Solved Highlight: The Real Reason You Procrastinate

Hey everybody, Mark Manson here and it's the start of the year. A lot of us are trying to get our groove back. Set goals, build better habits, maybe actually follow through on some of the stuff this time. Not just talk about it. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to bring back one of the most useful segments that we did last year. This one is about procrastination. It's from a longer episode where Drew and I went deep on the psychology, the history, and the science behind why we put so many things off and what actually helps us stop doing it. But this part, it's actually where everything kind of snaps in the focus. It gets to the real reason why we put off stuff that actually matters to us. It's not just about setting a timer or downloading another app. It's not because we're lazy, but because we're emotionally loaded. It's about identity, shame, fear, perfectionism, failure, all the real messy stuff going on under the surface that influences our desire to procrastinate. So if you've ever delayed doing anything important in your life, which is all of you, you fucking liars, I know it's you. It's me too, don't worry. I think this is going to land for you. It's a great refresher. It's a great way to kick off the year. And if you want the full episode, it's already in your feed. We cover everything from Aristotle to modern brain science to all of the best productivity techniques to yes, you guessed it. What fucking apps to download. And we've got a free procrastination guide to go along with it. So you can grab it in the show notes or head over to saltpodcast.com/procrastination. It is absolutely free and it is full of research tips and practical tricks. All right, let's get into it. 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. When you say procrastination is a strategy to for mood regulation, like explain that like I'm five. Okay. What does that mean? Okay. So Mark. In case people like don't really get emotional regulations, one of those things that like everybody's heard the term, but it's fuzzy. Yeah. 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 you need to do. Yeah. Okay. You don't want to do it. That's kind of the point. Right. When you approach this task, you might get an anxious feeling. Yeah. It's red. Dread. 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 and anger. Why the fuck do I have to do this? Yeah. Any, 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, I've approached this 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 as your phone or whatever it is. Yeah. Or yeah, this is why you can also like people procrastinate by cleaning their houses or something like this. Something some boring task because they find that even less awful than whatever they're going to be right on. Right. Right. Does that make sense? Markey. Yes. Okay. Let's go to call you daddy drool. It's not over. I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what that gets me. It's really weird. Please do not call me that. Ever early on in this, this, when this framework was being developed, a lot of the, the psychologist called it giving you into feel good. Right. So you look for whatever feels on a relative basis, whatever feels better in the moment than whatever you're uncomfortable with. Yeah. And you go, 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, at, it's based at its core, it is that, 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. Like a 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 seen it in my mind. Again, it's kind of two sides of a coin. Yeah. 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, is that, 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 of shitty reason, and it's actually not very motivating at all. Like all of those fact, all 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, 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, is few escape routes as possible? Exactly. And that's the behaviorist, right? 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. Understanding why you, you, you associate certain things with a task and how to kind of manipulate the levers or dials in your head to make the tasks feel easier, right? 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. Everything we've talked about does it crosses that point of emotion regulation that you have to manage, right? Exactly. Yeah. There's, it's, and it does, it goes back to it's a short-term relief for long-term detriment, right? Right. Right. All of this is, 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. I go, 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 and 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 your behavior, like the, what, what you were doing in that, that very moment, even to like the Buddhist perspective of like not being aware of what your internal triggers are. Like this is, 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. Like, and in fact, I actually found a meta analysis of 14,000 participants of who practice mindfulness and meditation. And they showed significant improvements in time management, task initiation, and also a sense, you, you talked about that sense of like how long it'll take to complete something. There's 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 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 appear very close or actually very far away and vice versa, right? So it's, it's understanding that you're looking at a fun house mirror, you know, meditation is a practice of like developing the ability to recognize the fun house 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, temperature, especially and fuchsia, seerwa, 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 and kind of brain that we all have. Yeah. And being able to deal with it. And it calls it the rain method because there's an acronym, it's "Recognize a. " allow, investigate, and not 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 those, 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 is investigate those emotions. Get curious. Why do I feel this way? You, that's, then you're 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 and my blowing things out of proportion? Yeah. And they might just tire them asleep last night. Yeah. Start asking all those questions. Ask those questions, 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 anxiousness. 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. At the point, you'll protect it. Yeah. Right. If you decide that you are anxious and perfectionist, then you will, you will actually protect that self-definition Yes. Uh, which will cause you to like actually your procrastination will become part of your identity. Right. And it's, it's, 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, they are incorporating their procrastination as a part of their identity. And so now they will start unconsciously protecting it. Right. And continue your procrastination show like this is my identity. To prove to themselves and others. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Brain FM. You know what nobody tells you when you're trying to get your shit together? Focus is not a vibe. It's kind of a war actually. It's you versus every notification, every dopamine hit, every mental garbage fire going on in your head. And the days that you actually need to focus the most, those are the days your brain feels like a hamster on Red Bull. That's where Brain FM comes in. Brain FM uses music that is actually backed by neuroscience and real researchers to help your brain shift into whatever mode that you need. The deep work, it could be relaxation, meditation, actually falling asleep before 2am. Now this isn't just background noise. It's not some dude on YouTube playing rain sounds through a tin can. This stuff is actually engineered by PhD scientists to change your brain state within minutes. It's you pass the lazy frontal lobe and hits all the good stuff going on underneath. The part that actually does things. Now whether I'm writing, reading, or just preventing my attention span from melting into TikTok soup, I throw on Brain FM and it helps me lock in. I have been using Brain FM for a while now and I swear by it and because they know I don't promote crap that I don't actually use myself, they are giving you 30 days of unlimited free access. That it's a full month to help train your brain to stop being a flaky roommate and actually show up on time. So head to brain.fm/solved to try it out. And you can get 30 days of unlimited access for free. As far as practical takeaways go, that for me, after realizing that, I realized that 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 buckle down and be like, okay, I don't like this. Why don't I 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 to you. Like you just said, don't wrap your identity up in whatever you're doing. Totally. For sure. Well speaking of identities, I've got like a fun exercise for us. Before we wrap up, the tactics and strategies for everybody. Dr. Linda Sappadin, she's a clinical psychologist. She wrote a book in the '90s called The Six Types of Pracinators. And so she has six types that she has identified through her clinical practice. And I thought it would be fun, like now that we understand all the frameworks, right? I think it'd 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 you've dealt with is the perfectionist. Right. Because in perfection sets unrealistic standards, refuses to accept good enough. And ends up having to use time limits to avoid endless revisions or reduce. Do you feel attacked? Yeah. I feel like I'm getting better at it. I mean, this is kind of 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, alright, that's not going to be perfect. Do you think that's just from accumulating so many imperfect experiences? Yes. I don't think I've actively worked it. Like I'm getting over it. I'm like now, except reality for what it is. Yeah. Alright, the second one is the dreamer. Love's 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. My mind definitely, I like to dream big and 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. 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, 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. So let's 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. It makes sense to me when it's something like a podcast outline where I struggle with that though is okay, I'm breaking something down. Make 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. It makes sense with like a podcast outline because that's a tangible thing. But 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. 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 its bullshit. Okay. 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, yeah, 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. 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. Okay. Next one, the warrior 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 I've definitely known people like this who are just like almost like a doom sayers, like they just think everything's going to go wrong. They're worried about everything all the time. It is like freezes them in place kind of 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 this? I definitely think, you know, if you think fighter fighter flight, I think it's the flight side of it. Like I mean procrastination is essentially just the flight in the fight or 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. Like they're just kind of always imagining worst case scenario. Yeah, which you would think it's kind of like almost a perfectionist thing, but it's not. Yeah. It's it's more because the perfectionist is like, well, what if I don't do it perfectly? Mm-hmm. But what if I, you know, what if I'm embarrassed by what? Yeah. This is like, what if it just everything just the worst case scenario. Right. What if it goes wrong? What if it, what if I'm worse off than I am now? 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? Right. Because I tried this thing. The crisis maker. So we talked about this. Thrive's on last minute adrenaline. Enjoys 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. Yeah. Resist imposed hast, 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 it's just like unnecessarily contrary and at times. Big cultural component of that one, though, too. You know, where if obedience are at least tradition or service to your family, society, whatever it is, there's there's a big cultural component as well. This feels like maybe a little bit of a privileged procrastinator. Yeah. Like it could be serving too many college kids. 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 it. 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. Yeah. Definitely a little bit of me in there too. Yeah. Like it just, you try to think 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 there's the opportunity of things to do and engage in as grown exponentially. Yeah. So the need to create boundaries and say no, is 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 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. I think it's useful to kind of ask yourself where you are and what each of us needs to focus on to improve this for ourselves. Absolutely. Let's talk about environmental design. What is a good way to implement environmental design to help with your procrastination? The core premise of this is altering your surroundings. So that the desire behavior that you're targeting is just easier or the one that you don't want to do is much harder to distractions, stuff like that. We'll talk about how to do that. So set up your environment so that for success, basically. Yeah. 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. There's kind of like actual just physically alter your environment. That's kind of the first category. And then the second or the second category, I think is creating rules for yourself. When you're saying things like, leave your phone in the other room or people will say stuff like, "Only check email after 2pm." Something like that. I think it's really useful to get explicit of like, "This is a rule that I live by." 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. Yeah. And not consistently over a long time. You might get it right the first day or the first week, but 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. Similar to environmental design. Another big one is social accountability. We talked a little bit about the Confucianism. And we've kind of skirted around this, 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 it is worth understanding that probably the strongest driver of our emotions period is other people. 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 conscious of who you led into your life. 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, 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 tactical level, finding somebody who has the same goals you and is also struggling with that goal is and then working on it together. It's just your chance of success rises exponentially. 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 five 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 you don't want to be the 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 just that's embarrassing. That loses respect that you know, people stop trusting you as much. And so that is a huge lever that you can pull within your own brain. 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 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 and not there. I mean, procrastination kind of becomes an afterthought when you really have a strong purpose, kind of what your daily actions, right? So reconnecting whatever task or 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 up like a greater sense of purpose around things. That starting there. So kind of fighting your why the Simon Sinek thing. You could dig into that. Why 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 or 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 third year old why why why am I doing this why why why why I think that's a really good place to start anyway. Yeah. I think to like having a basic understanding of like what a good why is versus a bad why yeah we didn't really talk about that. But I generally speaking I think 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 year that's going to be a weak why. And generally the strongest wise are the sorts of things that you're like you know it 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 than yourself that even if you die you hope it continues on past you like that is generally indicative of some some a good form of 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, 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 is fundamentally enriching in my life. That's a good why as well. You know, it's like try to stay aligned with that. Right. Yeah. We talked a little bit about in this section too. 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 very good why. The example I gave anyway was yeah, I started working out because I wanted to look good, right? Yeah. 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, a change from my vanity, and which is if I'm honest, it's still important to me, right? I think 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. Right. Basically, like hopefully I'm going to be one of those eight-year-old people, like my great uncle home out still out there skiing and I can, you know, do the splits and all that kind of stuff. So your why can change, but sometimes you also just need to let something go because there's no foundation for your why and your purpose. I think that's a really good point, though, is that like those weaker why don't go away. Yeah. Yeah. You just need to find the bigger, stronger one. Like, yeah, you never will stop caring. 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 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 you're just on a very ugly treadmill and it's it's not going to get any slower. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So yeah. Zoom in a little bit. So zoom in. So we're going that's the super big picture now cutting in super, super tight. I have this concept that I I've called for many years the minimal viable action, which is this is this is the breaking down or choking down, you know, actions into a smaller component pieces. I called the minimal 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 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, yeah, it's still kind of like, okay, what about one minute meditation, right? Like just go sit on the fucking floor. How about that? You don't even have to read 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 can do five minutes. And then you do the five minutes and then you're like, I could do 10, you know, and then you do 10, you're like, I could do 20 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? Okay, yes. So the next one is addressing those underlying emotions. This is what 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 perceive dreadful tasks. So we talked about the rain method. This is one way. It's really just more about mindfulness. 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 can be more mindful around this. But this, I found in a 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 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 the crazy, 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 you don't have to. This is ultimately, it's more about fixing your emotions or solving your emotions. It's more about becoming aware and accepting of your emotions, not being hijacked by your emotions. Just like, as you said, recognizing what's going on beneath the surface so that you can work with it instead of against it. So if anxiety comes up, you can alter the action or the expectation in your head until you get it to a point where it's not so anxiety-inducing or if there's a despair or sadness or whatever. You can play with your goals or 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 until you're aware of the emotion that's underlying the procrastination, you can't really adapt to it or use it in any useful way. Yeah, and a lot of this two, these all tie together. And so if you have 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 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 meditation or maybe you do need to go through to therapy just to get a little more self-aware around your emotions. 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. 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. So, a friend of the show, Ollie Abdullah, is a great book about this called Feel Good Productivity. And for me, my favorite thing about that book, it's one of 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 had 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. Like these are all just like really basic how to make it fun one-on-one techniques. And you can do this with anything. You can gamify anything. You can track progress on anything. Again, if you've got social accountability, 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 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. - Well, what are some examples, specific examples you've used? - I mean, you've been on a big health journey. I know just tracking in general, you think it's fun, which is, you know, some people might not think just tracking is fun. - I think progress is fun. - Progress, okay. - Yeah. - 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 it. - Okay, okay. - What I enjoy is the competition with myself, right? So it's like, I know how much weight I lifted on every exercise last week, right? - Oh wow. - It's fun for me to go into the gym this week and be like, let's see if I can do one more rep, right? Let's see if I can do this. Let's see if I can add five pounds to this. Let's see how that feels. - I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not skipping to the gym every morning. - You know, like, hopping out of that. - But 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 podcast 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. Like 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 only listen to audiobooks either while you're working out or while you're getting ready for bed. You know, and it's, there's no other time. So, what's fun for you could be fun for somebody else. Yeah, everybody's fun is a little bit different. But, you know, the principles are the same. I think I'll even go through this. He's like, gamify it, make it social, and then like batch it with something that you enjoy. Right. You know, so those are three tried and true methods. I think he has a couple more in his book. Okay. I'm probably not thinking of that moment. Yeah. 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, it is like juggling steak knives. And you can hurt yourself if you're not very focused on the depth of 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 spending 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. All right, everybody, that's it for today's highlight. If that resonated with you and let's be real, you're listening to a podcast segment about procrastination. So probably resonated. It's worth checking out the full episode. We go way deeper into the roots of why we avoid important stuff and how to actually build habits that last. And don't forget to grab the free procrastination guide. We packed it with takeaways, tools, research back strategies to help you get your shit together. You can find it in the show notes or go to solvepodcast.com/procrastination. And if you're enjoying the show, please do drop us a review. Give us a follow, whatever platform you're on. It's the best thing you can do to help us out. Help us get the word out. Thank you guys again. I will see you next week.