The Mindset Mentor - Ep 27 - Overcoming Procrastination

Episode Date: October 21, 2015

Procrastination is something we all do but wish we didn't. In this episode we speak about why we procrastinate as well as the 5 tips to overcome procrastination. 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

Psst, hey, do you want a free motivational ebook called Hack Your Goals, a Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success? Go to mwfmotivation.com and download it for free like hundreds of other people already have. Okay, now I'll get you back to the podcast. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a

podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast starts now. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast. My name is Rob Dial, and if you have not yet done so, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, however you listen to us. And if we do bring you enough value through this episode, please do me a favor and do anybody else that you're associated with a favor and just share this with a friend.

Our goal here is to just change the world one person at a time. And today what we're going to be talking about is a very difficult subject. It's the one thing that we all wish we didn't do, but we still all do. And that is procrastinate. And we're going to talk about why do we procrastinate. And then I'm going to give you five tips on how to stop procrastinating. So it should be a pretty quick episode, but should be pretty powerful at the same time. So why do we procrastinate? The reason why we procrastinate, there's a couple reasons. Usually we're afraid to start. We're afraid of something. Maybe we're afraid of failing if we start going down this road and then maybe

getting some failure. Maybe we're afraid of success. I know that sometimes I'm afraid of success because it's an unknown. We don't know what's going to happen. You know, we know that it might possibly push us out of our comfort zone. So that's one reason why I procrastinate. The other one is we're just waiting for the perfect moment. You know, we're not ready yet. And the problem with that is we're never going to be ready. So we just have to kind of start and just go, just start going and see what comes along. Another reason is because, you know, it's easier not to do something than it is to do something. That's usually the main reason why we procrastinate is because it's easier to sit on the couch and eat donuts than it is to get our butts to the gym. It's easier. It requires less energy. We don't have to get dressed. We don't have to

drive to the gym. It's just easier. That's the reason why we procrastinate. So how do we stop procrastinating? Let me give you a few tips on just how to stop procrastinating, things that have helped me along the way. The first tip I'm going to say is to make a to-do list. And slash with that make a to-do list is eat your frog first thing. And I'm going to explain what that means. Make a to-do list is eat your frog first thing. And I'm going to explain what that means. Make a to-do list. And here's the thing. If you're kind of like me, it's easier to write a huge to-do list of every single thing

that needs to be done because I can see what needs to be done. But what you have to do is you have to take that huge to-do list and shorten it to your top three things that have to be done. Sometimes you might have to forego other things that have to be done. Sometimes you might have to forego other things on the to-do list. You know, like say dishes, you have to do the dishes tonight. Say that's on the to-do list. You might have to leave the dishes overnight if you are trying to get other things done to be successful. Because what we do most of the time is we find the easy tasks and we cross those off first because we feel like

we're getting something accomplished. But the problem with that is because we're getting the easy small tasks out of the way, at the end of the day, we don't feel like we got anything accomplished because we didn't get the important things accomplished. So shorten it to your top three. And then what I want you to do out of those top three is to circle your number one thing that has to get done today. And that's going to be your frog. And what this means, if you've never heard this phrase before, is nobody wants to eat a frog, right?

And just like nobody wants to do their number one thing in the morning, a very first thing. So what you're going to do is that number one thing is your frog and you're going to eat that frog. You're going to get that thing accomplished first thing in the morning. So what is the most important thing that you can do today? That's a question you need to ask yourself every single day. What is the most important thing that if I get nothing else done today, as long as I get this one thing done, today will be a successful day.

And what you want to do is you want to try to get that thing done first thing in the morning. So if you think about it, if you were to get that one thing done every day of your life, that one most important thing, it's pretty hard not to have a successful life. So you need to build the habit of eating your frog

first thing in the morning and everything else besides that number one is just a distraction. Number two is going to go along with number one a little bit. But number two, the second tip to stop procrastinating is to wake up earlier. And this might seem counterintuitive, you know, waking up earlier so you stop procrastinating. But if you wake up earlier, you know, say you get up two hours before you know you have to leave for work. It's hard to do that. I understand I'm not a morning person at all, but what I do is I take my phone. It has the alarm on it. I put it in my bathroom so I have

to stand up and I should go to my bathroom to turn it off. And once I'm up, I usually jump in the shower or put water on my face. But wake up earlier because your willpower is exactly like the battery on your phone. Willpower throughout the day, it's a fact, will start to go down as your day goes on. So your willpower is your strongest in the morning, you know, a little bit after you have your cup of coffee. Same thing as your, you know, the battery on your cell phone. If you think of it this way, that your cell phone battery is going to get less and less. There's going to be less and less battery as the day goes on. Your willpower, there's going to be less and less willpower as your day goes on as well. So if you wake up earlier, so you have time to get your most important things done in the morning, well, then it's

going to be a lot easier or excuse me, it's going to be a lot harder to procrastinate because those things are already going to be done before your day even starts. Could you imagine if you woke up two hours before you're supposed to leave and by the time you left for work, on your drive to work, everything that you really needed to get done today, your top one, two, or three things were already done? Could you imagine how great of a feeling that would be? So tip number two is to wake up earlier so your willpower is the strongest in the morning. Number three, tip number three is to eliminate temptation. And what I mean by that is, you know, if your goal is to go to the gym and to get in better shape, eliminate the temptation of that. Eliminate the crappy food,

get rid of it. You know, if you come to my house, it's funny. I had a friend over my house a few weeks ago and he said, you really don't have anything in this house, do you? Like you must eat out a lot. And I don't eat out a lot. But the thing is, I have very few things in my house because usually what I'll do is I'll go and I'll go to the grocery store and get food for a day or two. You know, and what I'll do is I don't have

the crappy food sitting around so it doesn't look like I have a lot because usually the food that can sit inside of your house for a month and not go bad is the food that is not good for you. So I don't keep it in my house. So eliminate the crappy food, which is the temptation. If you're finding that you're spending some time

watching TV, like too much time watching TV, cancel your TV subscription. I'll tell you something. I canceled my TV subscription years ago. I will never get TV ever again because I realized how much time I was wasting. And it's easier to procrastinate when you could turn the TV on and go, oh, I'll just watch TV for five minutes. And then, you know, we've all done it before. Three hours later, you're like, holy crap, what the hell happened to my time? And then you have to go to bed and you didn't get anything done. So eliminate that temptation. What else do I mean by eliminate temptation? Here's something that I did as well. I deleted Snapchat from my phone. I deleted the Facebook

app from my phone. And I deleted all of the apps that don't really bring me any value throughout the day, but allow me to procrastinate if I go on my phone. Another thing is, you may have heard me say it in another episode before, is something that is a Chrome extension. And it's actually something that's called Facebook Eradicator, or excuse me, News Feed Eradicator. And what that'll do is every time that you go to Facebook on your Google Chrome, your web browser, it will actually take the entire newsfeed away. So it makes your newsfeed disappear. So you can't waste any time looking at it. And instead of having a newsfeed there, what it'll do is actually put up a motivational quote.

So you have a motivational quote, and it's usually a quote on why procrastinating is not good. So what it'll do is it will eliminate your newsfeed and put up a motivational quote. So it's hard to waste time on Facebook when you can't see anybody's newsfeeds and what's going on with everybody's lives. So eliminate temptation is tip number three. Number four is to remind yourself why it is important. We know, we're always thinking, this is something that's very interesting. I don't know where I got this from, but we're always thinking about the obligation and not the opportunity. You know, we're thinking about the obligation of what we have to do, not what we're going to get out of it if we do it.

So I'll give you an example. If you're a sales rep and you need to make phone calls or something like that, you're thinking about the obligation, the making phone calls part. You're not thinking about the opportunity, which is the paycheck, or which could be the being the number one in your office, or which could be the promotion that you're going to get. So think about the opportunity, not the obligation. Remind yourself why it is important. You know, if another example, thinking about the obligation, not the opportunity, working out and you know, what we're thinking about is that we have to get dressed. We have to go to the gym. After we get done the gym, we then have to take a shower, which is going to,

you know, take time. It all takes time to do. We're get done the gym, we then have to take a shower, which is going to take time. It all takes time to do. We're thinking about the process, the obligation of having to go to the gym. And man, we just had a long day at work. I don't want to go to the gym. I'd rather sit on the couch and eat donuts. We're thinking about the obligation. We're not thinking about the opportunity. The opportunity is how good we're going to feel once we get in the best shape of our lives. How much better our body is going to run once we get in the best shape of our lives, how much better our body is going to run once we eat healthy and go to the gym, and how much more energy we're going to have at the end of each day because our body is naturally producing more energy from all of

the working out that we do. So remind yourself why it's important. Think of the opportunity, don't think of the obligation. And the last tip that I'll give you is this, move your body. And what I mean by that is that, you know, if I catch myself doing this sometimes, where I'll be sitting on the couch and I'll be checking email or something, and I'll just be sitting there and I'll be like, man, I'm getting really tired just from doing absolutely nothing. My body's starting to slowly, you know, it's starting to slowly get tired and want to fall asleep. So I have stairs in my house. So what I'll do is I'll move my body. I'll stand up if I start to realize that my energy is going down and I'm not doing what I need to get

done. And I'll run up and down the stairs a couple of times to get my heart rate up. You know, some people that I know have a, I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a little trampoline, you know, those little tiny trampolines what it's called, but it's like a little trampoline, you know, those little tiny trampolines that they have. They call them a rebounder. And they'll jump on that in order to give themselves some energy. Because once you get moving and your heart rate gets up, your body will get more energy. So the fifth tip to get stuff done and stop procrastinating is to move your body.

Start just moving. That's all you have to do. So let me go through the five tips again for you just to wrap it up. So number one is to make a to-do list. And the most important part of that to-do list is your frog. Eat that frog first thing in the morning. Number two is to wake up earlier so you can eat that frog and have a very productive day from the very beginning. Number three is to eliminate temptation. Get rid of the Snapchat. Get rid of the Facebook. Get rid of the crappy food. Get rid of the TV subscription. Number four is to remind yourself why it is important. Think of the opportunity

and not the obligation. And number five is to move your body. Get your body moving. Do something. Those are the tips. If you get nothing else out of this, I say just make sure you eat your frog every time in the morning. And the last thing that I'll leave you with, as I do every time, is make it your mission today to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you listening. Please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and please share this with a friend if you like this episode. Thank you so much. I hope you have an amazing day. And so that is it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you like what you hear, please share with a friend, spread the love if you think it's something they could benefit from. If you want the show notes from today, you can get it at

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