Dear Reader,
I have been putting off writing this newsletter issue.
Not just the newsletter, but I’ve put off a lot of other things that I need to do. This is my default instinct: “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
To me, tomorrow is much closer to never than now.
My mind is designed to pull me towards whatever is more comfortable; it doesn’t want things to change. It definitely doesn’t want me to do that thing, which is difficult, even though it might help me get closer to where I want to be.
This resistance to getting things done has been a constant in my life; however, the intensity of it has gone down drastically. There have been a few things that have helped, and I want to share those with you today.
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I cannot say that these things will solve your procrastination, but what I can say is they will make things (at least) slightly better:
So here goes:
1) Give it a time
Whenever there is something that needs doing, but you don’t want to do it right now, just assign it a time.
Figure out when a good time to do something is (the sooner the better), and schedule it on your calendar. I’ve made an in-depth video on how to set this up.
When you give it a time, you don’t only make it more likely that you’ll get it done, but you also get a sense of relief since you don’t have to keep thinking about it anymore. Your calendar will hold it until it’s time to get it done.
Once you begin using a calendar, you’ll also realize you have way more time than you assume. But for now, we’ll just focus on what needs getting done.
So that’s the first step: put things on your calendar.
2) Confidence comes after you start, not before
To a procrastinator like myself, starting a task feels dangerous. It is the first moment when you can be exposed as a hack or a fool. You can ponder, plan, and envision a task indefinitely while enjoying a certain sense of safety. But the moment of actually starting brings real-world dangers into the picture: failure, ridicule, complications, and maybe the discovery of a new, deeper level to your ineptitude.
So before you start, you look for a little more assurance that things will go well for me. This inevitably leads to more planning, more thinking, perhaps some flow-charting of possibilities (either mentally or on paper), maybe some haphazard web research, maybe a YouTube binge session. One reliable standby is a thorough round of house cleaning, in order to clear the mind. Or why not a rest day, to rejuvenate?
How prepared do you need to feel? It’s hard to say, but it’s always a little more than I feel now.
Confidence is helpful for any task, but in reality, there’s little you can do to create it before starting. Once you actually start the task, things begin to fall into order. You quickly discover where the real effort is required, what’s surprisingly easy, and what possibilities you can ignore. Most of the things that were bothering me fall away. You just do the next thing.
Almost magically, the task shrinks before you, because it’s no longer composed entirely of your imagination. Only then, when some of the reality of the task is behind you, does confidence make its first appearance.
3) You have too many things to do until you do one
The longer and older your to-do list gets, the more it begins to feel like one singular set of interconnected mess. The mental friction to deal with everything that you have to do becomes so hard that you don’t even bother trying to catch up.
But this is when an analogy is helpful: Consider a dangling set of wires.
You can try to pull all the wires in all directions as much as you want. But as you may have learned from undangling wires, that doesn’t work. You have to work with one thread first, patiently undo that particular thread of cable. That might even require you to run it through itself. But only then do you clearly see what you can do next.
You have to start somewhere. When you do even the simplest of things, doing the harder thing becomes much easier.
Start clearing your to-do list from the easiest things first.
4) Prepare
One thing I’ve noticed multiple times is that associated with every task are a bunch of steps, and what I dread often is not the entire task, but a certain part of the task.
A nice way to deal with that has been to break the task up into smaller tasks. Doing this shows me exactly which parts are involved and which parts I don’t really want to do.
Hence, I know exactly the things I can easily and willingly do: most of the things except for the part that I dread. There might be some things that depend on the dreaded part, but other sub-tasks you’ll be able to do with not so much friction, which will make your life instantly better.
I’m pretty confident that you already knew these things, but we often forget the basics when we try to look for the next big trick to beat procrastination.
I will see you next week.
Warmly,
Suraj
If you'd like to hear more from me, here's my YouTube channel where I share lessons, experiments, tools, and resources to make life just a little better.
