Give Me 23 Minutes And I'll Destroy Your Procrastination Forever

What if you could eliminate procrastination forever? So that it's not just easy to do your work, but your mind actually gets sucked toward the task and you blaze through it like a knife through butter. We call this "fottery execution." It's the antithesis of procrastination. And in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how to master it. Now, I'm Reandars, co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective along with my partner, Stephen Kotler. We taught thousands of professionals how to perform at their peak by accessing flow states at will. Now, which of these three types of procrastination do you most fall victim to? The one is inertia. This means you have important work to do. You're getting paid to do it. You've blocked out time to do it. Often you even enjoy doing it, and yet you still can't get yourself to do it. The second kind of procrastination is distractability. This means you've started the work, but the slightest distraction diverts your attention. And before you know it, half the day is gone, because you veered off to other things, and you're too stressed to start the important task, but too guilty to do anything else. And then third is chronic delay. This means you continuously postpone major life goals or projects telling yourself. You'll pursue them someday, but never getting past the starting line. Inertia prevents you from starting work, distractability diverts your focus, mid task, and chronic delay perpetually postpones and prevents progress. For me, the most torturous form used to be inertia. For example, I was once tasked with a speech for my friend's wedding, as is best man. And despite it's significant, and the honor it represented, I found myself delaying, postponing, and yes, procrastinating. It loomed there and casted this uncomfortable shadow over every day that passed. Now contrary to popular belief, procrastination is not a symptom of lacking motivation. Rather, procrastination is often high motivation, plus inaction. That's precisely what makes it so bloody painful. That's the, I want to do it, but I can't bring myself to do it effect. And that's because of a neurochemical civil war that happens within our brains, known as the approach avoidance conflict. This conflict occurs between two systems. The approach system associated with dopamine rich areas the brain like the striatum and ventral tag mental area, which are linked to pleasure and reward and encourage action. And then the avoidance system associated with cortisol rich areas the brain like the amygdala and hippocampus, which are linked to fear and anxiety which encourage inaction. And this results in a cognitive contradiction. Dopamine flows to the brain and stimulates wanting and craving, while cortisol flooding the brain stimulates fear and anxiety. In this approach avoidance conflict, you experience both positive and negative aspects of a task. As you get closer to the task, the negative aspects become more prominent, increasing the avoidance tendency. Then as you move away from the task, the positive aspects become more salient, increasing the approach tendency. You know how this goes. When away from your desk, the thought of the book you'd love to write and share with the world excites you. But as you boot up your word processor, you dread looking at that blank page. So this creates a tug of war between approach and avoidance motivations. This approach avoidance conflict blocks us from engaging. So we never initiate the flow cycle and access flow state in the first place. Now you know how to experience this approach avoidance conflict many times. This approach avoidance conflict will keep you out of the flow cycle forever. Now what is the flow cycle? For over a decade, beginning in the '90s, my business partner, Stephen Kotler, chased some of the best action and adventure sport athletes in the world. Following them into the mountains, the waves, and even the sky, Stephen discovered something fascinating. All of these athletes were harnessing the power of flow states, this optimal state of consciousness where humans feel and function at their best. In flow, these athletes could perform previously unattainable feats that were advancing their respective sports faster than any other sport. For example, big waves in surfing used to be 30 foot. In mere years, 80 footers became the norm. And the '90s, a front flip on a BMX, was considered suicidally dangerous. Years later, a triple front flip became the standard. Flow is turning today's unthinkable into tomorrow's new norm, an unfathomably fast. By interviewing and observing these athletes, about how they pulled off these insane feats, Stephen realized all these guys were accessing flow in a specific way by using the flow cycle. And contrary to popular belief, flow isn't binary. It's not like a light switch, either on or off. Rather, flow is part of a four phase cycle. Struggle, release, flow, and recovery. In struggle, you have to fight for the task to absorb you. The norapranephran involved causes frustration, anxiety, discomfort. Release happens once you reach the edge of wrestling with the task or problem through task persistence. And the pain relief of endorphins rush into the system. Flow happens next, this state of effortless attention where your sense of self evaporates. The prefrontal cortex quiesce down and serotonin and dopamine drive you forward. And then recovery happens after flow. Replenishing the costly neurochemistry, the state requires and rejuvenating after so much energy expenditure. Now, for these action and adventure sports athletes, you can think of a struggle phase like a warmup, the first wave, the first run down the mountain, the beginning of a climb. But outside of the action sports arena, there's something else we've discovered about flow. In helping teams at Audi, Accenture, Facebook, the US Air Force, all sorts of the world's leading organizations, harness the power of flow in their workspaces. We've realized there's something you could think of as a fifth stage to the flow cycle. It only lasts a few seconds, but for modern professionals, it's even more challenging than the struggle itself. And it is starting to struggle in the first place. For action sports athletes, this is the moment they decide to bomb down the hill, jump out of the airplane, or wade into the water. This pre-struggle stage that cripples so many folks in the workplace is called engage. And compared to what happens next in struggle, for action sports athletes, the engage phase is the easy part. You just have to jump off that ridge or slide down that mountain, but engage is much harder for knowledge workers. So now you understand that procrastination is just approach avoidance conflict. Your tool set to overcome it is to either build up the desire to approach the task so that it overwhelms the avoidance or secondly, soften the avoidance tendency down. So that your existing desire to approach the task can smoothly roll through without the avoid tendency blocking it. So here are tools for doing this. So you can master the ability to engage the flow cycle and trump procrastination for good. Number one is to laser attention with ridiculously clear goals. Back in the 1960s, pioneering psychologist and co-founder of Positive Psychology, Mihai Chiksetmihae spearheaded one of the largest psychological studies ever done at the time, interviewing a diverse range of individuals from Navajo, Sheeperters to Factory Workers, Musicians and athletes. And all of these people experienced flow state regularly. As Chiksetmihae dug deeper into how they approach their respective activities, he discovered that flow didn't happen randomly. Rather, it had preconditions or triggers that caused it to emerge reliably in those who experienced the state. One of these flow triggers, in particular, can cut through procrastination, like a knife through hot butter. This flow trigger is called clear goals. Clear goals are distinct from goals. Run a marathon, take my kids to Disneyland, save for retirement, they may be goals. Well, clear goals are the target for your attention, not the overall outcome we're looking to achieve. For example, a clear goal is trying to get the soccer ball in the net, the outcome may be trying to win the soccer game. Now, when you focus on the outcome of your actions, you're really relying on your prefrontal cortex, the powerful, but also an inefficient energy hog. When you focus on the target, you rely on the basal ganglia, an older part of the brain that executes familiar habits. It's efficient and requires less energy. To leverage the authenticity of your basal ganglia, focus on putting the ball in the net, not on winning the match. This is not only easier, but it's also much more conducive to flow. Clear goals activate the central executive network for task planning and leads to motivation via dopamine surges, which help to diffuse the approach avoidance conflict. So the first step to annihilating procrastination is to set wildly specific clear goals for each task. And I mean, wildly, weirdly specific. That way, the brain doesn't have to expand resources on wondering how, why or what to do. To achieve this, break the task down into microscopic goals. Even if this is a small task that might only take you an hour, this way you get a steady drip of dopamine. By making the task you're procrastinating on so tiny, that it almost feels like reactive work. That is by taking the big, meaty task you're delaying, fragmenting it down into micro tasks, and so easy to achieve that they are comparable to the things you do to get dopamine hits. You get dopamine hits from bite-sized substeps of the bigger task that you would otherwise be putting off. For example, number one might be open my laptop. Number two might be pull up the Google Doc. Number three might be write the intro to the presentation. The next one may be add the data from past client results into the presentation, design the graphics with our brand colors, whatever it is, make the first action so easy, requiring so little energy that there's nothing left for the brain to resist. Then you can just write this down on a sheet of paper that you're gonna throw away or in the notes app on your phone. It doesn't need to take a lot. This keeps your brain from wondering what's the first step? When you map out these wildly clear, minuscule microscopic level clear goals within the task, execution starts to feel as smooth as a knife through melted butter. You slide right into doing it, and then flow emerges from there. Next, you can further amplify the power of clear goals by combining it with another of flow's most potent triggers, which brings us to the second step to annihilate and the approach avoidance conflict and banishing procrastination. And that is to tune the challenge skills balance. So far, we know of over 20 triggers for flow state, but one of these triggers is so powerful, it's often considered not just a trigger, but a precondition for flow, required for any of the other triggers to work. And it's called the challenge skills balance, [BLANK_AUDIO] critical for overcoming procrastination. His balance refers to the optimal relationship between the perceived level of challenge, a task presents, and your perceived skill or ability to perform the task. If the challenge is too high, you're prone to anxiety and to overwhelm. If the challenge is too low, though, you're bored, you're apathetic. You want to hit that 4% sweet spot where the challenge just slightly outstrips your current skill level. That's when the task will absorb your attention and you'll slide right into flow. So how do we tune the challenge skills balance to melt away procrastination? Well, there's a few ways. The first challenge skills balance regulator is to lower the hurdle. Back when I was a teenager in Ireland, I once tried to set up a website service business. For months, I spent 16 hours a day co-ocalling, trying to sell websites to accountants and I was getting torched, averaging 250 calls a day. I faced constant, unrelenting rejection. What makes you think we want your bullshit services? One had barked earlier that day, scammed someone else's spot another. Every morning, the first two hours were by far the most brutal. I grappled with paralyzing, crippling procrastination. The very idea of picking up the phone and making that initial cold call was such an immense hurdle that I would just delay and delay and delay. The problem was, I wasn't earning a dime unless I made a sale. The way I saw it at the time, if I didn't call, I'd go broke. Then I had a revelation. I could tweak my approach to make those initial hours a bit more bearable. Instead of diving straight into cold calls, I began my day by reaching out to existing clients, the ones who liked me, knew me and were friendly. These interactions were positive and I knew what response to expect. This strategy lowered the initial hurdle, building up confidence momentum for the day, once warmed up, I'd shift gears and braves the cold calls again. And this worked because the more effort you need to engage, the more likely procrastination will occur. Conversely, the less effort required to engage, the easier it is to start the struggle phase and begin to cycle into flow state. Ultimately, what we're avoiding when we procrastinate is energy expenditure, which is an evolutionary adaptation to preserve precious resources for only the essentials required for reproduction. If you trick your system into using fewer resources, then the drive to avoid and procrastinate dips down. So you've got two options, increase effort or just the situation so that it requires less effort. Most people do the former attempting to spike effort up by gozzling coffee, getting all caffeinated or just white nukling through the task. This is like gritting your teeth and trying to jump over a high hurdle. At first, this is exactly what I was doing with cold calling, but in hindsight, rather than jumping over the high hurdle through willpower alone, I should have just lowered the hurdle in the first place, like I eventually did, a better play for your ROI, your return on invested effort, is to restructure things so that we can engage with less effort, like lowering the hurdle so you can easily step over it. Now, the second way to regulate the challenge skills balance is to regulate time. We can use time as a variable that regulates the challenge level of a given task. Often, how much time you have to complete a task determines how difficult it is. If you're procrastinating on your tax returns, which is a painfully boring task for many, then actually limit and suppress down the amount of time to do it. Give yourself an hour instead of a week, which ups the challenge to the sweet spot for flow. If the challenge is too high, so complex, that just thinking about the thing hurts your brain, then do the opposite. Give yourself way more time than you think you need to complete the task. Because lower is the challenge level, allowing you to hit the sweet spot for flow and blast through procrastination. Now, the third way to regulate the challenge skills balance is to define the scope. Have you ever tried to complete 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture looks like? Well, the uncertainty is overwhelming and tilts the challenge skill balance toward anxiety. The same applies to work. If you don't know the scope of the work, what's needed or how long it will take, and there's a risk that it could take 30 minutes or three hours, you resist the task. It's like opening Pandora's box. The solution is to just take a little bit of time to figure out the true scope of the work. This will rarely be perfect, but just aim for as much clarity as you can, asking what needs to be done. Why does it need to be done? By getting clear here, you'll boost the perceived importance within the task, the context, and for you, which makes it easier to engage. Now, the third way to be procrastination and master the approach avoidance conflict is called bypassing or response inhibition. Response inhibition refers to the ability to override an automatic reaction to stimuli and to choose a gold-driven behavior. Instead, like joining your friends and jumping into a cold river, before you can pause to reconsider. Here's why response inhibition is important. As soon as emotional parts of the brain, like the amygdala, have a chance to take over, they override our ability to self-regulate. When this happens, we experience more anxiety about the negative consequence of our actions and are less able to filter out emotions related to the task. You'll notice that if you start dilly-dallying before getting into the river, the emotional part of the brain that's trying to protect you will win. From there, it'll become increasingly difficult to brave the cold. Instead, the more conscious part of the brain that knows it'll be fun to join your friends for a swim, we'll dive in within five minutes. By the time you're in there, it's too late. For the emotional part of your brain to take over, you aim to get ahead of the approach avoidance conflict before it even kicks in. This prevents procrastination from surfacing in the first place. Earlier, I told you about my experience with cold calling. Well, that story is a happy ending. And ending, I never would have experienced without training up my response inhibition. One day, when making my call calls through sheer luck and accountant called Martin Gilchrist picked up the phone, he saw something in my grit most sort of quit long ago, he said, let's talk business. And in time, we worked together and became regional finalists for Ireland's best young entrepreneur. But the real win was training myself to engage to overcome the approach avoidance conflict despite the temptation to procrastinate. It was a triumph of will, response inhibition over the prepotent biological urge to avoid. Just like jumping in a cold shower, before I had a second to inhibit the response, I trained myself to immediately click dial so that the person would answer and say, hello, before I could even think about it. In the end, that approach worked, but there's a better way than brute force. There's a way you can leverage your neurochemistry to dial up your response inhibition with the sleep-to-flow strategy. Prevailing wisdom says, we should wake up, drink lemon water, meditate, take a cold shower and prepare for the workday. But in the morning, there's a brain state you can harness to take the likelihood of procrastination way down. You increase your response inhibition, and at the same time, you drive your access to flow way up. That's because the Delta and theta brain waves and sleep are close to the alpha and theta brain waves found in flow. Alpha waves reduce prefrontal cortex activity, leading to a sense of effortlessness and reduce self-consciousness to your inner critic. Theta waves are associated with heightened creativity, enabling the brain to make novel connections and solve increasingly complex problems more efficiently. Harnessing these brain waves is simple. Get to work the second you wake up. If you have everything prepared, you can be typing within 60 seconds and getting out of your bed. And if you've been resisting work, this gives you no way out. You don't have time to even be awake enough to distract yourself and procrastinate. You override the emotional part of the brain and activate your prefrontal cortex. There's no room for the avoid and approach systems to be at odds. This doesn't mean you wake up and start checking email. It means you wake up and you work on the important tasks you have been procrastinating on. You can just set everything up beforehand for this to really work, but it's highly effective and it trains the skill of bypassing. And the fourth way to master the approach avoidance conflict is with something called the flow payoff. Flow state feels incredible. It's one of the most pleasurable experiences humans can experience courtesy of the cocktail of neurochemicals and producers in the brain. But there has to be a high likelihood of getting into flow and for long enough, in order to want to engage in the first place. Building a sand castle on the beach is less motivating if the tide can wash it away at any moment. But the same applies to work. If you know you'll be interrupted after you start working, the approach of avoidance conflict will cause you to resist the task. You need to be certain you'll get the reward for all that struggle. For example, I remember when I first started working with Stephen Collar, we launched this huge professional training event. To pull this off, I had to conduct hundreds and hundreds of sales calls in order to sell tickets to the event. At the same time, I was trying to build out the curriculum and plan the whole event itself, which required large stretches of deep focused work in flow. With all these sales calls, I ended up with this Swiss cheese-like calendar, constant meetings with little time in between. Since the sales calls tilted everything, in between calls, I found it hard to muster the willingness to work on the curriculum design. Even with the pressure building, as the event got closer and closer trying to engage, was like trying to resist the effects of a potent sedative. Even though it sometimes get into flow for a little bit between calls, I couldn't sustain flow state long enough to justify the struggle of starting to engage. It'll be like going surfing. Would you bother with all the struggle of waking early, waxing the board, squeezing into a tight wetsuit and paddling out if you knew that after one or two waves, there was a very high likelihood that the ocean was just gonna go flat on you, like that. I know I wouldn't, there's just not enough of a flow payoff for the struggle. And it's the same thing with starting focused work. You rally your focus, block distractions, and psych up to persist through the struggle phase. But if you know there's a high likelihood you're gonna interrupt it after 15, 30, or 45 minutes, it's more difficult to do so. Without a sufficient uninterrupted flow session, the struggle feels pointless, there's no waves to catch. To make sure the struggle is worth it, so you don't procrastinate, fix your schedule. To avoid a Swiss cheese schedule, collapse meetings where it's possible from in person to zoom, zoom to phone, phone to email, email to text, text to nothing. Canceling the meeting ideally, given that research has found that 70% of meetings are completely unnecessary. And when not possible, batch your communication outside of your peak productive hours and bookend your meetings. Either knock them all out at the beginning of the day or right up against your hard stop for the day after your flow blocks. Remember, flow is activity specific. You can either be in flow during a meeting or be in flow doing deep focused work, [BLANK_AUDIO] Crossing between these types of activities breaks flow. Now there's a final aspect to procrastination that we need to address. And that is, what if what feels like procrastination isn't actually procrastination at all, but a signal that you should pay close attention to? Now when I was first scaling one of my education companies, we were going to partner with an engineering team that was gonna build us a custom learning management system. I was utterly convinced that this new LMS was the ultimate unlock for being able to scale our business and hit our numbers for that year. We had a lot writing on the deal. People were counting on me and yet I found myself continually delaying the calls with our point of contact, procrastinating on the product scope document day after day. Now what was going on here? I was staying on top of every other task and key meeting for the business, but kept avoiding meeting with these engineers. Something just felt off, deep down and shootively, I knew that this partnership was actually a bad move for the business. I couldn't explain why or even be fully conscious of it at the time, but what was showing up as procrastination was actually something else. It was actually ambivalence that I was feeling. Ambivalence often has the same symptoms as procrastination, but it's something totally different. This ambivalence was signaling to me that we were about to get locked up in a contract that would eat away at our profits for something that we didn't need at all. Thankfully, I was able to reinterpret this procrastination as ambivalence and call off the partnership, saving us six figures a month in what would have been completely unnecessary expenses in the end. So procrastination is the desire to avoid doing something you should do, both variables, desire to avoid and the thing being something you should do need to be present for it to be procrastination. However, sometimes you have the desire to avoid doing something which is a signal that you should not actually go and do that thing, or that you should be doing that thing in a fundamentally different way. So it's crucial to be able to distinguish between the approach of avoidance conflict showing up as procrastination and ambivalence showing up as an intuitive sense that you shouldn't continue to do a given thing. You wanna overcome procrastination, you wanna pay attention to ambivalence and you wanna avoid mixing up those two signals because ambivalence can yield insight and you can use it to level up and approach things more effectively. Maybe you're not aligned with your values, goal stack or intrinsic motivators. Maybe you've burned out or you're not playing to your strengths when you become attuned to ambivalence to skies as procrastination. It leads to thank God we didn't do that in realizations afterwards, but these only come in hindsight. So you must build a skill of actually interpreting procrastination to recognize ambivalence in real time. Now remember procrastination is natural but optional. You can eliminate it by leveraging flow triggers like clear goals, the challenge skills balance and fixing your schedule for a great flow payoff. The compound effect of never saying no to what needs to be done will give you reliable access to flow and lead to extreme progression and accomplishment. After working with thousands of professionals, we've found that one of the most effective ways to make procrastination irrelevant is to wake up and flow. We touch on this briefly here, but for a deeper dive, click here.