9min chapter

Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal  cover image

How To Make 2024 Your Most Productive Year Yet

Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

CHAPTER

Overcoming Procrastination through Clarity, Courage, and Getting Started

This chapter explores the concept of procrastination and provides strategies for overcoming it. By gaining clarity on tasks, understanding emotions and fears, and adopting an alter ego or role model, individuals can start taking action and build momentum to beat procrastination.

00:00
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I want to go back to the idea of procrastination because I feel like this is such a huge subject. And everybody struggles with it. Right. I don't know anyone who well, I think if they say
Speaker 3
they don't, they probably like. Yeah. So I wonder if we can go back to the kind of the
Speaker 2
procrastination section of the book. And we talked a
Speaker 3
bit earlier about how procrastination is sort
Speaker 2
of often underlined by sort of fear or other emotions around the thing that you're supposed to be doing. Can you give us a bit more insight into that? Yeah.
Speaker 1
Sure. So yeah, chapters four, five and six, we're about beating procrastination. Chapter four is get clarity. Because clarity is like a big, like the first major hurdle. Chapter five is courage, which is all about like the emotions and fear being the main one. And then chapter six is get started. So if I just bookend the stuff about the emotions, initially we've got clarity where a lot of people be like, okay, I'm procrastinating from exercise. And if you think about it, it's like they don't really have any clarity on what exercise even means. If someone's a beginner to exercise, it'd be like the there's all sorts of like stuff where it's like, you know, at one point, I was, I was, I was trying to take up running. I was like, cool, I'm just gonna take up running. I didn't, I didn't know that meant like, how, how often am I running? Like, where am I going? Do I need any special kind of shoes? Like, what app do I use on my phone to track the runs? I know people do that. Should I wear them the Apple orders?
Speaker 4
There's
Speaker 1
basic questions where like a runner might just be like, look, man, just wear any shoes and just go out for a run. But as someone who hadn't experienced what running was as like an exercise activity, I just didn't have clarity on it, which meant I procrastinated for like a whole three months at being like, Oh, at some point, I'll get run through this running thing. I didn't know exactly what it was. Yeah. And so the first step in beating procrastination is actually getting clarity on why you want to do the thing, what the thing actually is, and like, when and where you're going to do the thing. Because even just that, like, even just committing to a time and a place and putting the thing in your calendar, I think solves like half procrastination within like a few seconds. So it's like, I'm going to go to the gym at some point. That's never going to happen. And it's like, I'm going to go to the gym every Monday at 5pm. It's way more likely to happen than the alternative. And so the next thing is like, okay, let's say the thing is now in your calendar, like in, in someone's case, it might be, I don't know, working on this presentation, for example, it's like I've been procrastinating from this presentation for such a long time at work. And I finally put in my calendar, I know what I need to do. And then it gets to 3pm on the Monday or whenever you put in the calendar. And then there's something that like holds you back. There's like a resistance. That resistance and that resistance is usually some kind of emotion. And the most common emotion is fear. Like fear, it tends to be the thing at the root of most procrastination. It's all in a self-doubt, because they self-doubt is sort of a subset of fear, because you're afraid of the thing being judged by someone else. And that's when we have to, I guess, you know, from your background as, you know, from your background in therapy, a lot of strategies around naming the emotion, telling ourselves a different story about the emotion to reduce the impact it has on us. And fundamentally, acting in the face of that emotion anyway, if we recognize the emotion is never truly going to go away. There's a fun study where they called it the Batman effect, where they got a bunch of kids, and they got them to do some sort of activity, some sort of game. And then, and so half the kids were just told to do the activity. But the other half of the kids, they were told to imagine that they were a like superhero that they vibed with, like Batman or Dora the Explorer or whatever. And they found that the group who pretended they were someone else who acted as if they were Batman or Dora the Explorer performed better at the exercise and felt better as a result of doing it than the group that had had no instructions. And so Adele, for example, has spoken about how back in the day, she had loads of stage fright when she was first getting a singing career off the ground. And so she would adopt this alter ego, you know, this woman called Sasha Carter, it was like a mixture of two different singers. And she'd be like, okay, when I'm on stage, I'm going to be Sasha Carter. I'm not going to be Adele. I'm going to be this version of me. And that was the thing that allowed to overcome stage fright and like do the thing. And so what is it? Yeah, this is one of the strategies in the book, trying to figure out what is that Batman for you? What is that alter ego? Like for me, when I do public speaking, I imagine myself not as me because I'm like, oh, every all the emotions get in the way. I imagine myself as young Charles Xavier from the X-Men series. He's cool. It's like an X-Men first class series is like cool guy, nice accent, good looking. This is before he goes into the wheelchair. I'm like, cool. I'm just imagining myself as young Charles Xavier. And I'm just here to teach and I'm here to share. And I'm going to smile on my face and I'm going to enjoy it. And it means that I can get over that initial hurdle, which would otherwise stop me from filming a video or from going on stage. Yeah.
Speaker 2
And there's something quite freeing in that, isn't there? I remember actually as a kid, being super shy and kind of introvert, but it really enjoyed doing theater work. And there was something about the freedom of pretending to be someone else for a minute. And you can kind of be as silly as you like, because it's not you. And yeah, so I don't know, there's something in that, isn't there, about this idea or kind of being able to
Speaker 3
take on the persona of an ideal or a role model or an image
Speaker 2
of something that just allows you to kind of leave behind the insecurities. Maybe that's when people are attaching their own kind of self-worth to something that then becomes a block, that kind of paralyzes them from making the decision start or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1
I found this with a book quite a lot. Like, I realized that a lot of what caused my procrastination from writing was the fear of like, oh, this needs to be good. And it was like the bar was too high. So you had procrastination from writing? A lot. Yeah. Did you as well when
Speaker 2
you were? Oh, for sure. For sure. I've already talked to you about my tendency to kind of buy animal or look for animals to buy extreme
Speaker 3
ways to procrastinate. But how did you, so you used the Batman technique for writing? A little
Speaker 1
bit. Yeah. I sort of came across that a little bit later. I was like, damn, I wish I'd come across this sooner. The way I did it for the book is sort of just trying to lower the bar as much as possible to recognize that like, okay, I feel like I feel like every word I write needs to be this good. But actually, what if it doesn't? What if what if it just needs to exist? I just need to get it onto the page. The aim is not to write a good book. The aim is to write something and then we'll worry about the good later on. And when I was, I interviewed Kalan Newport, who's written a bunch of these books over the last couple of decades. And he said the thing he tells himself, he's written like five or six books at this point. The thing he tells himself for every book is this one just needs to be reasonable. The next one is going to be good. And he's been kind of sustaining that momentum by just this one just needs to be reasonable. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of value in, I think, in the modern world, we're told that like quality matters and like quality is really important. But
Speaker 4
actually,
Speaker 1
having a bar for quality when you're a beginner at the thing just holds you back. It's like, you know, if someone wants their very first YouTube video, very first TikTok or very first book to be a masterpiece, they're just never going to do it. Yeah. As you lower the bar, it's like the lower the bar is, the easier it's to get started. Yeah. And often when it comes to procrastination, getting started is the hardest part. You know, the lower the inner show, once you start moving, it becomes easier to continue going. And so really all of these strategies are around just getting over the hurdle, doing the thing five minutes. And usually at that point, we start to get into flow.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. And I guess if you were doing, I don't know, any kind of, you know, if you're learning piano or jiu-jitsu or whatever it is, you would never expect yourself to do the advanced stuff first, right? In that first session, it's just do something and it's starting something in motion. And actually, in my writing, I find that once I get over that morning, emotional roller coaster of just putting a few words on the page, the rest comes easier. It's like starting, isn't it? You kind of, if you can just get momentum, the momentum can carry you for a little while. Yeah. Whereas if you're kind of stuck, it's really hard to just push
Speaker 1
into movement. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the major realizations that I've had around procrastination. That is like momentum is so important. I've realized like for you, for filling YouTube videos, what I do now is I hit record and I just kind of start somewhere in, I start like two minutes in, that's not recording. It's like, oh, the first point is blah, blah, blah, blah, because I just, in the past, I would hit record and then I'd be overthinking the hook of the video because the hook is so important. It's like the first 30 seconds. It's like, you know, 60% of people might click off in the first 30 seconds. And now again, there's all this pressure on the first 30 seconds, which means like, oh, it's such a heavy lift to do the first 30 seconds of a video. So now I just start the video with point number one, which is 30 seconds into the video. And then at the end, once I finish the video, and I'm like, oh, just film for half an hour. Great. Now I'm in, I've got the momentum. Now it's way easier to say, hey, friends, welcome back to channel today. We're talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, and to do the hook. It's almost like when you're when you're writing something, the introduction is the hardest part. And so a lot of people save the introduction to the end because it's easier to start somewhere in the middle. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah.

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