How to Break Your Procrastination Habit (For Good)

- Hey, what is up guys?

And welcome to the final video

in our procrastination miniseries.

Over the course of the past couple of videos,

we have dug into the science behind procrastination,

talked about what you can do step-by-step

to stop procrastinating when you find yourself doing it

in the moment and that leaves us with one final question

which is, if you are a chronic procrastinator,

if you find yourself putting things off again and again,

how do you stop that process,

how do you stop that cycle,

and this was really the question

that led me to do this series in the first place,

because as I alluded to in the previous video,

I have been a chronic procrastinator for quite some time.

In fact, every video I put out

on this YouTube channel over the past three

or four years has always been done kind of last minute,

and this honestly goes back even further

than my YouTube career.

It goes back into high school and middle school.

I was the kid who'd come to school at 6 a.m.

the day homework was due

and I would do it in the cafeteria before school started,

and I was always proud of this

and I think that's sort

of built the foundation for my chronic procrastination later

in life, so I went, I dug into the reasons

for my own procrastination

and I ended up finding some common themes

that I think a lot of you are going to identify with

which is gonna form kind of the meat of most of this video,

and then we're gonna get into one final tip

that I think everyone needs

to implement no matter what the specific causes

are that they are dealing with,

but the first thing that I want to mention here

is that I think self awareness

is a hugely important aspect in becoming less

of a procrastinator, because everyone

has particular reasons for why they tend to put things off.

Yes, in the science video,

we talked about some of the most common causes

and I think those are gonna be

kind of universal across the board,

but everyone has their own specific demons,

everyone has something that causes them to put things off

and that's gonna affect them more

than it might affect someone else.

So before digging into my reasons for procrastination,

which I do think a lot of you are going to identify with,

I just wanna put this out there.

Observe your own behavior,

observe the decisions you make and why you make them,

both emotional short-term decisions

but also long-term decisions as well.

Once you get into the habit of doing this,

you can start to identify some

of the underlying causes for why you do things

that you don't want to do,

such as procrastinating on your work.

So as I mentioned, I'm gonna go over four

big causes for my own procrastination in this video,

starting with the first one which

is that I am often overwhelmed with everything

that I have to do, and this causes me

to basically become paralyzed.

I have this analysis paralysis

because I'm aware of the huge amount

of things on my plate, all the projects

that are currently going on,

and it makes it very difficult

to focus in on the one task I need to do,

but of course to get over procrastination,

that is exactly what I need to do,

I need to basically put everything out

of my mind except for the one thing

that needs to be focused on at this moment,

and to drive that point home,

I wanna share one of my favorite quotes

from the book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

"Do not let the panorama of your life oppress you.

"Do not dwell on all the various troubles

"which may have occurred in the past

"or may occur in the future.

"Just ask yourself in each instance of the present,

"what is there in this work

"which I cannot endure or support?

"You'll be ashamed to make any such confession.

"Then remind yourself that it

"is neither the future nor the past which weighs on you,

"but always the present,

"and the present burden reduces if only you can isolate it

"and accuse your mind of weakness

"if it cannot hold against something thus stripped bare."

And we let the sum total of everything

that we need to do occupy our attention,

then the weight of it all can become unbearable

and that's how we get paralyzed,

that's how we put things off,

so by sitting down and getting clear on exactly what needs

to be done in the present moment,

maybe by writing it down on a piece of paper

and putting everything out of our attention except

that one thing, we can easily move forward

because in almost all instances,

if you get clear enough,

if you make it actionable enough,

it's easy to do, or at least the path is clear.

Secondly, I need to let go of the belief

that procrastination is actually a good thing,

and I think this is something that is not unique to me.

In fact, in the book A Mind for Numbers

by Barbara Oakley she talks about how this

is something that can become a pattern of behavior.

You can start to almost brag about how you're

able to get things done even though you procrastinated.

And in my case, I start

to attribute positive aspects to the act

of procrastination itself,

such as that I work better under pressure,

the time pressure of a deadline

actually makes me more creative,

but what I believe is actually happening

is that I have set lower standards

for myself than I actually have the potential to achieve.

I have been procrastinating for so long

that what I set out to achieve every single time

is something that is achievable by a procrastinator,

by somebody doing things at the absolute last moment,

and if I can get over that belief,

I would be able to achieve so much more,

so if you're like me, if you tend

to make these justifications,

and you tend to brag about how your procrastination

is actually a good thing,

quote unquote, then every time you

have to put something off a little bit,

every time you have to compromise on your vision

because of a deadline, realize

that that is a product of you procrastinating

and far from procrastination being an asset in this case,

it was actually a hindrance,

it caused you to compromise on your original vision,

or what you wanted to achieve.

All right, big issue number three from you which is the fact

that some aspects of my work just aren't fulfilling

and they aren't fun, and that also causes procrastination,

and I think this may be

one of the biggest problems for a lot

of you guys out there as well.

Some of your work just is not fun.

You don't want to do it.

Now, as I mentioned in the first video in the series,

a lot of people are gonna say,

well, if that's the case,

you need to drop your work and go follow your passion man,

find work that you want to do

that gets you out of bed in the morning,

and the fact of the matter

is that no matter what you're doing,

there's always going to be aspects

of your work that aren't fun.

There is always gonna be little tasks

that you don't really want to do,

so instead of focusing on those tasks

and the fact that they aren't that fulfilling,

I think that you need to focus on your identity.

This is something that I think about a lot.

Instead of telling myself

that I really don't wanna do this task and fixating on that,

I fixate instead on the fact

that I want be known as a hard-working person,

and like the author James Clear talks about

in his excellent book Atomic Habits,

every action you take is essentially a vote

for your identity, so when you fixate on your identity,

it actually influences the actions you're going to take.

It's kind of a two-way street.

That leaves us with our fourth

and final problem which for me I think is the biggest one

and it's the problem of perfectionism.

One of the biggest reasons

that I find it difficult to start my work

is that I have this overarching believe

that it has to be absolutely perfect from the start,

and even though in past videos

I have recommended getting in making a mess,

going with that terrible first draft idea,

I have trouble actually doing this.

Now, there are a lot of different reasons for perfectionism

and in fact, I've even done an entire video on perfectionism

which you may want to watch after this one,

but for me, I think the biggest influence is the fact

that my previous body of work has set certain expectations

or at least I believe that it has.

The fact that for the past four years

I've been putting out videos

that I've done well that people

have found useful makes me feel

like everything I put out in the future essentially has

to be the be-all end-all resource on that topic.

It has to be supremely helpful,

and this is honestly a pretty egocentric view, right?

I'm just one person among billions on

a speck floating through space,

so every piece of work I put out can't be

the most perfect thing ever,

but there is this internal belief that it has to be,

and you might have this problem as well.

If you've gotten good grades in the past,

or you've gotten a lot of great feedback from your boss,

maybe you feel like everything you do going forward has

to be absolutely perfect,

and I want to stress that this perspective

isn't completely useless,

but it's an editor's perspective

and it's a terrible perspective

to have when you go into the creation process at the start.

When you're thinking like an editor,

you can't create very well.

When you're fixated on what other people are going to think

and how your work is going to be judged,

you can't be creative.

You can't make that mess

that's important for just getting things started.

And at least for me, this relates very heavily

back to my second problem

which was sort of bragging about procrastination,

feeling like it was almost a superpower of mine,

because it would cause me to delay the start

of my work until right before the deadline,

at which point of course there is no time to first make

that mess and then go back and refine it later,

so for me at least, the solution here is twofold.

Number one, let go of that perfectionist mindset

at least in the beginning

of the process so I can actually make that mess

and get those thoughts out on that piece of paper

and number two, start work well in advance.

Maybe even use mini deadlines to facilitate this.

That way, there actually is time for refinements.

All right, so those are the four big issues that

at least for me cause chronic procrastination

and hopefully you've identified with

at least one of those along with my suggestions for

how to start improving upon it.

But in addition to those,

I do wanna give you one final suggestion

which I think is going to be universally helpful

for anybody watching this video

and struggling with procrastination

and it's to set up your environment

in accordance with the 20 second rule.

This is a concept from

Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage

and the gist of this concept

is that you want to take anything

that you want to do less often

and increase the friction required to start doing it,

so that it takes more than 20 seconds to start doing,

and of course this 20 second figure

is more illustrative than anything.

It's not based some scientific principle,

so if something takes less than 20 seconds

or more than 20 seconds,

that's fine, but the basic idea here is you

want to set up your environment

so that it's more inconvenient to go play video games,

just go check stats, like I have a problem with doing,

and so it's less inconvenient to start doing your work,

and I think this is very important for anyone

to keep in mind, but it's especially important

for chronic procrastinators

is because you can aspire to embody the identity

of a hard-working person.

You can aspire to be less of a perfectionist,

but that doesn't happen overnight.

No big change does.

And when you are in the process

of making a big change in your life,

you need to set up systems that keep you on track,

almost like training wheels,

so install a website blocker on your computer

or disconnect the Internet when you need to do your work

or make an entirely separate user account

that has nothing but your work programs

and websites available on it.

Put your video games in inconvenient places.

Basically do whatever it takes

to make procrastination

as inconvenient as possible

so you can start working on becoming less

of a chronic procrastinator.

Do that and then start working in earnest on

at least one of the issues we've talked about in this video

and you will be well on your way to becoming

the kind of person who does not put things off.

Now, one thing that a lot

of people tend to procrastinate on

to their detriment is securing their online lives.

Too many people I know use

the same passwords across multiple accounts,

they don't use two factor authentication,

and they do all kinds of other things

that could open them up to potentially getting hacked

or having their online accounts compromised.

And as more and more of

our livelihoods become dependent on online systems,

you can't afford to be one of those procrastinators.

Fortunately, one of the most important steps

to becoming secure which

is having a strong unique password on every site

that you log into is also

one of the easiest if you use a tool like Dashlane.

Dashlane is an incredibly well-designed password manager

that gives you a streamlined way to secure your online life

and make sure it's hardened against hackers,

corporate data breaches, and online phishing scams.

Their app, which you could use across

all major platforms including Windows,

Mac OS, Android, and iOS,

automatically generates strong

and unique passwords for all of your online accounts.

All this data is then stored in a secure user account

that is protected by a patented security architecture,

which encrypts all your data

and make sure that you are

the only person that can access it.

And aside from offering you better security,

Dashlane can also save you a ton of time as well,

because once you have your user data in their account,

it can automatically fill in login forms

and even log you into most sites

on the Internet automatically,

so if you want to start improving your online security today

and start saving time as well,

then head over to Dashlane.com/collegeinfogeek

which you will find in the description

down below and sign up.

And if you'd like to save a bit

of money on their premium subscription

which gets you extra features

like a VPN and secure file storage,

then use the code collegeinfogeek

at checkout to get 10% off of that subscription.

As always, I wanna give a big thanks

to Dashlane for sponsoring this video

and being a big supporter of my channel

and thank you as well for watching.

If you enjoyed this video,

definitely give it a thumbs up

and get subscribed right there

so you don't miss out on new videos

when they come out every single week.

You can also click like there to get a free copy

of my book on how to earn better grades

which may be useful to use since finals

are definitely right around the corner.

You can also follow me on Instagram

at tomfrankly or get one more video on this channel

by clicking right there.

Thanks for watching and I will see you

in the next one, goodbye!