What Makes You Procrastinate

What's happening? Come on in here. Usually when you're not thinking about things or you're thinking about too many things, we start procrastinating. So anyway, I answered back in about 30 seconds.

I think I freaked him out. He didn't expect to actually send a note on chat and have me answer back. I do sometimes. Not all the time. You can try it if you want to.

MotivationToMove.com. And if I'm here, I'll answer you. And if I'm not, you just know I'm not around, okay? It is a daily boost from MotivationToMove.com, the positive boost you do every single day.

It's me, Scott Smith. Good to have you. Thanks for coming in today. Labor Day holiday weekend coming up. People are checking out. I ended up with five days off because I had a couple of coaching calls and people just canceled.

It's like, all right, cool. I'll take the week off then. It's awesome. But I still have a podcast to do. I'm going to help you out today with that. By the way, this group I'm opening up next week, I have not told you a whole lot about it yet.

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It'll probably be right after the weekend. I'm thinking. So today, let's get into that question of procrastination. Now, procrastination is something that's kind of a staple in the work that I do.

When I first started out, it's kind of what I talked about 20 years ago, because that's what we all talked about, right? Because we didn't have the experience, we didn't have the science, didn't have things about us, things around us that we could go after and just say, well, there's how you fix the problem. Procrastination is human. It's always going to be around.

It's always there for you. It's a club that we all seem to be a part of, and we can't seem to get our membership card revoked. We just can't. Not ever going to go away because you're human.

So how do we deal with it? What's really going on here? Well, sometimes willpower is what people invoke in the procrastination thing. A lot of times they do that.

I just need some willpower and that'll get me through it. I'll force myself to do it. Well, willpower and my thing of willpower for a very, very long time is willpower is your friend that shows up to help you do things you don't want to do.

And anytime somebody helps you do things you don't want to do, how long is it before you just stop doing them? And as soon as you stop doing them, willpower goes away.

It doesn't bug somebody else. So the free will, when you have the choice to choose what you want to do, you decide to use your capacity to get it done is where the power is here. But still, we're human. It's hard.

Yeah, difficult. Now, why is that? Most people think about procrastination as a time problem. The way I've heard it over the years is, I don't have time, man.

My schedule's too busy. I just can't get it done. I need to make time for this, make time for that. I never saw it as a time problem. I never did. But I began to notice what people are saying.

I said, well, I guess they're kind of right. And the science does back that up. Most people see it that way. It's not. It's a feeling problem. It's how you feel.

And you're human. Most people listening to this show are human. We have a couple of aliens, I'm sure. But I think aliens have feelings too. It's a feeling problem.

You're an emotional being with feelings. And all you're doing in procrastination is you're kind of putting off a feeling that you don't want to have right now.

There's something that you're going to do and you don't feel like sit down and do it. You already have the feeling. I don't want to do it or it's going to make you feel a certain way when you do. It could be a tax issue.

It could be anything that you just don't want to deal with and you don't want the feeling now. That's what it is. You already knew that, right? It's pretty easy to figure that one out, right?

So what you do is you delay the decision to do the thing. Now, here's the thing. Every time that you delay a decision, you've already made a decision.

And people fight me with this all the time. It's like, I didn't do anything. I didn't take any action at all. Why did bad stuff happen to me? Well, not taking action is an action.

When you delay a decision, you've made the decision to delay it. I know. It's so weird. That Scott Lodge would come at you full force right there. You're trading a little bit of relief right now, but the bill is going to be bigger tomorrow when you get it.

And most people just keep making this trade, right? So one of the things that ends up happening here is when you think about this and how your brain works, it's a little trick your brain does, okay? So think of it like a reward, something good maybe. It's going to happen in like four or five weeks, okay?

Well, if you think four or five weeks out, it might feel like, oh, that's cool, but it's kind of small because it's not here yet. It gets bigger as you get closer like anything else is, right?

But a reward, three seconds, I was like, yes, give me the cake. I'm ready for it. But what if it's a bad thing? What if you have a bad association, a bad feeling with it?

Well, if it's three, four weeks out, it's like, that's not that bad. It's three or four weeks to go. But if it's three seconds out, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do? That same task feels easier when you schedule it four or five weeks out. You really do believe it's going to be different, but guess what? It's not going to be different.

It just happens. So in going through these, I've got like eight or nine notes here for you that I wrote down. In going through this, it's like, well, what do I do with this? Obviously, we know it's a feeling.

Obviously, it's not going to get any better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people don't avoid the work. Maybe you don't avoid the work. You just avoid the choice.

And sometimes you have to be really certain before you decide. That's scary, too. If you're a certainty person, you need to make sure you know everything before you do it. You're not going to make that decision.

In fact, it might be said that you're delaying the decision because you want to be certain. You're going to research forever. You're going to pick what you want.

And you're going to do what you want to do. It's really an easy trap to get caught in. And some people are really vague. If you have a vague task, like I got to work on my business today, that doesn't have any first step to it.

You're not going to do it. It's almost like you're not procrastinating. It's not even initiated. If you say, I got to work on my business at 9 a.m. today, much better chance of getting that to happen.

So it's pretty interesting how all this comes together. But like I said, willpower shows up sometimes. And willpower is going to force you to do something. But willpower just treats the symptom.

That's all that's going on. And you think you can push yourself into it. The fix is not that. The fix is making fewer decisions in the moment. And what do I mean by that?

You've heard me talk about my pre-planned response. And pre-planned, let me try to say that. A pre-planned response, it's about if somebody walks up to you and they ask you a question and you don't have the answer, you put your foot in your mouth, you feel like, oh my gosh, and you feel bad about it, right? So pre-planned response is just imagining who you might be talking to

what conversations you may have today and what the conversation may be and come up with an answer for it in advance. And if you don't know, just understand that you don't know and so you're not surprised. Same thing with what you need to be doing today.

You decide before the moment arrives. So in a procrastination world, when the feeling is there, you want to find a way to make that decision before that moment arrives.

What's the first move? How does it get done? When is it going to happen? A lot of people answer it the night before. I do that as well. And if you do that, the morning kind of takes care of itself.

Some people just do it as it goes throughout the day. After lunch, I'll do this. Because ultimately, remember, we talked about this being a feeling, but also we talked about this being a delay decision.

So when you make the choice to make that decision to go ahead and do something at a certain time, what happens? Well, nine times out of 10, it gets done.

But some of you all are really tough. Yeah, you know, right? Yeah, I just made the decision, decided to do it, then I didn't do it. Keep putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.

Now, how do we fix that? What's the trick to that? If you're one of those people who makes a decision, you're going to do it today at 9 o'clock and you don't do it, and you didn't get busy, you had plenty of time, you still didn't get it done.

Can I be honest with you? I have no idea. I have no idea. To me, it doesn't make sense. Okay, I do have an idea. I do have an idea. It's a feeling issue.

My guess is it's just got more pain attached to it than you want to have right now. And you don't want it right now, so you keep putting it off. And eventually, because you're glutton for punishment, you'll put it off for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then you got to do it. And what's the thing you say when you did it?

Well, that wasn't so bad after all, was it? Should have done that sooner. It's so true. Procrastination is just a feeling problem. Keep that in mind. Next time you want to put something off, just say, what am I putting off?

Can I just get it done and feel better? Get to motivationtomove.com. Get on the list somewhere. I promise you, if you're going to be a founder in the group I'm putting together, that you are going to be very glad that you paid attention to me.

Just get on the list someplace. I'll see you tomorrow.