The Mindset Mentor - 6 Tips To Beat Procrastination

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Ever feel like procrastination is stealing your time and holding you back? Well, you're not alone, and today, we're tackling it head-on with a 6-step process to beat procrastination once and for all!The first step to overcoming any problem is admitting it exists, so we'll talk about how to spot procrastination, even when it's sneaky and disguised as something else. Next, discover what sets off your procrastination – whether it's fear of failure, feeling overwhelmed, or the lure of instant gratification. Understanding your triggers helps you prepare and strategize. Big tasks can feel daunting, so let's make them bite-sized! Learn how to break down large tasks into manageable steps to make them easier to tackle. Vague goals lead to procrastination, so I’ll show you how to set clear, specific goals that keep you motivated and on track. And who doesn’t love a little reward? Find out how rewarding yourself for completing tasks can provide the instant gratification your present self craves while keeping you moving forward.Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another episode. I put out episodes four times a week around neurology, psychology, early childhood development, cognitive behavioral therapy. My goal is to help you understand yourself so that you can grow yourself, so that you can make your life better. And so if you want to do that, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. Today, I'm going to be giving you a six-step process to overcoming procrastination. Procrastination is the thief of your time. One of the main things that's holding you back from everything that you want in this world is procrastination.

Now, I'm gonna say procrastination, but I'm gonna actually give you another phrase that I prefer to say instead of procrastination, which is avoidant behavior. Because when you're procrastinating, you're not doing nothing, you're just doing something else. You are doing some sort of behavior to avoid that thing that you need to do. So it is avoidant behavior. So let's say you want to build your business, but instead you spend your time on Instagram scrolling through shit that

doesn't matter. Or you want to lose weight, but instead of going to the gym, you watch Netflix and you fart around on the couch for a couple hours. Everybody procrastinates to some degree. They do. There's no person who doesn't procrastinate. So if you're like, oh my god, I procrastinate. Welcome to the club. We all do it at some point in time because humans would prefer the easy route for everything in life. But we know if we take the easy route in life, we're not going to like what the long-term consequences are going to be. And so everyone does this some degree, delaying tasks because it's easier to not do something than to do something. It's very simple. It's much easier to not do something

than to just actually do something. One of my favorite things is when I post something on Instagram and someone says, easier said than done. I'm like, I know, no shit. Because to say something just requires you to move your lips. To do something requires effort. Or it's easier to scroll on Instagram rather than picking up your phone at work and making 100 cold calls to grow your business. But what if you could flip the script in some sort of way? What if instead of being a constant quote-unquote victim of procrastination, if you could master the art of overcoming it?

Does that intrigue you? If it does, listen up. I love this topic. I wrote an entire book about taking action. It's called Level Up. And literally in the title, it says how to get focus, stop procrastinating and upgrade your life. And so I love the idea of like, why do we procrastinate? Why do we hold off and not do what we want to do? Because everybody wants to do something bigger and better and grow themselves and have more love and joy and happiness and money and success and all of those things.

But not everybody gets everything that they want to out of life because they just don't put the effort. So I'm going to take you on a journey toward basically understanding your procrastination but also beating the procrastination. And I'm going to give you some really practical strategies that can boost your productivity so that you can kind of regain the control of your time and help you take action. So before we go into like how to overcome procrastination, we need to understand what procrastination is, like and understand why it exists and kind of pull it out from the roots.

Procrastination often is unconscious. Like we don't notice that we're procrastinating until later. Like we don't consciously go, I'm going to procrastinate right now. We usually don't notice until later on down the road. So basically here's what happens. An unwelcome task appears, whatever that task is for you. It could be writing a report. It could be doing laundry. It could be making an important phone call. It could be canceling your insurance, it could be doing laundry, it could be making an important phone call, it could be canceling your insurance, whatever it is. And your mind, in its effort to avoid discomfort, decides to just delay. And it whispers in your ear, not now, just do it later. And you start to procrastinate. Hey, don't do it now, do something else. No, no, no, you got it, man, just do something else.

Procrastination isn't just laziness or poor time management. What it really is, it's a really complex interaction of different psychological factors. So it involves the struggle between our present self and our present self wants immediate gratification and our future self and our future self, which values long-term rewards. So an example, our present self, you know what? Donuts taste really good. I would like the taste of a donut in my mouth. Our future self, hey, I would like to look good on the beach. Or hey, I would like to be fit so that I can pick up my grandchildren and play with them when I'm in my 60s. So if you're not intentional and you're not conscious as often as you possibly

can, you will almost always go the easy route. You will almost always go to instant gratification. Why? Because donuts taste amazing. That's why. So you've got to allow yourself to be very aware of when you procrastinate, why you procrastinate, and what you need to do to get past it. And so we tend to talk ourselves out of why we don't need to do it now and we can do it later on down the road. It's actually a term that researchers have coined as temporal discounting. It's where the present self tends to undermine the future self's goals. Hey, don't worry about it. You can work out later. You can eat that salad later. Put the

donut in your mouth. So that's kind of the idea of how procrastination works inside of our head. So let's go over the six steps to overcoming procrastination. The first one, and the first one that's really important, is you just have to recognize and acknowledge that you procrastinate. The first step to overcoming anything, any problem, is acknowledging its existence. Recognizing procrastination can be really tricky since it can mask itself as taking a break or I'm just waiting for the right mood. Oh, you know what? I have to wait for inspiration to strike me. It's funny. I was watching a video a couple of days ago and it was Theo Vaughn's podcast and he was interviewing Ed Sheeran. And Ed Sheeran just says like he

doesn't wait for the, he doesn't wait for inspiration. He just works really hard. And so he writes thousands of songs. And so on the day that he created, I don't remember which one it was. I think it was the song Perfect. It was one of his huge, his massive, or it might've been Shape of You. This huge, massive song. He wrote four songs that day. And the other three, he's never given to anybody. They've never seen the light of day, but that one ended up being huge. And so he doesn't believe in waiting for inspiration. He just decides, I'm going to take action. I'm going to do what needs to be done.

I know that most of it's not going to be good for me, but I'm not going to sit around and wait for inspiration to strike me. So recognizing procrastination can be tricky because it tends to be like, oh, I'm just waiting for that inspiration so I can write the perfect song, or I'm taking a break because I've been really busy. We need to pay attention to our patterns and start noticing our patterns so that we can uncover them. If you consistently find yourself delaying tasks and procrastinating, especially the ones that are like really important,

but not immediately rewarding, it's likely that you're procrastinating. So say it with me now, everybody. My name is Rob and I'm a procrastinator. So that's the first thing. We've got to do that. The second thing is to understand your triggers. So you will be triggered in some sort of way to procrastinate. Once you've acknowledged that you're a procrastinator, the next step is to understand what triggers it. For some, it might be the fear of failure. And so you're not growing your business because you're triggered by this unconscious feeling that's kind of deep in your subconscious of, yeah, but if I grow this business, what happens if it fails? Or what happens if I'm successful? There's a fear that might be there. Or it might be that you have something that needs to be done and it's just this huge,

daunting task of, this is a big task and I have to get it done. I have to take action for this thing. I've got to study for this final exam, whatever it might be. So for other people, it might be just the lack of immediate gratification. You know, there's no immediate gratification in working out. You might get it after your workout. There's no immediate gratification in reading a book sometimes. It's just about doing the things that you want to do to have your future self say, hey, thank you so much for taking that action in the past. And so what you want to do is you want to identify these triggers so that you can kind of prepare and strategize against your procrastination. When you identify what normally triggers you, you can start to make a plan for what you want to do next time you find yourself

triggered. So a trigger could be thinking about all that you have to do today to move your business forward. And what happens is you're thinking about all of the things you have to do today. It's too much to think about all at once. You get paralysis by analysis and then you're like, it's too much. And you just decide to play video games instead. Oh, your present self won because your present self wins because you're going for immediate gratification. I'm just gonna get a dopamine hit by playing this video game. Your future self that needs delayed gratification

doesn't have a successful business down the road. Why? Because you decided to play video games because you had quote unquote too many things to do. So that's step number two. Step number three is to break those tasks down into smaller, more incremental tasks that are a little bit more bite-sized.

One of the biggest strategies to overcome procrastination is to take your tasks and make them smaller and more manageable. So oftentimes, when you're not taking action to what you need to do, you might be thinking about all of the things, everything that you have to do in order to accomplish it. And so procrastination, a lot of times,

is the brain going everywhere, everything, all at once. It's this really, when you decide that you're going to take your tasks and break them down, the tactic makes it less daunting and allows you to have a sense of achievement whenever you do complete each individual subtask. So you feel like you're actually progressing versus like, oh my God, I've got these big things. So for instance, let's say you have a business proposal that you need to create and it's a huge business proposal and it's just like daunting to think about the entire thing. Okay, well, can you break it down into smaller parts? Okay, so what am I looking at? Okay,

so I've got to do the research for this business proposal. I've got to do the drafting for this business proposal. I've got to do the editing of it and so on and so forth. And you break it down into all these little tasks. And when you break it down into all these little tasks, it makes it much less intimidating, but also you can track your progress. And when you get done with the research, you feel good about yourself. That's a win.

When you get done with the drafting, you feel good about yourself. That's a win when you get done with the editing. And so it feels like you're progressing versus one large, huge thing that you have to do. So that's the third thing. Step number four is to get better at time management. I literally just put out an episode about getting better at time management,

but use time management techniques that I talked about in there. Use the Pomodoro technique. Use the time blocking. Use the batching. You only get 24 hours in a day. You need to get better at those 24 hours and getting the most squeeze, the most juice out of that squeeze. And so when you do these things, when you use these tasks and you go through and you say, you know what, Pomodoro technique, time blocking, batching, all of this, it helps you focus, it encourages focus, it prevents your burnout, and then helps you use your time more effectively. So I'm not going to go real deep into time management because I literally just put an episode on it. So when we get done with this one, you can go back and listen to my time management one. But that's the third thing is to get better at time management. I'm sorry, that's the it so when we get done with this one you can go back and listen my time management one but that's the

third thing is to get better at time management I'm sorry that's the fourth thing is to get better at time management step number five is to set specific that's the key word specific achievable goals a lot of times when people set goals they set vague unrealistic goals and vague unrealistic goals are just a breeding ground for procrastination. The key to motivating yourself is setting specific achievable goals and you want to know the outcome that you want. So instead of a goal like a work on the report, say something like write the

introduction to the report by 10 a.m. and then you're like, okay, I don't have to do the entire report. I've just got to write the introduction by 10 a.m. And then finish research by 2 p.m. Okay, then I've just got to do this by 2 p.m. And basically you're just pulling yourself along and you're taking what we said with incremental tasks. You're using those and you're going step by step by step. You're getting it done. And then you're setting specific achievable goals by a specific time to get it done by. So you're giving yourself a deadline to get it done. Deadlines tend to motivate people to get things done in the amount of time they have until they hit that time. So it's like, when's the most productive day that you have of the year? The day before you leave for vacation, because it has to all be done. You don't want to

do work while you're on vacation. And so that's step number five. And then step number six is to reward yourself. It sounds weird, but rewards provide immediate gratification to that present self that, because that's what the present self seeks. It wants immediate gratification. So when you reward yourself, that present self is going, oh my gosh, this taking action thing was actually a pretty good thing. I don't hate this taking action because I was able to get rewarded for doing this.

The same way that you're like, oh my gosh, there's too much going on right now. Instead of actually doing this thing, I'm gonna just play video games. That's the immediate gratification, the dopamine hit. So can you give yourself dopamine when you do what you need to get done? And then your future self is like, oh my gosh, you're taking action. This is what we need. Your present self is going, you know what? This is

great. We took action and I got something out of it. So this way you don't procrastinate to get the instant gratification. So after you complete a task, reward yourself for it. It could be a short break. It could be going to your favorite cafe to get your favorite coffee. It could be anything that feels like a treat. One of the things that psychologists have found that actually becomes very motivating for people, especially after a workout, is allowing yourself to have a piece of chocolate. Not like an entire chocolate bar to have a piece of chocolate not like an entire chocolate bar but a piece of chocolate and this is one thing that my first manager did when I was in sales is we would sit down and make a hundred

phone calls and I don't know if you've ever sat down and made a hundred phone calls it is terrible it sucks it's terrible and so he would say hey bring a bad a bag of Skittles with you and after my first ten calls I could have three Skittles my second ten calls three Skittles and every 10 calls, I could have three Skittles. My second 10 calls, three Skittles. And every 10 calls that I made, I got three Skittles. And I was basically like just rewarding myself for every single step in the process. And inside of my book, Level Up, I literally have an entire chapter on this. This is something that's called the dopamine reward system, which is rewarding yourself

incrementally on the path to the success that you're trying to get. And so those are the six step process to overcome procrastination. Procrastination, everybody does it. It doesn't have to be insurmountable though. When you understand what it is, you understand why it exists, you understand how you're triggered, you start to create strategic steps to overcome it, you can actually start to take the action that you need to. And then Mark Twain, one of my favorite quotes that Mark Twain ever said is, the secret to getting ahead is just getting started.

So all you have to do when you feel yourself procrastinating is just get started. Take one small step at a time. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J- today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories.

Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Also, if you love this podcast, you will absolutely 100% love something that I've launched called Mindset Mentor Plus. And here's how it works. For every episode that comes out four times a week of the Mindset Mentor Podcast, Mindset Mentor Plus subscribers get a whole lot more. You'll get three to four page,

sometimes five page detailed worksheets that go deeper into the subject that we cover in the podcast. And you can print them out, you can underline them, you can highlight them, you can take notes on them. And then every one of them has journal prompts so that you can take each episode and actively integrate every single one of them into your life. I also do monthly Q&A sessions live inside of Mindset Mentor Plus, and there's a whole lot of other bonuses as well. So if you're interested in learning more about it and how we can help you integrate every single one of these episodes into your life so that you can learn, grow, and improve your

life and yourself faster, go to MindsetMentor.com. There's a video up on that page that explains everything for you to see if it's right for you. Once again, it is MindsetMentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave it the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.