That kind of thing. Just kind of keep me. These are the things that I know I have to get done today. That's what I put in the calendar. The to do list is more just like these need to be done at some point. The time box is what am I doing right now? That's kind of my system. Do you have any sort of like rules or principles?

Do you like do the hardest thing first in the morning? Do you like do easy things in the morning? So I try to, I am a big fan of Cal. Of Cal Report. And I do try to get deep work in every day, what he calls deep work. If you don't know, go read his book, Dikwork. It's fantastic. I try to get that done.

And for me, it's mornings. For most people, it's going to be mornings. So usually I try to schedule about two hours of deep work in in the mornings where I'm getting like, okay, this is something that's going to require a lot of my attention and focus. So I'm going to sit down. And for two hours, usually from like eight to ten or something like that. I usually get up around 630 or 7 do, you know, I'll read, I'll kind of get warmed up for the day. And then I start working around 8-ish, 7.30-8-ish.

Try to give my two hours of deep work in. And that is usually the hardest, the hardest thing that I have to do for the day. And honestly, if I get those done, that's like a win for the day, too. You know what I mean? Like if I get two solid hours of deep work, I mean, there's all sorts of other tasks that are important that I need to do that I will get done. But if I get those two hours in, I feel pretty accomplished for those. Yeah. Yeah.

So again, that's a realistic expectation. You can get about two to three to maybe four hours of real deep, solid work in if you're in a knowledge work industry. Yeah. Yeah. And for those listening who haven't read the book, like deep work, it's generally something that requires intensive creativity or problem solving. Right.

So something that takes like a lot of mental energy and effort, like, you know, writing an article or programming or, you know, whatever, design, something like that. Like generally, we kind of max out at three to four hours a day. Right. Intense research. you know, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds very... I think that's it. Like I said, though, what, yeah, the other principle I have is just keep it as simple as possible. Yeah. As soon as I add any sort of complexity to it, I just, I don't rely.

So no Comedoro, no, like, break times. No, I mean, I will schedule in with my time boxing. I'll schedule in breaks. Or sometimes what I'll call flex. I'm just like, I know I just need a bunch of stuff that I need to get done. And I'll put like a 30-minute box. It's just called flex. Okay. do whatever I need to get done in that time. Yeah. Okay. But I don't do, no, I don't get hardcore on the Pomodoro or the, um.

Pomodora never worked for me. I did. I never quite got that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if somebody just made that up. I wonder that with a lot of things.

Yeah. Yeah. If it works for you, great. But yeah, sure. Try it. Whatever. What's your ADHD, uh, Ritalin, Apple's system look like, Mark. If you could call it that.

So, okay, I would divide it up into two kind of classes of work. So for deep work, I would say it's not very different, which is I try to block off X a number of hours, eliminate as many distractions as possible. You know, I used to use software that would block things like social media and, you know, sports websites and stuff like that. I did that for a number of years and it was very helpful, especially when I was writing a bunch of books. These days, I don't do it as much. I kind of, I'll let myself, if I kind of feel the need to get distracted for a little bit, mentally, I'll let myself do that. The biggest difference, so this is where the ADHD comes in. This is, and this is what's going to sound crazy to people.

And also, I think, is a good case study of, like, how productivity is just very personal. And what works for you may be something that, like, does not work for any productivity guru out there. That should be the highlight of the section, actually. Yeah, absolutely. As we're going through all these details, that's the highlight section. So as somebody with ADHD, my brain kind of has a disproportionate need for novelty. Actually, I wouldn't say need. I would say a disproportionate susceptibility to novelty.

Like it gets bored extremely easily and it gets excited by something shiny very quickly and very strongly. What I noticed, and I noticed this as far back as when I was in university, is that to a certain extent, and if it's not deep work, task switching actually works in my favor. I wouldn't call it multitasking because I don't, I never do two things at the same time, but I'll give a simple example, which is I had a university lecture that I used to go to. And without fail, I would fall asleep every single time.

And I would have to like end up asking my friend for her notes. And I would like scramble and freak out and have to like go read the textbook, you know, two days before the exam. And it was a disaster. And then at some point, I don't remember when or how. I started picking up Sudoku's and crossword puzzles from the student union, and I would take them to this lecture. And I found that if I, like, sat there and did Sudoku's while the guy was lecturing, not only did I stay awake the entire time, but I paid attention to the entire lecture.

That makes no sense. I mean, I know that makes no sense. That makes no sense. I didn't understand this for the longest time. And it's true to this day. So, like, sometimes when I'm, like, listening to something. somebody give a talk or even if I like pull up a podcast or something like I can't just sit and listen to a podcast I have to like open up like a game on my phone and if I have the game

going on my phone then I can pay attention to the podcast I know yeah you are weird man but it's you know what it is so this is what I figured out yeah it took me a long time to figure this out but it's so it's not multitasking I thought it was that for a long time what it is is it's task switching or it's like I guess cognitive switching. Let's go back to the crossword in the college lecture. So I'm in the, the classroom. I'm listening to the professor lecture. I pay attention, let's say I make it five, six minutes. My brain starts getting bored. And as an person with ADHD, when I start to get bored, it's like, I'm really fucking bored. And when I have the Sudoku there, I'm like,

cool, switch to the Sudoku. And I start doing the Sudoku. And while I'm doing the Sudoku, I'm like, kind of passively listening and hearing him in the background. And then after a few minutes, when he says something interesting, I'm like, ooh, that's shiny and new. Hey, look, novelty. Go back to the lecture. Okay. And so now I'm back in the lecture for another five or six minutes. And then when the lecture starts to get boring again, I can use the Sudoku to keep the novelty engine going in my brain so that I never just shut down and go to sleep. And, I bring all of this up because I do this every day. Yeah.

In my actual day. I've watched you do this, yes. And as you know, I'm, I am strangely somehow extremely productive. Yeah. So anything that is not deep work, I will very intentionally do this. Like, we took a break between shooting this. We were out in the office. We're talking about this podcast.

While we're talking about it, I am looking at the design for podcast covers. and fonts for the website and thinking about feedback that I'm going to give for on all that and I'm doing the exact same thing. So it's like, you know, while you and Jess are talking, as soon as that conversation starts to get boring,

I look at the designs and start thinking about the designs. And then as soon as I hear one of you say something interesting, I like stop looking at the designs and I go back to the conversation and it keeps the novelty engine going in my brain. So anybody listening to this with ADHD, the thing to know is that

you have this kind of, of constant disproportionate craving for novelty, for new stimulus. And if you don't feed your brain that stimulus, you shut down essentially. Like you just lose interest completely and, in my case, go to sleep. If you can find productive ways to feed yourself that stimulus, if you can, and in my case, it's kind of task pairing things. So it's like if I have to do something extremely boring, like, check, like go through my inbox and clear it out,

then I will just pair that with something else I need to do, right? Which is like, I don't know, have a meeting about, like a production meeting for the YouTube channel, right? And I'll just kind of casually, like, flick through the emails

while people are talking. And I'm not being rude. Yeah, no. I'm like, I barely notice it when it happens. Yeah. I am paying attention, but it helps me get everything done because it's like,

if I just tried to do the email and nothing but the email, it would never get done. I would get bored and I'd start watching YouTube after 10 emails. And if I just did the meeting and I tried to pay attention through the meeting, I would get bored and I would like zone out and probably start watching YouTube videos. So it's okay by pairing them together.

And this is, so we have not talked about something yet, which you and I, I think it's like the main thing of this episode that you and I disagree on. Okay. And it's probably because of this, which is the active procrastination. There is something in the research called active procrastination. Big debate over it, actually. Yes, which I personally call, my wife and I, we lovingly call it productive procrastination. Yes, that's common. Yeah.

Which is essentially this. It's like, let's say you have a big, hairy task that's really intimidating and scary, and so you're putting it off. Well, one way to get it done is to go find an even bigger, hairier task that's even more scary than that one, and then procrastinate by doing the less scary task that you've been putting off, right? So it's like a simple example is you've been meaning to clean the garage for months and, you know, you just keep putting it off. But then suddenly it's, you know, you need to go buy a new car and that's terrifying and you're really anxious about it. So you put it off with like, so it's Saturday. You're supposed to go to the lot. You're supposed to go look at the cars.

And instead of doing that, you decide, you know what, it's time to clean the garage. Okay. And so you spend the entire Saturday cleaning the garage. Now, on the one hand, you just put off a really important task. On the other hand, you finally clean the damn garage. And as somebody with ADHD, I feel like my entire life is this. It's just like finding like, here's the task I'm supposed to do. Here's my level of intimidation with it.

What is something I can find that is more or less intimidating than this to either do instead or to force me to do this? Right. And it's just like this constant negotiation with my own brain. Like you, I do have a to-do list. I don't time box because, as you can imagine, my life is chaos and the time boxes are completely useless. If you're going to be task switching, that's useless. And it's not just that, but it's also like given my role in the business, like my days are crazy. Yes.

Like there's so much unexpected stuff that happens throughout the day. So, yeah, timeboxing just goes out the window. But I do do do do do-to-do lists and task list. and I'm actually quite religious about it because I think it's the only thing that keeps me tethered and like streamlined because otherwise I just forget stuff. But outside of that, I don't do a whole lot else.

The other thing that I do that is strange about me, that's different. You know, the conventional wisdom is always like knock out the most difficult task of the day first. It goes all the way back to Ben Franklin. There was a bestselling book in the 80s called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. Basically, it's one of those, like, books that should have been a blog post.

Like, the entire book is just, like, do the most important thing. Eat the frog first thing in the morning. And then, like you said, it feels like a win for the rest of the day. I can't do that. Yeah. Like, I need some warm up or? Yeah, my brain, it feels like my brain needs warm up. Okay.

So I usually actually do the least important stuff first thing in the morning. I love mornings. It's funny. My morning routine is literally wake up, grab an energy drink, and sit down. my desk and start working, like, within 100 seconds of waking up. Oh, wow. So it's... Wow. Really? Yeah, I don't do anything. I don't, I don't stretch. I don't meditate. I don't walk. I don't, I literally wake up, walk to my desk, start working. Okay. But I need to start with like low impact work. So it's like, usually first thing in the morning is email. And then I catch up on Slack messages. And then usually by then it's been like 30, 40 minutes.

and my brain's like functioning and I can start kind of doing creative stuff and then I'll, and if anything is kind of intensive and creative and I need to like dedicate more in a couple hours to it, then I'll like do the deep work thing where I'm like, okay, close all the windows, close all the tabs, put the phone on the other side of the room and like now we're locked in, we're writing a script

or we're writing an email or whatever. That's kind of it. Yeah, okay. That's it. Well, okay, what it sounds like is you have to figure out a way to leverage your impulsivity. Yes. which I think is probably useful for people, even if they don't have ADHD, if they're just an

impulsive person. And I consider myself to be impulsive at times, too. And I've heard you talk about that before where your tasks switching, cognitive switching, whatever. And I've experimented with in recent weeks as well. And yes, every now and then, like, if I am getting bored with something, I'm like, okay, I just need a jolt of novelty. And I don't have ADHD. Yeah. So I think that could be useful for a lot of people. The important thing I think is going back. Yes. When I talk to ADHD people who are dysfunctional, they do the task switching thing, but

then they'll just leave six things half completed. And they never go back and complete it. And so like, and this is where the to-do list come in that I'm like religious with my to-do list because it's like, I, I, yeah, you have to go back. Okay. You have to go back. So that's what, when you talk about the productive procrastination, I think that's the point where I get a little sticky with it. Because it's so easy for me, like if my house is a disaster, I've been procrastinating and putting off.

But I got some work task I need to do. Like, time to clean the house now. And I go do that. And then two hours go by. And I got a hell of a clean house. But I'm nowhere closer working on what I want to work on. I think this is one you just have to be very, very careful with. Yes.

Yeah. If the task should probably be in the same domain, ideally. Oh, okay. I see. I'm usually like, I'm going to know something completely. Yeah, exactly. It's like if I was supposed to prepare for this podcast and instead I, like, decide to go mow my lawn, like, that's useless. Right.

Okay. Whereas if it's like, you know, I should be preparing for the podcast. But maybe instead what I'll do is I'll, like, start doing research for the next podcast. Okay. Like, that's what I try to do because then it's like, okay, at least that's like adjacent to what I should be working on. Even emails at that point. Yeah. Right.

Okay. And the idea, too, the whole, the importance of coming back to the thing and finishing it, it's like, let's say I start, you know, prepping for this podcast, I get bored halfway through, so I start doing another thing. What I do is I wait for the moment that the initial task starts to feel novel again. It's like, oh, yeah, I was prepping for the podcast this morning, and now it's six hours later. And yeah, I should go finish that. That sounds kind of interesting, actually.

I was at a really interesting place with that. So it's like tricking your brain into finding old things to feel new again. Yeah. That makes sense? That does make sense. No. I found the same thing, too. We've been working on this particular episode for so long.

I would get so bored. I'm just like, oh, my God, I cannot with procrastination anymore. I've read these studies or whatever, it's so many times or whatever. And if I just put it away for a week or whatever and came back to it, I'm like, boom, there's all this novelty to it again. It feels novel again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The big takeaway here, though, is not to. get caught up on what we do because you and I have very different systems. Except for the to-do list, I think we have pretty different systems. And I try not to work on too many things at once where you leverage that in your favor. I need to work on a lot of things at once. Yeah. The key takeaway here is you can try these things out, figure out what works for you, pick, choose, borrow. That's great. Yeah. But this is not going to solve your procrastination problem. This is only after you're self-aware enough, right, of why you procrastinate in the first place, that these things actually will work.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's move on to another mid-century school thought. This one that went completely under the radar in the productivity space and is actually one of the most effective things when it comes to dealing with procrastination and productivity. And that is purpose. This doesn't get talked about it. In fact, we almost miss this.

Yeah. This was a late addition to our guide and our outline. I was embarrassed. Actually, you're like, why aren't we talking about purpose? I'm like, oh, God. It was a huge face palm for me. Yeah. This is the fascinating thing.

It's like so much has been written on time management. There is not a single person in the corporate world that is like, you know, walking around cubicles, like reminding people of their purpose. Yet when you look at the research, this is like one of the most important things. Yes. Is that people feel a sense of meaning and purpose in the work that they're doing. Right. Like if you feel like your work is meaningful, you're much less likely.

to delay doing it, right? Because it aligns with your values. It feels important. It feels useful. So this actually comes out. I'm not going to harp on it for too long, but like it comes out of the mid-century existentialist movement, right, which is just wonderful and bleak and French. And they basically said like, you know, they start with nihilism, which is like nothing

means anything. Off to a great start. We're all just a bunch of dirt and atoms. And we're all going to die. and there's nothing you can do to stop it. But from there, they make a very important leap, which is that meaning and purpose is not preordained. So Jean-Paul Sart had this great saying where he said,

existence precedes essence, which is actually taking Plato and flipping it on his head. Because Plato said, productivity is a form, a concept that we try to live up to. And whether we exist or not, productivity is always there. And it's just a question of whether you embody it or not. Start's like, no, dude, fuck that.

Like, you get to decide what productivity is. You get to decide if it's even worth pursuing at all. You get to decide if it's meaningful. Existence precedes essence, that basically meaning is constructed after the fact. That essentially, like, we are all writing our own stories, and we are all deciding what is useful and meaningful and what is not. And it's a simple idea. It's incredibly profound. I think it's most popularized from the experiences of Victor Frankel.

In his book, Man Search for Meaning, he wrote about his experiences surviving the Holocaust, and he talks about how it's a sense of hope and purpose for the future that not only drove him to survival, but he noticed among the other prisoners was kind of the deciding factor of their fates as well. And so you get kind of this whole philosophical movement through the 60s and 70s of just really thinking and paying attention to the meaning that's being ascribed to certain behaviors or functions or or groups or relationships. And strangely, it's funny because existentialism, I mean, it was everywhere. It was in culture. It was in art.

It was in film. It was in politics. It never made its way into the business world, which is funny because when you look at the research on productivity and procrastination as an extension, people who feel a sense of meaning and purpose in their work, they're more productive. They're more resilient to setbacks. They're more willing to take risks. They're more willing to hear feedback.

And they procrastinate less. And so it's just like it's so stupidly simple, but it is worth considering why am I doing this? Right. Why do I care? Well, do you think it didn't make its way into, say, corporate culture because it's almost, it's almost antithetical to a lot of corporate culture? because it's kind of hard. I think most people would kind of see what's going on there.

If you brought a consultant then to say, okay, we're here today. And from 8 to noon, we're going to talk about your purpose here in this corporate setting. And people would be like, wait a second, what? Okay, let me back out. Or is that too cynical, I guess, yeah. That is pretty cynical. Yeah. I would also say that it did make its way into the corporate world.

It just took about 50 years. I would say with our generation. Ah, okay, yeah. I would say really just in the last 20, 25 years, like really the millennials in Gen Z. And I remember seeing survey data around this years ago of like one of the big things about the millennial generation is like they, like millennials really gave a shit. What they did for a living. Like they needed to feel like their job was contributing value to the world in some way.

And they weren't satisfied just, you know, getting a paycheck. And that's a relatively new thing. throughout history. Like, it's a, I would say it's actually a very privileged thing in history. But it's also, I mean, it is purpose is, is productive, right? Like, it's, and if you look at all of the businesses and companies over the last 20 years, like, they really push some sort of social value or cause or mission behind whatever they're doing.

You know, everything from like, like, the Nike commercial, like, focusing on. on female athletes or Apple being the first to pioneer, like recycling electronics. And there's just so many examples from the last 20 years of large corporations who have like adopted specific missions, certain meanings aligning themselves with certain political causes. Right.

And it's like very much like it's not an accident. It's more profitable, right? Like it's like we want to, we want our employees to feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile. And because when you feel like you're doing something important and worthwhile, you work harder. Yeah. And you fuck around less.

And you're willing to make mistakes and embarrass yourself because it's for some higher cause. You know who's the master of this? Fucking Elon Musk. Oh. Like, think about it, dude. Like, if you're an engineer interested in space, what feels more important than taking humanity to Mars?

Right. Right. Like, if you're an aeronautical engineer and you hear that, like you're 25 and you or that. You're like, whatever, dude, I'm all in. Like, tell me what to do. I will grind all day, all night. I will work my ass off. You know, Tesla, you know, climate change and bringing the renewable economy, you know, into America. It is, it really is a superpower. Right. And it is a real, I think it's an overlooked talent of Elon's of like finding these kind of almost like civil, civilizational important causes to align his companies with, you're seeing it now with

the AI stuff. Like he's pushing this narrative of like, we need an AI that's aligned with valuing human life or else like we could all go extinct. It is absolutely existential. It is existentialism, you know, just in corporate form. So it is a super over. It is a super overlooked thing. Yeah.

And I understand why it feels hand-wavy and cliche. There's like there are a lot of clichés around it. But it is a thing. And I think to bring it back home to people listening to this who are struggling just to like, you know, eat healthy or apply for that job that they want or whatever, like really ask yourself, why do you want it? I'd say what I noticed the most often is that people who are primarily motivated to do things not because of the, you know, not because of the same. they actually care about the thing, but because they care about the attention or the result, the thing will get them, those are the people who lose motivation very quickly, right? Like, if you're doing something for the approval of others, that is not a sticky motivation.

Like, that is a very short-term motivation. So you're not going to stick through all the challenges and setbacks and failures and, you know, false starts. Whereas if you actually really believe in a higher, like a higher meaning or purpose around something, then you will have that patience. You will have that resilience and you will stick with it even if you don't get it right the first or second time. What do you think, too, though, about, you're talking about purpose kind of in a grander sense and a, you have this higher grand purpose that aiming for, whether it is somebody like Elon Musk and their, his grand designs

that he has on humanity, I guess. Is that overcomplicating it? So two, though, for some people, because we can't all have those jobs, right? So what I'm thinking of is I think a lot more jobs and work in general had just an inherent purpose tied to them. And it was usually taking care of your family. Yes. Like so a miserable job, you could be shoveling shit. Yeah.

And you could say, ah, this is a meaningless job. I'm shoveling shit. Or you can say, this job allows me to put food on the table for my family or, you know, whatever it is. Another example, I had a friend who wanted to say. start his own business. He had a pretty decent corporate job that he had and didn't really like it, though, and there was no purpose behind it. But he wanted to start this business. And as soon as he decided, I'm going to start this business, the job that is corporate job actually took on a new

meeting because he needed the money from that corporate job. And he needed the connections. And he needed, so he started to like his job more because there was a new purpose around it. That's awesome. Which is insane. And it wasn't some high pie in the sky purpose that he had. It was more just like, I mean, it is treating it as a means to an end, but there was a bigger purpose behind that means to an end, if that makes sense. So I think there's just a way to, you know, not we don't all have to be engineers for space X or NASA or whenever to find that purpose and to motivate us and to not procrastinate on these things. Yeah, you don't need these civilizational, cataclysmic existential reasons. It's interesting. I was talking to a guy recently, you know, we did a podcast, an old podcast episode last year

on my health journey. And I, in that episode, I talked about how it was really important for me to find a way to make exercise fun. Like, that was one of my big challenges is that I just, I hated doing it. And so I really had to find like gamification or groups or, you know, competitions or whatever, just like keep it interesting for myself. He's like, it's funny. I've worked out religiously for 20 years and I've always hated it.

Never enjoyed it. I was like, wow, that's actually sad. Yeah, well, I was like, first of all, sorry. I'm sorry, feel a little bad for you. But I was like, wow, that's actually, that's atypical. Generally, when you meet somebody who's like exercised religiously for forever, it's because they enjoy it in some way or they found a thing that they enjoyed. And so I asked them, I was like, well, what drives you?

Like, why do you keep doing it? And he said, oh, well, you know, everybody in my family dies super early. And as soon as my kids were born, I was absolutely determined that I was not going to die early. I was going to live to an old age and I was going to see him grow up and I was going to see my grandkids. And I was like, there you go. There you go. Yeah, yeah. It's like it doesn't need to be fun.

You didn't actually hate it probably at some level, right? Exactly. On a deeper level, you didn't. Right. And I think that's, that is the power of finding some sort of purpose and something is that it, it, it, makes, like the suffering in anything is going to be inevitable. You know, we've talked a lot in this episode about the pleasure principle and avoiding pain. To me, it's like purpose is the one, if there is a hack, it's the one hack there is.

Right. Because purpose is the only thing that can take pain and make it feel worthwhile. Right. Yeah. Right. And it like, it can make you feel like, okay, that sucked, but I'm glad I did it. Going back to the Goggins thing, too, I think that's, I think that's actually what's going on with him. There's just a higher purpose to his pain.

Totally. What do you think, too, about, though, if you do start out kind of at a not very good reason or not very good purpose for something. I'll give you an example. I've always been fairly healthy, but, you know, like you over the last few years, I've focused more on my health. And I started out was, I just want to look good. I was as a vanity purely. It switched to a bigger purpose, though. I was just telling you a little while ago about a great uncle that I had who in his 80s was able to like spread his legs and bend down and put his head on the floor.

Like he could stretch insanely and he's skiing into his 80s and all of that. And I'm like, well, I want to be able to do that. And I want to be able to live a healthy life when I'm older now. It's very much switched to that. But it started out as a very vain purpose. Yeah. Some jobs can start out that way too. this is just a means to an end.

Yeah. Pay my rent. And then it turns into something bigger later on too. Are there examples of that that you could think of in your own life or what's going on when that happens? I don't know. I mean, this career started out that way.

Oh, yeah. I was, I read Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week and I was like, I just want to make some money on the internet so I can go party in Argentina. Like that's a dream by then. I was like literally the, my entire bar. God, the 2000s, man. They were awesome.

I can just clear that bar. I'm good. And so I just started, I just started a bunch of websites. Like, I didn't really think about it. I didn't care about it. And, you know, eventually, as you know, one of those websites was a dating advice website. And that started to take off and do pretty well. And then people started asking me for advice.

This was 2007, 2008. And I was like, well, shit, if people are going to ask me for advice, I should probably, like, know what I'm talking about. So I started researching all this stuff. I started, you know, buying a bunch of stuff. of books and downloading psychology papers and reading journals and and pretty soon next thing I know I'm like this is I could do this forever yeah like this is it I'm I'm so in on this and I just feel like that that actually is probably the more common story I guess I think this is people's biggest mistake with this too and and I am 100% sure we will do an episode on purpose at

some point but it it people mistakenly assume that you find the purpose and then you become super motivated to do all the stuff where it's like, no, you do the stuff and as you do it, you find the things that feel very meaningful and impactful. And then that's where the purpose is. Right. And, you know, so again, I guess this might be a little bit like the time management thing where it's like if you're trying to go from zero to one, then purpose is probably less of a factor unless there's, I don't know, there's like some major external force, like a kid's born or something. something like that. Generally speaking, though, it's like you need to have actually be doing something and then you look for the purpose and the things that you're doing. Because that's the thing that's going to sustain you over the longer. The purpose, the thing that the purpose

solves is going from short term to long term. It won't get you from zero to short term. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense to me. And checks out where I have found purpose in all sorts of places I never thought I would have. So 100% that checks out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just really quick, before we get into the takeaways, I just want to remind listeners that we do have the free downloadable guide that goes along with this episode. Most podcasts put their show notes on the website. Our show notes are so freaking long and thorough. We actually had to turn them into a PDF. The show notes for this episode is over 65 pages long.

So if you want to see those show notes, including full summary of the episode, all the takeaways, all of the research, book recommendations, all the above. Go to solvepodcast.com slash procrastination to get it. Also, if you want some help implementing the advice from this episode into your life, you should check out the momentum community. We are launching a 30-day procrastination challenge based on this episode where we take all of the best ideas and concepts that we're discussing here and turn them into daily actions that you can implement into your life. So if you're wondering how to apply everything that you've been learning,

then the momentum community is the best way to do that. You can go to find momentum.com slash procrastination. Link is in the description below. All right. Let's get back to the theory and the research. So like we're, at this point, we're pushing into the 80s and 90s. Everybody realizes the time management stuff doesn't really work. Where are we at here?

Right. What's next? Well, a group of researchers were very observant that the time management was not working. And so they set out to figure out, okay, what is it about procrastination, motivation in general, that gets people to actually do what they want to do and say what they want to do. One researcher in particular, his name was Pierre Steele, who you've already brought up, and he gave us the definition, our modern definition of procrastination.

He also formulated what's called the temporal motivation theory, okay, or TMT for short. I might refer to it as TMT right now. Temporal motivation theory. Essentially what he did, he tried to marry a few. few different areas around things like motivation. There was this idea about temporal discounting and hyperbolic discounting that he kind of developed to throughout this that he borrowed from which we've talked about. And just for for listeners, temporal discounting is we tend to deval things far in the future. Right. So if there's a consequence, 20 years from that, we tend to not

really care. Right. Right. That will factor him really big into temporal motivation theory as we go through this. But his, the big innovation through his theory was this equation that he came up with. Okay. And I'll go through a little quick one for you with the details. And, you know, there's no, obviously you're not going to be able to have to plug in numbers for this or anything like that. But I know. I brought my calculator and everything. He came up with this, this equation, which is motivation equals expectancy times value divided by one plus impulsiveness times delay. Okay, that's all right. So if you're not mathematically inclined, no big deal.

The important thing to take away is there's kind of four big factors that go into this equation on whether or not you are going to procrastinate or not. If you're motivated enough to not procrastinate, right? So expectancy, we have this first variable, which is the perceived likelihood that you think you can actually achieve what you're trying to achieve. It goes back to the self-efficacy thing. Right. We already talked about that. So he's already bringing in stuff that we know. If you expect you're going to be successful, you're more likely to be successful.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's one of the first factors that are up in the numerator of the equation, right? Then you have the value. It's your perceived how rewarding the perceived outcome is to you. And there's a subjective component to that. But essentially, if it's something that you actually value highly, you're going to be more motivated, right? Makes total sense. Yep.

Okay. Multiply that by your expectancy. If you think you can achieve it and it's highly valuable to you, then you're going to have the synergistic effect where motivation goes up, you're going to not procrastinate on it. But then we have some things that might detract from your motivation as well. Impulsiveness. Okay. So here we're kind of getting at some of the emotional side of things, right?

And we've talked already about our own impulsiveness and how that's factored into our procrastination. So impulsiveness is how prone you are to seek out and succumb to distraction. or immediate gratification too. Right. So your ability to postpone gratification or delay gratification. And then that last one is delay. How far away is the outcome of whatever is associated with the task that you're about to perform, right?

Right. So the further a task is or the further the reward or the result of the behavior that you're going to engage in, the less motivation you have. Right. And that's the temporal discounting that you talked about. That was one of the big innovations of temporal motivation theory was including that in our calculus. Literally, the equation to procrastination. Now, I'm going to guess just from my experience with other psychologists who have tried to create equations is that this equation is just not going to work in every situation. So that's fine.

What I like about what I really like about TMT is that it finally breaks down and acknowledges a lot of these emotional factors. the expectancy. We've already talked about that, not just in terms of the self-affecacy, but also the perfectionism, right? Like, if your expectation is that, you know, that it needs to be perfect to be accomplished, then that is going to be far more intimidating

than if your expectation is that like, oh, I just need to do, you know, a decent job at it. I like the temporal discounting. And then I like the, it's amazing that we've gotten this far not talked about distraction yet, especially given this day and age. Like, I mean, younger listeners will probably will have trouble believing this,

but, like, procrastination and distraction were not two things that people really related to each other until, like, maybe 15, 20 years ago. Like, when we were kids, it was never, like, the issue of doing our homework was never because, like, we couldn't get off our phones. It was just, we just didn't want to do our homework. Maybe TV, but even that was, yeah. Yeah, like it's. Dad was probably watching TV anyways. So you can choose what you can watch. My memory of childhood is long periods of boredom, but I still didn't do my homework.

So it's this idea that procrastination is directly proportional to distraction is a relatively new concept. And I know we're going to get into distraction deeply at some point here soon. But it's interesting to me that it's really only coming up now. Yeah. Well, look at it in the historical context, again, like you just said, Pierce Steel was doing most of his, the bulk of his research was in the 90s and 2000s, and he's continued since then. But that is when information technology really started to take off, take off and get like embedded

into the culture to where we see it today. And so the impulsiveness part of that, you're right, it captures that distraction element. Yeah. It's a simple equation, but it is pretty flexible still at the same time because that impulsiveness, one of the benefits and the strength. of the equation is that it can these these terms can capture a lot but those terms can also become imprecised into we can get into that in a little bit but yeah so like just some examples of this like your expectancy it could be really high like you like yes I can do this but your impulsiveness

might override that and then your the deadline might be a long ways away so you can start to see all these different really complicated kind of calculations that happens with just these four variables, which is really pretty interesting. And again, it was an innovation at that time that to marry all these different things and start putting these things together in a way that's more interactive. Because when we started out, we were talking about the ancient world. There's this one school of thought that thought this thing. And then the psychologists come along and they're like, no, it's this thing. This is finally, we're starting to get a more integrated approach at this point. And I think that's another big innovation of TMT.

was that it started looking at it in a kind of multidisciplinary way that we just hadn't seen up until this point. Yeah. Yeah. If we may take a quick detour, okay. I think the assumption up until this point is that to be productive or to defeat procrastination, it is about summoning willpower.

It's about just mustering up enough energy or motivation to just brute force. force your way through it. And I definitely like, especially in the ancient times and throughout, you know, in my second book, I called it the classical assumption. Like, if you look at all of the discussions around Ecracia and like why people don't do the things that they should do and why people fail at things, like it is very much seen as like it is the job of the higher level of your mind, the chariot driver to whip the horses into

to shape until they do the right thing. And so you're just expected to like brute force your way through it. I think it's really only in the last few decades that our understanding of psychology has gotten developed enough that we've realized that it's like, A, that doesn't really work in the long term. Like you can brute force yourself into, I mean, everybody's had this experience. You can brute force your way into the gym once, maybe twice, maybe even a couple weeks, but like by week three or four, you're done.

you're just tapped out, you don't care anymore. So you really do have to negotiate these other factors. You really have to look at like what is, how are you measuring yourself? Like when are the benefits coming? How do you feel about it? How do you feel about your ability to accomplish the thing? What sort of standards or expectations are you holding yourself to? Are those reasonable or not?

Like it's kind of negotiating these other factors within your mind that help you, you know, when you combine that with the environmental stuff, like that's, you almost just like grease the skids for the behavior to happen naturally as a byproduct of these things. Yeah, and I think maybe what you're kind of getting at too

is that you're not denying that part of you, that part of your nature too. You're working with it. Yes. More so. These more recent theories start to really acknowledge that and incorporate that into their frameworks.

Yeah. And I think, you know, yeah, for the longest time it was very much like the reasoning, the rider, you know, on the chariot, the reasoning part of your brain developed so you can overcome all of these terrible, nasty, brutish things about you. And, well, yes, it can be used for that. But it's also those things probably evolved in our minds as well in order to serve those two chariot driving horses, right? Like there's there's a an acceptance of who we are in a lot of these. It's like, okay, look, there's impulsivity. We're impulsive by our nature. How does that factor into getting things down in our procrastination?

We, you know, there's, we have this weird kind of temporal discounting where we put off things that are further, that are due further in advance for whatever reason. Yeah. This starts to incorporate that and like really acknowledge human nature on a more realistic level. in my view. And it's a much healthier view of how to actually get yourself to take the action that you want to take. Right. You know, because it is coming back to the shame piece. I was just going to say, shame is gone.

Shame is out of the equation. Right. You're not judging yourself. You're not like, oh, God, why am I like not? Why am I discounting things that happen in the future? Right. You know, yeah. It's like you're human.

This is, we all do this. And coming back to Aristotle, this is the skill, right? The skill, you could almost look at. each of these four factors and see the skill in each one of them, right? It's like managing your expectancy, managing, like, being mindful of the value that you're going to get out of something. And there are ways, I'd love to talk to you, like, there are ways of manipulating that value as well.

Like you can gamify things. You can create social accountability around things. You can reward yourself for things. You can create things in your environment that make it more enjoyable, right? So it's like learning to manipulate the value aspect of the equation, learning to implement. I think the purpose stuff that we talked about really factors into the time discounting. Right. Right.

It's like when you remember what is the cause or mission that is driving my motivation to do this thing, that helps you counterbalance that time discounting. It's like, I'm doing this for my kids. I'm doing this so that when I'm a grandfather, I can play with my grandchildren. That's why I'm going to the gym today, right? It's like that counterbalances that time discounting that naturally happens in everybody's brain. So it's, we're finally starting to see everything come together. Right. Right.

Yeah. And you can, you can look at each one of these, like the expectancy thing. You can work on things around self-efficacy or break the task down to a point where it is. You do feel like you have some agency and some ability to. Where did that start? Like the breaking down tasks. Yeah. Actually, a lot of that kind of came from time management.

Oh. So there was glimmers within that where it's like, oh, you don't know how to, one of the big kind of, I don't know, not a revelation or even an innovation, but they were like, oh, yeah, people need to be able to see a big task and break it down into their component parts. And it's just a lot more explicit in something like TMT where, yeah, they found that breaking that down into, you've talked about this so many times. This is my go-to advice for this. This is one of the first pieces of advice you always say. If you have this huge daunting task, and start with the most dead, simple, obvious thing that you can do. And that gets your momentum going.

And then on to the next one and on on the next one. Yeah. That's the other thing about the equation. It's very dynamic. If you really apply it, you will see that these factors can change over time a lot. It's most obvious in the delay thing as the time approaches, the motivation goes up. But the others can do the same thing, too. You might value a task or the benefits of a task differently throughout the stages of

the process of doing it as well. Yeah. So, yeah. It is, the breaking down thing, I feel like it works on so many levels. You know, part of it is just the intimidation factor. Yeah. You know, when you have this huge, hairy goal, it is scary and it feels impossible. And it feels you don't get that sense of progress and movement, you know, in just a single

day or a single week of action. But if you can break it down into that single day of action, then you get to feel the sense of accomplishment. It feels less intimidating. And then like you said, you do get that sense of momentum, right? Like there's like an old thing from that Jerry Seinfeld said that, you know, when he writes, he exes out a day on his calendar. Yeah. And he said that, you know, initially the goal is to just X out a few days in a row.

But he said once he's got a few days in a row, his only goal is to don't stop the street. Yeah, don't break the chain. Keep it going as long as possible. And you can, again, that's like a beautiful example of like manipulating these factors within your own head and redefining what the metric is and read like breaking down tasks into constituent tasks or like lumping tasks together into some larger task in a way that feels more doable, feels more exciting, feels more fun and feels less intimidating for yourself. Yeah. So that's the expectancy component of the equation. I think for the value one, like you already, mentioned too is like having some what you you said it with respect to delay but I think value can also be manipulated through your purpose as well like if you do have a purpose again it goes back to if I have a job I don't really necessarily like yeah I'm probably going to procrastinate it this and that but if I have

a purpose attached to that job that same job now the value could shoot up right at that point too so again it's just these little mind it's just it's all within your head too which is crazy you know there's some external factors as well, obviously, the delay and all of the impulse in this, distractions in your environment. But again, yeah, we're putting it all together at this point. And it is, it is a skill. It is something you work on and develop. And I mean, we'll talk at the end of the episode about how to work on and develop it. But it is, it's not something, you know, because again, it's like purpose is subjective, value is subjective, expectation is subjective. These are all things that you get to decide. You get to decide, like, what success.

looks like. You get this to decide what is meaningful, what is valuable, what is worth pursuing. How long you pursue it? Do you want to pursue it for a week, a month, a year, 10 years? These are all decided within your head, and the skill is learning to draw the lines in such a way that makes it easy to move forward. That it stops being intimidating or feeling difficult. I listened to a podcast that Pierce Still was on in preparation for this too. He made a good point. And you actually alluded to this earlier, was that TMT, a lot of it is about being very realistic, too. And he said the people he's noticed that do the best with procrastination are very, very honest with themselves.

And I think it applies to each one of these variables. But he gave the example that we've already given to, you know, he doesn't buy junk food. Yeah. And it's because he knows what happens when he has junk food in the house. And I've been very, like with my friends, they all know, like I'm a sugar fiend. I'm a junk food fiend and that's why I don't buy it. You know, but I think that you, that's part of like reducing distractions part maybe or it is even increasing expectancy.

Like I know I can not eat junk food if it's not around me. Yes. Boom. That's like a immediate unlock for me. Yeah. Immediate win for me. So it is just getting into the kind of minutia and dialing these things around to fit your personality and be real honest with yourself about it.

Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel like this maps with Neera IL's indistractable stuff? Because, you know, one of the things I quibble with Neuron sometimes. Sometimes I feel like, you know, it is a two-sided coin. One is just don't have temptation in your environment. Yeah. Like be aware of your triggers and get rid of them.

But then some of it, too, is like being aware of your own internal triggers. Like being aware of when you get bored or antsy or anxious. and not choosing the avoidance in the moment. Sometimes I feel like he leans too much on the ladder, but like I'm wondering, I'm wondering if, like, if his framework kind of fits into the TMT stuff. So specifically around environmental design or more about the emotional trigger stuff?

The emotional trigger stuff. Yeah. Well, so I think that's actually kind of one, I would say fair criticism about TMT, is that it kind of is a little, it's not specific enough around the emotional triggers necessarily. Yes, there's impulsivity in there. And there's some subjective constructs like value and expectancy and all of that.

But the emotional side, I don't think it's quite, it kind of tries to boil down these very complex emotional processes that we go through into four variables. And that's one of the criticisms of it that I think is fair. Yeah. It feels like it should be like six or seven variables. Well, yeah. While the variables are pretty well clearly defined, like actually measuring them and

defining them in the real world is much harder. Yeah. So I think that's a fair criticism of it. And we'll get to more of the emotional side of things. But yeah, it oversimplifies some of the complexity of human behavior, I think, to some extent. Because all equations will. Of course. You know?

Well, and it's, this is, this is the problem with this field is like, anytime I see an equation in psychology, I'm like, yeah. You know, it is probably directionally correct. Yeah. But it probably doesn't not measure a single thing. It can't capture everything. Yeah. And really what they found in the experimental studies is TMT does a very good job of predicting procrastination in the short run, but it's not super great about, like, chronic procrastination, let's say. Or just like a repeated procrastination in the same domain.

Yeah. I'm sure you've experienced this this before too. Sometimes you're like highly motivated and you still procrastinate. Like I like a surge of motivation I'm going to get this done and you still find a way to procrastinate. And so that's the one thing to output for this if you notice in the equation is motivation. It's motivation equals the expectancy times value, yada yada. There can still be times where you feel highly motivated and still procrastinate. You still don't do it.

And it just doesn't, this doesn't fully capture that. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the criticisms for sure. And there just isn't really a lot of focus on the emotional and affective triggers. Yeah, because I'm just thinking about the impulsivity piece. Like, everything else makes sense to me, right? The expectancy, the value.

Delay, yeah. The delay. I feel like the impulsivity you could actually break out into probably three or four of its own variables. Yes. Like there's how many distractions are in your environment? Like, how easy is avoidant? Like, this is the near IL thing, which is like it. It's your level of distraction is proportional to both how many opportunities for distraction

is there in your environment and how prone are you to distraction through your own internal emotional triggers, right? Like you want to work on both sides of that coin, right? You want to reduce your internal emotional triggers and you also want to reduce your external environmental triggers so that you're kind of like hitting it from both sides. So that feels like it's missing. And then also, I know we're going to get to emotional regulation in a second, but it's a huge piece. Like if you are not good at managing your emotions, right?

Like if you are the type of person who when you get angry, you just fucking lose your shit for an entire day and become extremely impulsive. Or when you get anxious, you just like panic and like run to, you know, whatever the nearest bucket of chocolate is. Like, it is the intensity of your emotions plays a huge factor in this. And the ability to regulate your emotions to come down from them to cope with them effectively is a huge part of this as well. Yeah. And this doesn't even get into the physical side. Like, it's like if you haven't slept, right? Like, if you haven't, if, you know, if you've got an injury or if you're sick, I mean, like, it's well,

documented and everybody's experience it, that it's like, if you are physically not in good shape, your willpower is just basically gone entirely. Cultural norms, too. Those aren't captured in this either, you know? So it's really hard to, that impulsivity one, I agree, is kind of like it's a catch-all category for any sort of emotional influence that would go into procrastination or whether you are motivation. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's limited in that regard. I definitely think so. Yeah. It is kind of, I really want human behavior to be boiled down to like an equation. That would be awesome. Would it be nice? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there are, there, like this equation, it does capture a lot of procrastination or motivation in certain situations, but it's not, it's still not complete. And I, you know, whether we ever get to a fully complete view of it or not, I don't know. But this is definitely a step in the right direction. So I don't want to knock it by any means. So where are we at now? What is, uh, what is, uh, what's our current best understanding of procrastination and why it happens? Well, Mark, I hate to tell you, but it comes down to emotions. I know.

I know. We have to get squishy with this one. Why? See, you just need to be hugged more. That's why you're not doing your term paper. You have had enough hugs. Well, that could be part of it, yes. In the early 2010s, late 2000s, early 2010s, there was one researcher in particular, Tim Pitchell,

who started to notice that actually this isn't just a problem that boils down to these four factors. It's a much deeper emotional mood regulation problem. And in 2013, he wrote a book about it, and it's a very accessible and great book if you want to check it out. And then one of his protégés was Fuchsia Seirwa, who we interviewed for the show too. And she has kind of carried the torch since then. Tim's retired. He's retired now. Fuchsia is now living in England and she's carried on, she's kind of the world's foremost researcher on procrastination.

And the core premise of the emotion regulation theory of procrastination is that it is first and foremost, procrastination is a mood regulation strategy that we use and an emotional regulation strategy that we use to avoid these nasty negative feelings that we associate with any given task, that a lot of what we've already talked about. But they said that is the point. That right there is where procrastination starts and where we need to focus our resources and our ability and our higher cognitive powers and everything we've been talking about. This is actually where we really need to focus on. The research findings point to the negative affect triggers that we have around we're more

likely to delay tasks that we just find unpleasant. It makes sense, right? There's task aversion as well. Anything we perceive as unpleasant or overly challenging. It gives us this kind of urge to procrastinate almost. We also prioritize mood repair, right? So procrastination typically serves to like kind of quickly improve our current mood that we have. Like, ooh, this feels bad.

I just want out of this. I want escape, basically. Research backs all of that up. There's a lot of individual traits, too. We've kind of, we kind of mentioned that. If you're more impulsive or not, that's like one individual trait that might influence the way you procrastinate or whether you procrastinate on anything. And as opposed to something like conscientiousness, which we haven't really talked about,

but that's an individual trait, a personality trait that can influence all of this. There's very personal experiences, too. We've talked a little about your childhood upbringing or anything like that. They incorporate that into this framework as well. There's also just kind of a personal nature to all this. So it's both universal emotional processes, but then also the individual differences. So it's kind of trying to tie all of that together into this picture of how we regulate emotions on a even moment-to-moment basis, not just day-to-day basis, but a moment-to-moment basis.

Procrastination is a strategy for mood repair and just wanting to not feel bad, essentially. Yeah. So when you say procrastination is a strategy for mood regulation, Like, explain that like I'm five. Okay. What does that mean? Okay. So, Marky.

Marky. Marky poo. No, in case people like don't really, emotional regulation is one of those things that like everybody's heard the term, but like, it's fuzzy. What does it actually mean? Yeah. Let's just take an example of when you are going to procrastinate on something.

You have a work task you want to do or you need to do. Yeah. You don't want to do it. That's kind of the point. Right. when you approach this task, like, you might get an anxious feeling. Dread. Dread.

Bortem. Yeah. Or the perfectionism can even come in at that point, too. Like, oh, my God, am I not going to do a good job at this? And if I fail. Anxiety. Anxiety boils up. Anger.

Why the fuck do I have to do this? Yeah. Any negative emotion associated with the task will increase your likelihood of procrastinating in that moment. And so what we do is we look into, usually into our. immediate environment or past strategies that we might have used as well to alleviate those uncomfortable feelings that we have and that's when procrastination takes away. Okay, I've approached this to task that I find unpleasant. Don't like that unpleasant feeling. Get me out of here. Let me do something else. Let me distract

myself with these days it's your phone or whatever it is. Yeah. Or yeah, this is why you can also like people will procrastinate by cleaning their houses and or something like this, some boring task because they find that even less awful than whatever they're going to be working on, right? Right. Does that make sense, Markey? Yes. Okay. I was going to call you Daddy Drew.

I don't know. I was like, oh, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. That gets weird. It gets really weird. Please do not call me that. But yeah. Ever.

Early on in this. this, when this framework was being developed, a lot of the psychologist called it giving in to feel good, right? So you look for whatever feels on a relative basis, whatever it feels better in the moment than whatever you're uncomfortable with. Yeah. And you go to that and you give in to that urge. Yeah. There's some impulsivity around that. Totally. It's well. There's environmental factors that go into this. But at its base at its core, it is that emotional regulation, that moment, When you choose between do I need to do the thing that needs to be done or do I need to, I just want to remove this anxious, uncomfortable, angry feeling that I am bored feeling,

painful feeling, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah, I still, it's funny because I didn't think about this when we were researching the episode, but like now that we're talking about it, I'm kind of like seeing it in my mind. Again, it's kind of two sides of a coin. One is managing the environment, managing, giving yourself fewer opportunities for that avoidance. right? Like clearing the junk food out of the fridge. Turning your phone off.

Turning the phone off, leaving the phone in the other room, all those things. And then the other side of the coin is that emotional management, the awareness, understanding the emotions that are coming up, and then understanding perhaps why those emotions may be arising for unnecessary reasons, right? Like are you being too perfectionist? Are you protecting your ego? Are you rationalizing past behavior? Are you trying to impress somebody?

Do you, is the reason you're motivated? The reason you want to do this thing, a shitty reason, and it's actually not very motivating at all. Like all of those facts, all of those things that we've talked about, do you have a lot of shame around this? And you just like don't, it makes you feel icky and horrible about yourself. And so you just find any way you can to get away from it. All of these factors that we've been talking about up to this point, almost all of them, are factored into that emotional negotiation of like, why do I feel this way?

Is it reasonable to feel this way? And now that I feel this way, how do I manage it well? That's one side of the coin. And then the other side of the coin is the, how do I give myself as few escape routes as possible? Exactly, yes. Right. And that's the behaviorist stuff,

the environmental design stuff. Right. Coming back to the skill thing, that it's the two sides of the procrastination skill coin, right? It's like on the one side, it's the environmental, design, the managing your triggers, managing your nudges. And on the other side, it's managing your own emotions. Right. Understanding why you associate certain things with a task and how to kind of

manipulate the levers or dials in your head to make the task feel easier. Whether that's through breaking it down in the smaller chunks, whether that's gamifying it, whether that's finding accountability with somebody, rewarding yourself with something. There's all sorts of levers you can pull to like manage those internal emotions right right that everything we've talked about does it crosses that point of emotion regulation that you have to manage right exactly yeah there's uh it's and it does it goes back to it's a short-term relief for a long-term uh detriment right right all of this is it what it comes down to is i don't have to feel that discomfort right now if i just do something else yes All of those things are kind of like getting at that.

Yeah. Like whether it's in your environment or just an emotional. Well, and what's amazing too is that like all of the thinkers that we talked about throughout this entire episode, from Plato to Augustine to Aquinas to everybody, it's not that they got it wrong. Right. It was just incomplete. Right. It's like Augustine said he's like it's the failure is is you are you are sacrificing your higher level value, the thing that is more important to you but difficult to do for. the thing for the lower level value, the thing that is easy to do, but much less valuable

and less important. You know, Plato saw it as like an ignorance of the repercussions of your decisions, like, not understanding, like, how you're doing in that very moment, even to like the Buddhist perspective of like not being aware of what your internal triggers are. Like, this is what I found really interesting when I looked at the Buddhist side of it. Like, again, it's correct. It's incomplete. but it's completely correct.

And in fact, I actually found meta-analysis of 14,000 participants who practice mindfulness and meditation. And they showed significant improvements in time management, task initiation, and also a sense, you talk about that sense of how long it will take to complete something.

Their sense of how long it would take to complete a task actually got more accurate after the mindfulness as well. And so again, it's like emotional sense. Emotions tend. tend to be fun house mirrors in our brains, right?

So like when you're angry, things that are small appear very large, and things that are large appear very small. You know, it's like when you're anxious, there are other things that are things that appear very close or actually very far away and vice versa, right? So it's understanding that you're looking at a funhouse mirror. You know, meditation is a practice of like developing the ability to recognize the funhouse mirrors and adapt to them

and still navigate through them. and whereas when you're just, you know, I think where Plato was correct is that the actual ignorance is just believing the fun house mirror is real. Yeah. Like that's the ignorance. Yeah, definitely. And the one of the big recommendations from this group of researchers, Tim Pichel, especially and fuchsia, Sirwa, is more mindfulness around these things. So we can talk about this now, the rain method. This is what, this was an article that Tim Pitchell wrote and he's written about it in his books as well.

But it's a mindfulness tool that gets you figuring out that fun house mirror kind of brain that we all have. Yeah. And being able to deal with it. And he calls it the rain method because it's an acronym. It's recognized, allow, investigate, and non-identification. Okay. So it's just a very basic kind of, I believe it's from Zen Buddhism, maybe actually, too. but it's recognizing in the moment when you do feel that resistance, those uncomfortable feelings

that pop up. I think most people, like when that pops up, your initial reaction is to look for a distraction. This says, okay, wait, just recognize when it's happening. That's all you have to do at first. This is, I'm approaching a task I don't like. I'm just going to sit with that, right? And that's actually the second step is allowing those emotions to just exist and not push them away, not reach for distraction. Just allow them to be there and don't flee from it. The eye in it is investigate those emotions. Get curious. Why do I feel this way? That's something you just said to. Like, why am I feeling ashamed about this? Why am I feeling anxious about it? Angry about it? Are my expectations reasonable? Am I blowing things out of proportion? Am I just tired? That I sleep last

night, like, yeah, start asking all those questions. Ask those questions to investigate and get deep with it, too, right there. And the last one is not identification with the emotion. This is a very Buddhist thing. Very Buddhist. Yeah, which is, you know, I am not this anxiousness. I feel anxious. I am not this anxious.

Yes. Don't, you don't want to fuse your identity. Like you just said, if you fuse yourself with that fun house mirror image that you have in your mind, then everything becomes like a fun house mirror room. Right. And to Freud's point, you'll protect it. Yeah. Right.

If you decide that you are anxious and perfectionist, then you will actually protect that self-definition. Yes. Which will cause you to, like actually your procrastination will become part of your identity. Right. And we talked about that earlier about people who identify as like, oh, I just work better under pressure. What they probably don't realize they're doing is that they are incorporating their

procrastination as a part of their identity. And so now they will start unconsciously protecting it. Right. And continue to procrastinate to show like, this is my identity. To prove to themselves and others. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So that, as far as practical takeaways go, that for me after realizing that, I realized I realized I did some kind of version of this or bits and pieces of it. When I really did need to get something done, I would kind of like, you know, buckle down and be like, okay, I don't like this. Why don't want to like this? All right. I just get going.

Putting it all together like that, though, has been super, super useful for me. And especially the non-identification part, that last part is very important. Yeah. I think, too, like you just said, don't wrap your identity up and whatever you're doing. Totally. For sure. Yeah. Well, speaking of identities, I've got like a fun exercise for us.

Oh. Before we wrap up with like the tactics and strategies for everybody. Dr. Linda Sappenden, and she's a clinical psychologist, she wrote a book in the 90s called The Six Types of Procrastators. And so she has six types that she is identified through her clinical practice. Fun. And I thought it would be fun to kind of like now that we understand all the frameworks, right? Like I think it would be fun to go through these six types and kind of identify what the factors are, like that lead to their procrastination.

And I imagine that listeners will see themselves in at least one of them. So the first one, which I know I know you've dealt with is the perfectionist, right? Fears in perfection, sets unrealistic standards, refuses to accept good enough. Yeah. And it ends up having to use time limits to avoid endless revisions or redos. Do you feel attacked? Yeah. I feel like I'm getting better at it.

I mean, this is kind of my, this is my beast to slay this year, I think, was the perfectionism. I actually feel like as I'm getting older, I'm letting more things go. I'm like, all right, that's not going to be perfect. Do you think that's just from accumulating so many imperfect experiences? Yeah. I don't think I've actively worked it. Like, I'm getting over it. It's just been, I, like, now accept reality for what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. The second one is the dreamer. Loves big ideas, but struggles with details. Breaks goals into steps and needs to use structured plans to maintain consistent habits. Tends to wait for inspiration rather than just take action. I relate to this one a little bit.

Like, my mind definitely, I like to dream big and, like, have these kind of giant aspirations. And that's fun and that I think that is like overall, it's a net positive to have like big goals and dreams. But the drawback of that is the intimidation factor. Because it's like if you have this massive world changing plan that is going to take 10 years to execute and then you wake up on day one, it just feels so minuscule and insignificant. And so yeah, it says here that these, the dreamers have to break, break their goals down in the steps. I am like, as you know, I am an evangelist for this. Like, this is my number one go-to.

For any time I'm procrastinating, I mean, to the point where like, if I'm procrastinating writing this outline for this podcast, I will tell myself, literally just write one word. Yeah. That's all it takes. Start with a word and then go to a sentence and then go to the paragraph, right? Like, it creates the momentum. It removes the intimidation. It, like, generates emotional momentum.

It's the way to go. Like, my brain tends to just want to make everything as big and ambitious as possible. And so it's like I'm, the work for me is constantly breaking things back down and making them smaller. Yeah. So that makes sense to me when it's something like, do a podcast outline. Where I struggle with that, though, is, okay, I'm. I'm breaking something down. Makes sense.

It's doable. I have self-efficacy around it. I can do this thing. My problem often comes in when it's tying that back to the bigger picture. Oh, yeah. You know, it makes sense with like a podcast outline because that's a tangible thing. But it's like if it's more abstract, further in the future maybe, and I'm doing this one little task, I have a really hard time marrying what I'm doing, like writing a sentence about something with some grand goal that I have. So I'm actually, I didn't expect to do this, but I'm going to bring Eisenhower back into this.

Oh, okay. So Eisenhower is a great quote that I love where he says, plans mean nothing, but planning is everything. Okay. And I truly believe that like planning, projecting, forecasting, 99% of it's bullshit. Okay. You know, it's like none of it's going to come true. It's funny because I just worked with our head of operations on like a projection. for 2025 and 26.

And I mean, I've been doing this long enough that I'm like, this is bullshit. None of this is going to come true. But it's still useful. I still do it every single year because it does exactly what you just said, which is it like it ties this individual podcast. Shooting this segment of this podcast is now tied to this episode, which is tied to the projection for the podcast this year, which is tied to the overall business strategy, which is tied to like our overall mission and goals, right?

So it's like it lines all those things up. That's what I find is that like it's like the numbers don't matter. Like it's nothing ever plays out the way you expect it to. But the act of creating that plan or projection ties all those things together in your head. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Next one. The Worryer avoids risk due to fear of failure.

Struggles to reframe fear as growth. Needs to take small manageable steps and challenge. catastrophic thinking with more realistic outcomes. I'm definitely not this person. I don't think you are either. No, maybe a little bit, but yeah. I've definitely known people like this who are just like almost like doomsayers. Like they just think everything's going to go wrong.

They're worried about everything all the time. And it is like freezes them in place kind of. Is it like a like a fight or flight response or more of a fight flies freeze response? So they're freezing or what is it that makes them procrastinate about? some procrastinate about this. I definitely think, you know, if you think fighter, fight or flight, I think it's the flight side of it. Like, I mean, procrastination is essentially just the flight and the fighter flight. But yeah, for people who are prone to worry and fear chronically, I could see how it's just like, you just don't want to do anything because what if it goes wrong?

Right. You know, like they're just kind of always imagining the worst case scenario. Yeah, which you would think it's kind of like almost a perfectionist thing, but it's not. Yeah. It's more because the perfectionist is like, well, what if it's, you know, if I don't do it perfectly. But what if I, you know, what if I'm embarrassed by or whatever? This is like, what if it just everything just, the worst case scenario comes to mind. What if it goes wrong? What if it, what if I'm worse off than I am that?

Like, yeah, the perfectionist is like here, my bar is way up here. What if I don't hit it? Whereas like the warrior is just like, what if things get worse? Because I tried this thing. The crisis maker. So we talked about this. Thrives on last minute adrenaline. Enjoyes the emotional rush of doing things last minute.

needs to create earlier artificial deadlines, needs to work in scheduled sessions, and needs to reward themselves for finishing ahead of time. I think we've covered this person quite a bit here, but it is interesting to see them show up in the list here. The next one is the defier. I definitely relate to this one. Resist imposed tasks dislikes authority, struggles to reframe actions as personal choices, needs to identify with the direct benefits, use autonomy to stay in control rather than react. passively. As a person who just chronically hates being told what to do to the point, like, is just like unnecessarily contrarian at times.

Big cultural component, that one, though, too. You know, where if obedience or at least tradition or service to your family, society, whatever it is, there's a big cultural component as well. This feels like maybe a little bit of a privileged procrastinator. Yeah, yeah. Like it's... Could be serving too many. many college kids, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Like, it's just, I mean, my personality has always been, like, if somebody tells me to do something, my first reaction is like, no, I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Right. And then finally, the overdoer takes on too much, tries to accomplish too many tasks at the same time, unable to manage their energy effectively. They must learn to say no, delegate their tasks, focus on high impact tasks, prioritization,

which we talked about, and then set boundaries. to reduce overwhelm and burnout. This is me. Definitely a little bit of me in here too. Like it just... You try to take on a lot you do. I have a hard time saying no. Yeah.

Yeah. I definitely see this one in myself. To me, this feels like the... If there's one of these that I imagine has grown over the last 10, 20 years, I could see it being the overdoer. Yeah. Just because they're the opportunity

of things to do and engage in as grown exponentially. Yeah. So the need to create boundaries and say no has also grown exponentially. And those are hard things to do. Like it takes, there's quite a cognitive load to like turning something down or refusing to do something. So, so yeah, those are the six types of procrastinators. I think it's a little bit useful before we get into all like the specific tips and strategies and stuff.

Like I think it's useful to kind of ask yourself where you are and what you need to vote. what each of us needs to focus on to improve this for ourselves. Absolutely. All right, Drew, so now that we've beat people over the head with a trash can full of information, it's time to bring this home. It's time to, now we get to the end of the show, we get to the part. We're like, okay, what are the takeaways here? Like, what do we actually use and implement into our lives?

How do we actually fight procrastination within ourselves? And so you and I, we like to do this section. We like to start this segment of the podcast. with a section that we call the 80-20 of procrastination, which is what are the 20% of actions or behaviors that are going to give you 80% of the result? Like, what's the highest leverage implementation here? So you and I, we've got a list of a bunch of things.

You know, we've talked through, at this point, dozens and dozens of different ideas. These are the most useful, the most verified, the things that have the most evidence behind them, and also the things that you and I have personally found the most leverage with when we've implemented them. So let's go through them one by one. I think it could be useful kind of returning to that external versus internal framework,

like managing your external environment versus dealing with your internal environment. Let's start with the external first. Sure. Right. So why don't you kick us off? Let's talk about environmental design. That's right. What's a good way to implement environmental design to help with your procrastination?

The core premise of this is altering your surroundings. so that the desired behavior that you're targeting is just easier or the one that you don't want to do is much harder distractions and stuff like that. So we'll talk about how to do that. So set up your environment so that for success, basically, right? Some of the ways, like we've mentioned right now, if you're being procrastinating on your diet, don't buy junk food.

Don't keep it in the house. That's like an easy win you can have right there. If it's more work-related, get your work station set up. put the phone in the other room. Get all distractions out of sight and out of mind. That's a good place to start with that. You can use, like you mentioned, you use website blockers. There's a lot of software.

There's a lot of things like that, yeah. So if you're the type of person who's like prone to just going down email rabbit holes or YouTube rabbit holes or sports website rabbit holes, you know, one piece of software is called Freedom. There was another one called, I believe it was called self, or no, it was called focus. Yeah. There was another one called control.

There's a bunch of them. And then there's all sorts of accessibility, things like on your phones. Like, you know, the iPhone and Android, they have like these are working hours. So you turn off all the notifications. Honestly, just keep your phone in the other room if you're really serious about that. But if you need to have it on you, I would say definitely use those. Hackback notifications on your phone too. I don't know why people.

Like, look at some people's phones and they're just, there's like 90 notifications on it. I'm like, why from like an app they downloaded four years ago that they don't even use? That's crazy. And turn off your notifications. Just turn off. Yeah. But your text messages, maybe a couple other things, and that's it. Yeah.

If your phone is chiming or buzzing all day, like, you're basic, that's like putting crack in front of a crack addicts. Like you're doing yourself zero favors. Yeah, I think one thing that's really useful to think about this too, like there's kind of, I would almost put this in two different categories. One is there's actually physically altering your environment. in your environment. Like I said, get rid of the junk food.

One of the things that I, like, a really extreme example of this that my friend Nira A.L. did. And by the way, his book on this is excellent. Environmental design go to that. That's an unconstructible. Yeah. His book, Indistractable. It's excellent. If this is, if distraction is a huge issue for you, like that is the best book that I can

recommend. One thing that he did in his own house is that he put all of his Wi-Fi routers, he put on these plugs that you could put on timers. And so he like programmed the timers to shut off, I think, at like 7 p.m. or something every night. And so his like, the internet in his house just went off every evening at 7 p.m. And it's such a pain in the ass to get up and like re-plug in the router and like do all this stuff.

So he just, he never did it. And sure enough, he stopped using the internet past a certain time. And he would start, he was reading more books and he was spending more time with his family. and he was doing all the behaviors he wanted to do. So there's kind of like actual just physically alter your environment. That's kind of the first category. And then the second environment or the second category, I think, is creating rules for yourself. You know, like when you were saying things like, you know, leave your phone in the other room or, you know, people will say stuff like, oh, only check email after 2 p.m.

Something like that. Like it's, I think it's really useful to get explicit of like, this is a rule that I live by. Like, this is a rule that I have for myself. Because if you try to, I think the key principle here is that when you leave it up to your own decision making, you can't trust your own decision making. Right. And not in the moment at least. Yes. And not consistently over a long period of time.

You might get it right the first day or the first week. But, like, eventually you're going to start making the bad decision. And as soon as you make the bad decision once, that's going to justify every future bad decision. So it's just like you have to create a rule. I'm not allowed to have my phone in my office, period. Right. Or I don't check social media until after four or whatever. Email too.

I only do email at 2 or 3 p.m. in the afternoon or at the end of the day, once a day, clear the inbox. Then it's done. Yeah. Yeah. And then the physical side, the physical environment side too. I've done things like, well, for a long time, I didn't even have a TV, which just didn't even have it in the house. It's like, you know, not having junk food in the house.

Same type of deal. I've also in times where it's like, okay, I need to get a lot of work done. And since I do work from home, there are those distractions. So I've taken like the power cord to my TV and like giving it to a friend, right? I'm like keep it in my friend's house. So I can't even have it. Like, just hold on this for next two weeks. Seriously.

I'm just imagining you like ringing a doorbell just like hanging a power cable and somebody and be like, I'm going to come back for this. Not too far off. Again, it goes back to, I mentioned earlier that, you know, that interview, I listen to with Pierce Steel where he said the people who are most honest about these things. Yes. About they know themselves well enough to be like, okay, I know I don't have the requisite willpower to fend off the TV or the fridge or whatever in these certain moments.

And so I'm just going to accept that. I guess another thing is that there's a self-acceptance to environmental design that you have to be really okay with. Right. You have to accept that you're flawed and that you're not going to change your own nature. I think that's something, you know, I think a lot of credit. chronic procrastinators, they like have this unreasonable expectation that there is going to be a day where like they are able to turn down every temptation and they are going to be impervious to distraction and they are going to be able to put their phone away whenever they want. And it's like, no, you're not.

Never going to happen. You're human. You're not. You're not going to defeat 100,000 years of biology. You're just not. So you might as well work with it and create rules and structures and an environment for yourself that like nudges you towards success. I'm curious, like, what is your personal biggest environmental design win that you've had? Besides the not keeping junk food in the house, like that's a, that was a big one.

But also separating my workspace from other parts. So I just have, there's one room now in my house that it's just for work. And now I've seen after a while, it's been a couple of years now that I've had that. It's when I enter that space, that's workspace, right? And I try to keep the phone out. I try to do all that. So separating your workspace from your kind of like your play space. you know, I guess you could call them.

That's been a big one for me too. And then keeping that space, and I try to keep it clean because for me anyway, if I see clutter on a desk, that's a reflection of my mind. So a big one for me is just, yeah, using those cues too. So it's like, it's like I enter that room and my brain automatically goes into work. Work time. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's a big win for me. And it's great because now when you leave, you're like, it's done. Personal time. Yeah. Yeah. Not worrying about it, not checking email, not. Yeah. That took a while.

I've been working remotely for a long time, and I've had a boundary issue a little bit of, like, where does work happen and where does leisure happen? Yeah. For you? For me, I mean, obviously the junk food stuff's big. The phone stuff has been big in the past. I would actually say home gym was a absolute game changer. And it's funny, too, because I remember, you know, when I moved to my place here in L.A., and I started putting together a little. home gym, you know, it's a really small room.

It's like half the size of the studio probably. And so there's not a whole lot in there. There's just some free weights, a bench, and like a small squat rack. Yeah. And I was like, you know, it'll just be kind of cool to have this. At first, I was going to keep my gym membership. And the idea was like I just kind of work out at home as like the supplement. Yeah.

It was such a massive game changer because it, the simplest thing is I no longer had any excuse. Right? It's like, come home at 530. I'm tired, long day of work or whatever, big day of shooting. And I'm like, oh, I should work out today. Like, normally I'd be like, well, I don't want to get back in my car and go to the gym and have to change and like do all this thing and shower and all this stuff. And it's like, no, now the gym's like 20 feet away, motherfucker. Like, you have no excuse.

It's right there. Go do it. It doesn't matter what time it is. It doesn't matter how tired you are. It's right there. You can get something in. And at first it was a little bit of like, it's like, ah. Why did I do this to myself?

But now I'm just so happy it's there. And actually I quit. I cancel my gym membership like within a month or two. Because I'm just like, this is so easy. And it's so, even dumb things like, you know, like I'll be like sitting on my couch watching a TV show with my wife.

And she'll get up, you know, we'll pause it and she'll get up, have to go do something for 10 minutes. And I'm like, wonder how many pull-ups I can do. Just get up. Just like,

I'm just like walking to the gym and start doing pull-ups. I'm like, all right. Yeah, it's not bad. You know? Like, it's just,

it has been. And just having it right there, the convenience, the ease, and the elimination of all the friction of having to, like, get dressed, get in the car, go, get a gym bag, all that stuff. So home gym, huge up, even if it's, like, small and simple and, like, not even, it doesn't have all the equipment that, like, a normal gym would have. Huge game changer. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think the big kind of takeaway from this then is using friction strategically Remove it for the things that you want to do, like have a home gym. It's frictionless you get right into there. And then add it to places where you don't want to do a behavior. Don't have junk food. There's a whole bunch of friction with not having it. I got to go all the way to the grocery store just to get a bag of chips or, you know, a candy bar or whatever. Strategic friction is really the key here.

Yeah. And it can even go as far like one thing I learned when I was kind of going through my health journey. Don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, that's a good, that's an easy one. And then also another one, like, this one, like, my health coach pushed on to me because I'm like, well, yeah, you know, and then I'm in the grocery store. And I've got my list, but then I'm going to start walking through the aisles.

I see all this stuff that looks good. And he was like, you know what? Don't even go. Sign up for Instacart. Yeah. Put your list in when you're, like, while you're eating lunch, while you're full, put your list into Instacart. Don't even give yourself the chance. Again, it's like removing those decision points.

Like the more brain dead simple you can make the good behavior, the more likely it is to happen. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. So similar to environmental design, another big one is social accountability. We talked a little bit about the Confucianism. And, you know, we've kind of skirted around this, you know, with all the talk of emotions and behaviorism and conditioning and all this stuff, the ego stuff. We haven't addressed it really directly, but like it is worth understanding that probably the strongest driver of our emotions, period, is other people, right? It's the people in our lives that we like, that we trust, that we respect, that we want to win the respect of or the trust of.

They are some of the strongest levers on our own behavior. And you can utilize that. I mean, first of all, on a very abstract level is being. being conscious of who you let into your life. You know, there's this old saying that you are the average of the five closest people to you. I think there's a lot of evidence that that is true, right? It's like if the five closest people to you in your life have absolute shit habits and they get nothing done and they're always complaining and laying around on the couch and brain rotting, like that is going to nudge you into those behaviors because that is what is going to get you social validation and approval. and fundamentally we're human, we all need social validation and approval.

So surrounding yourself by people that you admire, people that have good work habits, good health habits that have the habits that you wish you could have, just by spending more time with them, you are more likely to adapt a lot of those behaviors. But then on a very, like, tactical level, finding somebody who has the same goal as you and is also struggling with that goal is, and then like working on it together, it's just your chance of success rises exponentially. Like the difference between, say, I don't know, trying to learn a new language by yourself and trying to learn a new language with a friend, your chance of success is going to like

5 or 10x if you do it with a friend. And I think that's true of pretty much anything. And a big part of that is just more fun and interesting, which we'll get to in a second. But I think the biggest thing is just accountability. You don't want to be the asshole who like skips French class. Like, you don't want to be the dick that, like, paid for, you know, convinced your friends to, like, join a CrossFit gym with you and then never shows up. Like, it's just, that's embarrassing. That loses respect that, you know, people stop trusting you as much.

And so, like, that is a huge lever that you can pull within your own brain. I do have a quick story about this. So that friend that we mentioned earlier, Nehryl, and that book I recommended it in Distractable. So he was writing that book while I was writing. my second book. Everything is fucked. And we were both having trouble finishing our books. And so we agreed that we were going to meet up, I think it was twice a week, for writing sessions. And we set, basically, we both gave ourselves the deadline of the end of the year. I think this is 2018. And we made a bet that if, I don't remember how much money it was, but it was like,

if one of us finished our books and the other one didn't, we had to give, whoever didn't finished the book, had to give the other one, I think it was like $5,000 or $10,000. It was like a very painful amount of money. It was a very painful amount of money. And we like wrote it down and like had like a contract and everything. And and we did it. And it was, I mean, we both, we both got it done. I mean, let's just put it this way.

We were more effective, I think, in those four or five months than we were like the entire year prior to that. Yeah. I've heard near tell that story to the other people. And he said his hand was shaking. when he handed you because I think you each wrote a check or something or a contract, whatever he wanted.

He said my hand was shaking. I handed it over because it is that powerful. Think about that emotional space he had to be in for that. He's like, oh, God, now my ass is on the line. Yeah, and it was, it's funny because there was kind of that looming threat of like, oh, my God, I have to get this done. But it actually turned, I mean, he and I are really close friends now, and a lot of it is because of that because we started meeting it up

and writing together every week. And it just became, there was a lot of kind of soft accountability that happened in the interim, right? Like, you know, it's like I'd go over there on a Monday and we'd spend a few hours writing. And then afterwards, we'd have lunch and kind of look at each other and be like, well, how'd your session go? And be like, oh, man, I didn't. This is a disaster. Like, I got, nothing was usable, right? And then we kind of talked through it and be like, oh, yeah, that's how last week was for me.

But, like, today was pretty good, you know? And, like, it was just nice to, like, validate each other and reassure. sure each other. Because if stuff like that happens when you're by yourself, like let's say you have a horrible writing session or a horrible workout or something, again, the tendency is to like the inner fun house mirror warps it so it feels more catastrophic than it is. Whereas when you're with somebody else, they're like, oh, yeah, I've been there. I felt that way last week. But, you know, you just try again and it'll be fine. You know, it's like having other people around reminds you that it's not as big of a deal as you think it is or things aren't falling apart the way you fear

they are. Yeah. And I want to highlight something you already mentioned with regard to that, though, but finding people who are in a similar situation and place that you are is really important in this case, too. Yes, you can find somebody who's like, you know, get an accountability coach, like somebody who's fitness or something like that who's really good and they're way advanced in you. There's some accountability there. But I think it's a lot more enjoyable and relatable when you find people who are at a similar

spot as you are. For example, too, like when I started CrossFit, it was me and two friends. We started in both of us. None of us had done CrossFit before. All of us kind of probably hadn't been in the gym for a little while. And so there is that kind of commiseration that you can all do around it. And you're like, oh, this person's the same spot,

struggling with the same thing that I am. And you kind of feel that sense of community around us. So I think that's really important, too, something to highlight. Yeah. And it's funny because we talked a little bit about how, like, students are the biggest procrastinators. And it's funny because this is the easiest solve for them.

You know, like you were constantly surrounded by people who in the exact same situation as you struggling with the exact same procrastination as you are. And my first two years, well, first year, first year of college, I was at music school, but first year out of music school, my grades were okay, like up and down. But then my last three years, I was like a straight-A student.

And the primary reason, it was two of these things that were, we've talked about already. The first thing that I did is that I realized that like if I went back to my dorm, zero studying would happen. Like absolutely nothing would happen. You know, the guys down the hall would be playing poker or something. The next thing you know, I'm at a party on a Tuesday night and then I'm like drinking until 4 a.m. So like nothing useful would happen at the dorm. So I eventually developed a rule for myself that when my classes ended, I had to go to the library. And I had to spend at least two hours at the library. It didn't matter if I just sat there and like

stared at the wall, I had to go to the library. And sure enough, once I'm in the library, it's like, well, I got all my books. I might as well, like, start studying or, you know, do that, like, start working on that assignment that's due in two weeks that, you know, I haven't really thought about. And I started doing that. And sure enough, like, grades immediately went through the roof. And then, you know, jump a year or two ahead later. And I, like, tell them some of my friends like, oh yeah, I have this rule. I just go to the library. And a bunch of people I knew were like, can I come with you? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. I'll be there at 1 p.m. on Thursday. Like, I'll be there until at least three. And like, sure enough, a bunch of my friends

started coming and meeting me at the library. And again, it's that accountability, right? It's like, well, my friend's there, she's studying for her history exam. Like, I'm going to look like an idiot if I'm not studying for my exam. So I might as well study for my exam. And you just, again, you start nudging yourself into the right behaviors. Yeah. I had a very similar experience in college, too. Yeah, I wasn't very good at studying the first year or two. And then after that, I did find, like, especially in the more difficult classes,

you'd find a group of people in there and be like, hey, we're going to meet at the library. It was always that. And that, like, I look back on college. I remember those study groups very, very vividly. And so leveraging that, too, just the social connection that you get really brings it all home, too. It's strange how it, like, yeah, it becomes fun. Yeah. I don't know. Like when you're young, you kind of think like you need to be like drunk or doing something crazy to have fun.

No, seriously, like a stats class that we took that was just horrible. Our study group that went to the library. It's like I remember that. We had a lot of fun about stats, you know? Like, yeah, you're absolutely nerd. I know. I know. Totally was. Cool. All right. So that's the external stuff. Those are the external factors that we can manipulate to help our own procrastination. Let's start talking about the internal stuff. Yeah. You know, so let's start with the big question. I think you, let's take, let's take opposite starting points. Why don't you start with like the big, hairy questions, and then I'll kind of like break it down into the small questions. Okay.

Okay. Well, first, we talked about purpose and finding a why for your actions, right? And I think that's just foundational and fundamental, as we already discussed, to getting things done. I mean, procrastination kind of becomes an afterthought when you really have a strong person. time to what your daily actions, right? So reconnecting whatever task or a job or whatever it is to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and what is this doing for me in my life that is going to bring like a greater sense of purpose around things.

That I'm starting there. So kind of finding your why, the Simon Sinek thing, you know, you could dig into that. Why is something important to you really digging into the reasons like, okay, why is this, I have this job or I have this task? I have this creative project I want and finding the underlying drive and value that you associate with that. So go back and listen to the first episode on values. That will give you a very good foundation for this as well.

Yeah. But starting there, starting with why, why am I doing any of this and like really getting into and digging into playing the why game with yourself like a 30 year old? Why? Why? Why? Why am I doing this? Why?

Why? Why? I think that's a really good place to start anyway. Yeah. I think too, like having a basic understanding of like what a good. why is versus a bad why. Yeah, we didn't really talk about that, did we? Yeah.

But generally speaking, I think the best way to characterize like a good why is that it's something that is bigger or more important than yourself. Yes. You know, I think if you dig down and ultimately you find that your why is just pointing back at you, it's like, oh, I'm doing this just because I want people to respect me or I'm doing this because I want to impress, you know, this group of people that I wish were impressed by me or, you know, whatever, that's going to be a weak why. And generally the strongest whys are the sorts of things that you're like, you know what,

I don't matter, right? I will do anything for my kid or I will do anything for my church or I will do anything for the environment. You know, like it's like when you find something that is greater and more important in yourself that even if you die, you hope it continues on past you, like that is generally indicative of some, a good form of why. The other good form of why, I would say, is around creativity. Like, if there's an action that you appreciate just in and of itself,

like if it's something that you would do if nobody was watching and nobody knew you did it, right? Like, it's, then that's probably a good why. It's just like the pure enjoyment and satisfaction of that thing, right? It's like I would still play music if nobody ever heard me play. It's just because it's like the pure joy and satisfaction of playing is fundamentally enriching in my life. That's a good why as well. It's like try to stay aligned with that. Right.

Yeah, we talked a little bit about in this section two, we talked a little bit about this, where if you do start out with the why that you later find that, oh, this isn't a very good why. the example I gave anyway was, yeah, I started working out because I wanted to look good, right? But it eventually did change into something else. Sometimes that can't happen. So sometimes we need to abandon something if we don't have a good why for it, but sometimes the why can change too, right? So like in that case, I changed from my vanity, which is, if I'm honest, it's still important to me, right? Sure.

On some level. But really what it grew into was, oh, this is a lifelong skill that I'm developing that's going to help me until the day I die. Basically, like, hopefully I'm not going to be one of those 80-year-old people, like my great-uncle who I'm still out there skiing and I can do the splits and all of that kind of stuff. So your Y can change. But sometimes you also just need to let something go because it's just there's no foundation for your Y and your purpose. I think that's a really good, a really good point, though, is that like those weaker whys don't go away. Yeah, yeah. You just need to find the bigger, stronger one.

Like, yeah, you never will stop carrying. You will always want, you know, the cute boy or girl to, like, find you attractive. You will always want respect from your peers. You will always want to impress certain people. Like, that's a very natural and human thing. It's just like, that's not sufficient. You need to find something bigger than that. Because if that's your only why, then you're just on a very ugly treadmill.

And it's not going to get any slower. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay, so, yeah. Zoom in a little bit here. So zoom in it. So we're going, that's the super big picture.

cutting in super, super tight. I have this concept that I've called for many years the minimum viable action, which is this is the breaking down or chunking down, you know, actions into a smaller component pieces. I call it the minimum viable action because it's basically what you do is you take whatever you're procrastinating, you break it down into sub-actions, and then you continue to break it down to the point where it stops feeling intimidating. And then the point where it stops feeling intimidating, then you say, okay, cool, I'll go do that.

So really simple examples. Like, let's say I want to develop a meditation practice. And I wake up one morning and I'm like, oh, man, 20 minutes of meditation, like, that's a huge pain in the ass. And it's like, okay, well, let's break that down. Like, what about five minutes of meditation? It's like, yeah, it's still kind of like, okay, what about one minute of meditation, right? Like, just go sit on the fucking floor. How about that?

You don't even have to. Just sit on the floor and just do like 30 seconds. And it's like, okay, yeah, that's not intimidating. So then you go do that. And then what you find is that once you do the tiny action, once you're on the floor for 30 seconds, then you're like, well, I could do five minutes. And then you do the five minutes. And then you do the five minutes.

And then you do 10. Or maybe not. You know, maybe you just do the 10. But at least you did 10. Because 10, before you were in a place where it was either zero or 20, If you sit down and do five, that's better than zero, right? So the minimum viable action is always, it helps guarantee that something gets done. Even if it's not as much as you would hope or imagine, it's just that something gets done.

I've applied this in almost every area of my business and my productivity. Like this is just, this is my absolute go-to. In my personal life, anything that I am struggling with or I'm delaying, this is the first thing that I go to. Because I'm like, how can I break this down into something that's not intimidating? So with workouts, I did this just the other night. We had a long shoot day. I got home like 6 p.m. I'm like, I'm hungry.

I'm tired. I'm supposed to work out today. I don't want to do this shit. And I like, you know what? Just do one set of each exercise. Like you don't have to do the full workout. Just do one set of each exercise. And I was like, all right, I can do that.

And yeah, I did one set of each exercise. And that's better than nothing. Right. Right. You know, when I'm writing a book, books are really fucking intimidating. And some days you sit down and you're just like, I don't know how to start this chapter. I feel like this whole section is terrible. I don't want to deal with this right now.

And I just look at it and I say, just write one sentence. Just to just put together one non-shitty sentence. Like, it doesn't have to be good. Doesn't have to sing. You don't have to be hyming way. Like just put together a sentence that like makes, that is readable. Right. And then you start there and you're like, okay, well, I kind of know what the next sentence is.

And well, let me just finish this paragraph. And, you know, next thing you know, you've got two pages written. So minimum viable action, use that momentum to carry you forward. To me, this is like the most, the biggest tactical hack that I've kind of ever found, you know, aside from the environmental stuff, like, this is the biggest tactical hack that I've ever found for my own procrastination. Yeah. Yeah, you've been recommending this one for a very long time.

A long time. Many different ways. And what really clicked for me when doing this episode was that how that really helps with the emotional side of the skirt. So what you're really addressing is kind of like this overwhelm that happens when you have this big task in front of you. And we mentioned in the previously, you know, it was actually this kind of came out of the time management crowd, which a little bit surprising. But if you think about it, they went from, okay, we're in a factory. You know, we want to build a car, but we have to break that process. down.

Yeah. And so they're like, this is, you know, this is how you should do it. What they missed was it's because it's an emotional problem, not a tactical, rational problem. It's an emotional problem. You have this big, huge task in front of you and you need to break it down into more manageable emotions that are attached to this task. Right.

Like we keep saying procrastination is an emotional problem. Self-control is an emotional problem. Like this is not a problem of information. It's not a problem of motivation. It is a emotional problem. It's managing your own expectations, managing your own self-perception. And so, yeah, this is just the most effective trick that I've ever come across to do that. Yeah, and with the minimum viable actions, too, don't underestimate like a small win, the impact of a small win.

Yeah. That can have an outsized emotional impact on it. Especially if you go from, man, I'm just not feeling like I'm getting anything done to even just getting one or two things done. It's a huge, don't underestimate that. It's not linear. It's exponential and how good that feels. Absolutely. Yeah.

Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but like, yeah, I've noticed that so much through. my career that like you'll get these people who have been stagnant for a long time and I think what happens when you feel stuck and stagnant is that you start developing the story in your head that like I've got to do this drastic thing to turn my life around and it's like actually no dude you just need to go get like yeah go get a couple small wins under your belt like that will actually that that will move mountains for you like it just it will open things up for you way way way more more than you would ever anticipate. So absolutely 100%.

All right. What's the next one? Okay, yeah. So the next one is addressing those underlying emotions. This is kind of the crux of it. This is where we want to end up and be able to really address what's going on, dig into what's going on. Why are we putting this task off?

Why are we anxious about it? Why are we angry about it? Why are we bored? What's so painful about this task? And addressing those emotions that we attach to these dreadful tasks that we have to do. or perceived dreadful task. So we talked about the rain method. This is one way.

It's really just more about mindfulness, though. Being aware, so your rain method, remember to recognize, allow, investigate, and non-attachment to those emotions. So it's just a way to be more mindful at every single stage of what's going on during procrastination. And you can, I mean, there's different ways. You could be more mindful around this. But this, I've found any way just on a moment-to-moment basis when that does pop up, this is a really good way to

just get, like really get in there and be like, okay, what's going on here? Why am I feeling this way? Where am I feeling this in my body? Why am I feeling it there? All the things you think about when you hear about mindfulness practices. That's, yeah, that's how you can start to address the underlying emotions. And I think it's important to emphasize because I imagine that there's some subset of listeners right now who like just went through four hours of information and the history of procrastination and ecracia. and they get to the end and they're like,

ah, fuck, it's about emotions. You mean I got to go to therapy to get my work done? It's like, no, no, you don't have to. Sure, it would help, but like you don't have to. Ultimately, it's more about, it's not about fixing your emotions or like solving your emotions.

It's more about becoming aware and accepting of your emotions, like not being hijacked by your emotions. Just like, as you said, like recognizing what's going on beneath the surface so that you can work with it instead of against it, right? So if anxiety comes up, you can like alter the action or the expectation in your head until you get it to a point where it's not so anxiety inducing or, you know, or if there's like a despair or sadness or whatever, like you can kind of play with, you know, your goals or or your the way you approach an activity to try to find a way that makes it a little bit more exciting or fun. for yourself. So like, it's just until you're aware of the emotion that's, that's underlying the procrastination, you can't really adapt to it or use it in any useful way. Yeah. And I mean,

a lot of this to, these all tie together, right? And so if you have like an environment that's bringing up a lot of these emotions too, and fixing that will help. But again, it still just goes back to the mindfulness part of that. You have to be aware of those triggers in your environment, or maybe it's a person or, you know, a work situation that happens a lot, too. But, yeah, becoming more self-awareness. We talk a lot about self-awareness in a lot of different areas. And that's a skill, too, that you develop over time. And self-awareness around why you do and don't do things, I think that you have to find

some method, whether that's through more meditation or maybe you do need to go through to therapy just to get a little more self-aware around your emotions. Yeah. But at the end of the day, yes, I'm sorry. It's about emotions and you do have to address it. You have to figure out a way to address them. And again, it goes back to being honest with yourself. Like me, I just know that there's certain things that I do procrastinate that I like, and I have these emotions that I don't like around them.

But I was like, look, accept that. That's just how it's going to be. And it's probably never going to change. I'm never going to have this like real big excitement to, I don't know, clean my house or whatever it is. But that's okay. You got to work with that. So you're telling me there's no notion template to solve my anxiety issues. I've tried them all.

I have tried them all. That's a good point you make, though. That's a million dollar idea. Get this notion template to solve all of your anxiety issues. Right. I think that's a way we avoid the underlying motions around all of this. We talked about this, trying to find the new app or the new system or whatever it is. Oh, yeah.

That is avoidance. That is not addressing the underlying emotions here. Recognize what you're doing in that situation is you're saying, I want a way around this uncomfortable feeling. Please just give me the fix. Just give me the one thing, the one hack, the one trick. It's not there. It's the appearance of progress without actual progress. Yeah, 100%.

For sure. Well, let's talk about how I deal with my unpleasant emotions, which is I just find a way to make it fun. Yeah. Party boy, Mark. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So a friend of the show, Ali Abdallah, has a great book about this called Feel Good Productivity. And for me, my favorite thing about that book, it was reading that book, it was one of those things that I had personally believed and felt for a long time. But I didn't really know how to say it and I'd never really seen it said well anywhere else.

And I feel like he was kind of the first person to say it, which is like you can find a way to make boring things fun. There are actual ways that you can apply certain principles that just make something that's, that's drudgery feel more interesting. I think you mentioned CrossFit earlier. I think CrossFit is like a prime example of this, right? Like most people don't enjoy working out. So what did CrossFit do? They gamified it. Like, they created systems and achievements and goals and challenges and they have you track your progress over time.

And then they put you in a social environment and they put you in teams and the teams are competing against each other. These are all just like really basic how to make it fun 101 techniques. And you can do this with anything. You can gamify anything. You can track progress on anything. You can, again, if you've got social accountability, you know, you can set up a little game with your friend of like, okay, let's see who can study more hours this week or who can learn more French words this month. You know, create little friendly competitions between yourself and somebody and track your progress over time. create little rewards and incentives for yourself.

It's, you know, human nature is pretty simple. And if you understand how to how to leverage it, you know, you can get a lot further. Yeah. What are some of the examples? I don't use this one as much. Maybe I hate fun or something. I don't know. But what are some examples of specific examples you've used around?

I mean, you've been on a big health journey. I know just tracking in general you think is fun, which is, you know, some people might not think just tracking is fun. I think progress is fun. Progress. Okay. So one thing that I find very fun, I'm a very competitive person. And one of, like, I agree, tracking is annoying. Yeah.

I don't, the tracking itself, I don't enjoy. Okay, okay. What I enjoy is the competition with myself. Okay. Right? So it's like I know how much weight I lifted on every, on every exercise last week, right? Oh, wow. Okay.

It's fun for me to go into the gym this week and be like, let's see if I can do one more wrap. Right? Like, let's see if I can do this. Let's see if I can add five pounds to this. Like, let's see how that feels. I mean, and don't get me wrong. I'm not like skipping to the gym every morning, you know, like hopping out of bed. But like, it makes it interesting enough that it's not as hard to go.

And it's not as hard to finish the workout. It takes what would be a pretty dull and boring workout. And it makes it interesting and exciting. The other thing you can do is you can pair, like you can batch. activities with each other. So, you know, if you, let's say there's a podcast you love, like, two handsome men talking about procrastination for four hours, you can, you can make a, you can make a rule with yourself that like you can only listen to the Solve Podcasts while you're doing housework. Like this is, I've got a couple podcasts that are just frivolous

and fun. And I, they're my chores podcast. I don't listen to them any other time. It's like when I'm doing the dishes and taking out the trash and, you know, cleaning the office, like that's when I put this podcast on because it's kind of, it takes what is normally just a painful, boring experience and it makes it interesting for me. And you can lump activities together like that. You know, if you love audiobooks, you know, make a deal with yourself that you can, you can only listen to audio books either while you're working out or while you're getting ready

for bed, you know. and it's, there's no other time. Okay. So I did think of actually ways I have made things fun. For me, though, it's more of a, it combines the social aspect to it too, though. So CrossFit being the example that you gave, but I like it, instead of having a home gym, I just, I don't like having, I need to leave the house for a word. But what I've realized is that it's actually really fun for me to go to CrossFit and see those people.

Yeah. The workouts themselves are brutal and they're, you know, intense. But you go and you start, you kind of get your little CrossFit friends, you know. and there's a social aspect to that. I used to do jujitsu too. I'm like, you go in. There's a very social aspect to that, obviously, too. So, yeah, for some people, for you, you have fun with competition with yourself.

For me, even though I'm also introverted in a lot of ways, that social, there's still some social reward in a lot of it. In my yoga studio, go to, too, there's, yeah, there's that. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean. So what's fun for you could be fun for somebody else. Yeah, everybody's fun is a little bit different. Right.

But, you know, the principles are the same. I think Ollie even goes through this. He's like, gamify it, make it social, and then, like, batch it with something that you enjoy. Right, right. You know, so those are the three tried and true methods. I think he has a couple more in his book. Okay. I'm probably not thinking of at the moment.

Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Last one, and I know this is the spicy one, but just really quick. Productive procrastination with an asterisk. Yes. This is personality dependent. If you are an ADHD person like me, you might get a lot of leverage out of this.

Be careful. Like it is like juggling steak knives. You can hurt yourself. If you're not very focused and adept at like what you're doing, the productive procrastination, it can get out of hand very easily. So just to review really quick, it's when you procrastinate one task by doing some other tasks that is also intimidating or difficult to do. And it can be very effective if it's honed well and honed correctly. It can be extremely effective, but you can also waste a lot of time spinning your wheels, doing a bunch of shit that seems useful, but is not.

And like you said, it's like another subtle form of avoidance. So the difference between productive procrastination and just unproductive procrastination is like a very fine line. And I would urge people to consider it, but also be very, very careful about it. Right. All right. Last section, a drum I've been banging on for a long time now is that everything in life is a trade-off. There's no win. No win is 100% a win.

There's always some downside somewhere. No free lunch, yeah. So in that spirit, we like to finish every episode with what are the hidden costs or what is the hidden trade-off of solving this area of your life? And so what are the hidden costs of getting a handle on your procrastination? Like what are the unnoticed sacrifices or things that you're going to have to give up if you actually get over this issue in your life? Get a handle on it. Yeah.

The first one that I put, and this is something that I've experienced quite a bit myself, is that you have to accept that you're probably going to lose hobbies, interests, or diversions. Like, there are going to be certain things in your life that you do genuinely like and appreciate, that you're just going to have to let go of. And that could be anything from like, you know, the gaming Discord server that you hang out in to the sports websites that you frequent to, you know, the TikTok channels that you enjoy watching. Like, you're just going to, you're going to have to let some of those go. That's the price. That's the price of admission of just getting this area of your life handled.

And that can suck. I experienced this a lot with video games. Like one rule I discovered I had to create for myself was no multiplayer video games because I'm too competitive. A single player video game, I can play for an hour and just put it down and go on with my life. A multiplayer video game, I'm like, no, fuck you, dude. I'm going to practice. I'm going to, like, I'm going to grind.

I'm going to get so good at this. I'm going to beat all of you. You get to talk trash on your headset. Dude, I've literally wasted months of my life, like trying to get good at certain video games. So I just don't let myself do that anymore. And I miss it sometimes. Like I really do miss it.

Like I have very fond memories of certain games that I did get very good at. And but that's just that that's the price of, you know, it's not worth giving up my business and my career and my marriage. So I have chosen those things over it. Yeah. We talked a little bit already about trading a lower value for a higher value. You only talked about it in the previous episode, too. But that it's, it can be, that's pretty a clear example where it's like, okay, yeah, I probably shouldn't be playing these multiplayer video games or video games in general.

I should be doing this other thing. There's a clear tradeoff. You know you should make it. It's a struggle, but you do. Sometimes, though, you also, like in my situation, I've had to adjust where I don't feel like I'm necessarily trading a lower value for a higher value. I'm sacrificing something that is genuinely, genuinely meaningful for me. But I guess at the end of the day, it is a higher one.

And so my example is when I did finally start to address my health stuff and stop procrastinating on working out and eating, writing, all of that, that takes up a lot of time. So workouts, and I usually work out in the middle of the day because it's just, that's how my brain works. And so it takes up kind of a big chunk of time in the middle of the day. And I've had to sacrifice some of my, like woodworking has kind of, I haven't been able to do as much just because I have less time now for that. And that's kind of a big, like I love workworking.

And it's great. And it adds a lot of fun and enjoyment and meaning to my life. But I guess I did realize that taking care of my health long term is probably more important right now. And then will be more important in the future. And I can woodwork longer, hopefully, you know, it's a physical activity. I'm going to need that when I'm old, you know, when I'm an old man in the wood shop. And so, yeah, sometimes it's really clear that, oh, I need to give up this kind of lower value with this lower fun that I have in my life for something that's more important.

And sometimes it's not quite as clear cut, though, too. Yeah, it can be ambiguous. All right. What do you have? Yeah. So this one might get a, might ruffle a few feathers from a certain type of person. Yes. You got to lower your standards and accept your limitations.

I know there's a certain type of person out there that's going to say, what? No. I'm not going to lower my standards. Like, that's not what productivity is. that's not what getting your life together means. It's raising your standards. Actually, you know, there are certain situations where you just have to accept reality and I think is really what it is.

And like we already mentioned one thing, celebrate those like little wins that probably don't look very sexy on the outside or to anyone else. But that's a win. Like a win is a win here. And like lower your standards from I'm going to get 10 million things done today, you know, I'm going to get one or two things done today. And they don't look like it's making a whole lot of progress, but it is actually in the grand scheme of things when you step back.

This is how it works. And you are speaking on this one, you were speaking as a recovered perfectionist. That's right. Like, I think this is the one that the perfectionists really struggle with. It's like, no, it has to be excellent. It has to be perfect. And it's, that is self-defeating. Yes.

Before you even get started. There is a fantastic book on this friend of the pod, Oliver Berkman's 4,000 Weeks. Fantastic book. That's one of the most recommended books I recommended people. Yeah. It's just it is the subtitle is called Productivity for Mortals, which I love. It's all about this. It's all about like you can't do everything.

Yeah. And accepting your finitude is that kind of way he puts it. Yeah. And not only can you not do everything, but like A, coming to that realization and B, like, properly prioritizing the things you can do is a very difficult thing. And this kind of like, a lot of it's a critique of just kind of the productivity industry in general, like the mentality of like, bro, you just got to hustle, man. You just got to like get this new system.

And like you can do it all, dude. Like you don't have to don't make any sacrifices. You don't need to sleep. Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, no, actually the game is sacrifice. Like that is the game. It's like, what are you willing to give up for your goals? And by the way, if you really are trying to do something ambitious and great, you probably only have the capacity to do a handful of things like that in your entire life.

Right. So, yeah, you have to get very realistic on timelines and capacity and time management and everything. So I'm a huge fan of that. But here's a drawback that I think a lot of people won't consider, which is that if you handle your procrastination, you're going to have to give up your excuses. Yeah. That we hold on to so dearly. You're going to have to own your bullshit.

You're going to have to own suddenly some of these stories and narratives that you've had in maybe in many cases for your entire life, kind of explaining your own underperformance or why things didn't work out the way you thought they would or why you haven't been able to dedicate as much time to this thing as you thought you would, yeah, you're going to have to let that go. Yeah. It's like, again, it comes back to the pure steel thing about reality. It's like the best people at not procrastinating are the people who are the most realistic

and who understand. They're like, yeah, that's just the story I tell myself. Right. To justify, like, not doing the thing I don't want to do. And that sucks. Yeah. It's, it's the sort of thing that, like, when you let it go, it's painful. But then once it's gone, it's liberating.

Right. So, yeah, that goes back a little bit too. We can sneak forward back in here if we want to, the defense mechanisms, right? You have to let go of those. And recognize that that's what you're doing is you're just protecting your little ego and letting go with those. That can be a painful thing, too, because those defense mechanisms, they're defensive. They protect you in some way. But they're protecting you in a way that's holding you back.

So recognizing that. Right. And like you said at first, yes, it's painful. Rip the band it off. You adapt. It comes back to the ego. flexibility. Yes. And not building an ego around the lower values, building them over over the higher values. All right. What's the next one? Disconnecting from bad influences. So we mentioned this a

little bit already, but there's going to be people in situations in your life that are not conducive to you getting things done and you taking care of what you really want to get done in your life. And you're going to have to remove yourself from some of those situations or some of those relationships that you have. And that's also painful. Those relationships have served some sort of purpose in your life. It might not be a healthy purpose, but it's served some purpose in your life. And you're going to have to leave those in some way, shape, or form. And that will be painful. If there are, you know, certain work, there's going to be situations, too, where it's like in work situations where you might not be able to get away from somebody, you're going to have to set up some boundaries.

That might be a little bit. Have some uncomfortable conversations with these people. It's going to be, there's more opportunities for you to manage emotions. Let's just say that in these situations. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, in some cases, it will be removing the people from your life or reducing your exposure to the people in your life. And in other cases, it will be managing that relationship in your life. And even more important than simply like who's in your life and who's not, it's really paying attention to who are you seeking validation from? Ask yourself, do you respect the person you're trying to win respect from? Because in a lot of cases, you don't. Yeah, yeah.

So, like, why the fuck are you trying to earn their respect? It makes no sense. But it is very human, right? Like we kind of default to just wanting to be approved by the people around us, right? So if the people around us are actually people that we don't really respect or value their judgment highly, we should have a difficult conversation with ourselves of like, why am I trying to win the approval of this person? Like I should find somebody a little bit more admirable to try to get validation from. And I do think there is a little bit of a misconception in just self-help.

in general, which is that like there's like a cliched advice of like, you know, stop seeking validation from others. I think that's impossible. It's not, you don't stop seeking validations from others. You seek validations for from better people and for better reasons. Right. They're more in line with your values, more in line with what you want to get done. With who you want to be.

Right. So again, it's like finding that lever to push you in the right direction. All right. Last one, as we're talking about relationships with other people, and this is definitely a champagne problem. Yeah. You will have this problem. You will not mind having this problem. But it is a problem nonetheless, which is the more effective you become as a person, the more productive you are, the more successful you are, the more you get things done, accomplish your goals.

The more the people around you will expect of you. Yeah. Yeah. The higher the standard you will be held to. others. And in some cases, people will not like holding you to that stand. They won't like that you're that productive or that effective. And so there might be a little bit of backlash among some people. But for the most part, people will respect and admire it, but they'll also, you know, you'll set the bar high for yourself. And that can be stressful and intimidating at

times. It can feel unfair at times. But it's also, again, I think it's a positive social pressure. Right. Like if the people around you, see you as somebody who performs well and is diligent and is reliable, that puts social pressure on you to be those things. And ultimately, that's a good thing. Yeah. So it's an example of a desirable stress, I would say. In fact, I would say most of these are desirable stresses. I would say most of these in most cases are things that you would like to trade off.

So don't get the wrong idea that these are any reasons to not fix your procrastination. We're just trying to be realistic of like, hey, if you get your procrastination handled, here's what you can expect on the other side. Yeah, and with the higher expectations, one, too, that you've got to be careful because then you lead into the situations where you're not saying no. And we talked about that, the certain type of procrastinator who takes on too much at that point, too,

and then you just end up procrastinating more. So, yeah, it's a hazard, but it's a good hazard, yeah. Good hazard, yeah. All right, we're at the end. Finally, before we sign off, Drew, I'm curious, and all the research and prep and recording that we've done for this episode, has anything, have you been inspired to change anything in your life? Has there been any kind of tangible takeaway for you going through this process?

Yeah. So when we started researching this a long time ago, right, I did my own little experiment and I borrowed a Nintendo Switch from a friend, and I said it. It's like not too far away from my office, so it's really easy for me to go in and out. I was like, okay, how bad are these distractions? So we're talking about the environmental side of it. It's bad. It's very, very bad.

And what it did for me is it really made me get, again, get honest. I knew that being honest with myself was actually a key to this, you know, don't buy the food, don't buy the junk food and put it in the folds, all that kind of stuff. I already knew that. I, though, realized really the impact of environment really came home for me in a lot of this. but what the, I took it one step further to, and it was very surprising to me just to learn how important emotions are. I mean, I knew they were important. I knew procrastination on some level was an emotional problem. But I think we've come to the conclusion that it's all an emotional problem.

Yeah. It's not, it's not there's an emotional component to it. It's just baseline and emotional problem that you have to deal with. Yeah, all this other stuff, environment, social connections, relationships. even ego stuff, like it's only relevant in so much as it alters and affects your emotions. Right, right. Right. Like your ego is only a problem with procrastination if your ego is causing negative emotions to prevent you from actually doing the thing you want to do.

Yeah. Insofar as though what I've changed specifically, I've used more of the mindfulness, like the rain method. And I've definitely implemented that into my daily habits and routines. Now when I start to procrastinate it on something, I'm much better at it now, too, just stopping, catching myself, okay, what's going? on and achieving that last step in the rain model, which is non-identification. I'm like, oh, this is what I'm feeling right now.

I'm not going to identify with it so much that's just going to derail my next hour, day, or whatever. So that's been a huge win for me anyway. That's funny because it's, yeah, prepping for this episode is, I mean, I've been thinking about it for a while. Like, as you know, I've been, I've gone in and out of meditation quite a bit throughout my adult life and done it very intensely for periods and done it not at all for periods. I'm currently in a not at all period, but it's funny, prepping for this episode, it's making me think that I should kind of get back on the meditation train.

You know, I've done it on and off mainly to kind of help manage the ADHD. I've definitely noticed over the last year, year and a half, I am becoming a lot more distractible. And I am a lot, like, I'm the stimulus junkie in me is like, is getting, is, is becoming. a little bit of a dope fiend. And it was just interesting going through all this research and really seeing the importance of that self-awareness, the importance of boredom, the importance of being able to sit in stillness and recognize emotions. And, you know, that gap.

So in Buddhism, they talk about the gap between the emotion and the action, you know, and it's like the more you meditate, the wider that gap gets. And I've definitely felt my gap shrinking over the past couple years. And I don't think it's resulted in a huge problem with procrastination. I've been very productive recently. But just in terms of like mental health and general well-being and happiness, it's kind of inspired me a little bit to maybe get back on the mat and put some time in again. Yeah.

I recently heard that gap. The way that was described was the gap between whatever happens to you and your reaction in between is your interpretation. and that's what you can control. Yeah. And that definitely through all of this, too, has been kind of a motto of mine as well. It's like, okay, you can't control what happens to you. Sometimes you can't, like your reaction is sometimes not where you control either, but the interpretation in between.

Yeah. And then it can obviously influence the action that you take. So that's been a big one for me too. Cool. Another mindfulness little trick that, yeah. Cool. That's it. I think so.

We made it. We made it. We will be back next month with an episode on emotional rights. Yeah. Since it is, I think we realized researching this one, we're like, yeah, if this is all about emotional regulation, we should probably just do an episode. Yeah. Yeah.

That's going to be a foundation. Yeah. Yeah. So. All right. And finally, if you have listened to all of this and you want to start taking some action on this stuff, we have an amazing online community that is designed to do exactly that. So we break every episode down into 30-day challenges with daily exercises and implement

We also connect you with like-minded people who are doing the same thing as well. The community is called momentum and it's incredible. Honestly, it's just it's full of the smart, hardworking people who just want to get this area of their life solved once and for all. So in momentum, the whole point is to build a habit of action. It's to get those small wins, get the momentum towards doing something. Too many people sit around, listen to a bunch of podcasts and don't ever do anything. We're trying to fix that. Too many people also think that the solution to their problems is a huge transformational moment.

No, it's actually just getting up and doing a little bit more each and every day. It's gaining that momentum. So if you've enjoyed this podcast and you want to know how to implement these lessons into your life, check out the momentum community. We have a 30-day course that breaks everything that you just heard down into bite-sized actionable chunks so that you can actually make some progress on it and get more shit done. To learn more, go to find momentum.com slash procrastination. That's find F-I-N-D momentum.com slash procrastination.

The link is also in the description below. I will see you all there. Hey, so if anything in today's episode hit home for you, don't just let it fade. Because that's usually what happens, right? You hear something that clicks. You think, I should do something about that. And then life happens. And three weeks later, you barely remember.

what you heard in the first place. That's why you should check out Purpose, because Purpose is built for exactly that situation. It's a personal development AI that learns you. It takes the stuff that you're learning and helps you actually apply it to your life, to your situation, everything you're dealing with right now. It remembers what you've told it.

It tracks your patterns. It gives you specific personalized direction and not just a pep talk. Check it out. Try it free for seven days. Go to purpose.com. That is purpose. dot app.