Procrastination Is Caused by a Frightened Nervous System

We're aiming for 30 minutes as a baseline for your productivity every day, because for many of us, when we struggle with procrastination, our baseline for effort is zero. Many days will go by when I don't do anything. I have zero hours done. We're just raising that up to a new threshold, a new lower threshold, which is 30 minutes. At least every day now is going by and I'm doing something towards my goal in life. Hey there, it's David. I have a question on procrastination and I'm going to answer a question here from a subscriber to my online course on procrastination. As you may know by now, my procrastination approach is quite different to many of the other approaches that are out there. It's really not about pushing yourself hard all the time. It's this mentality of actually, no, let me just put in some healthy boundaries with this, set myself as a priority, work on my self-esteem, do some inner work on myself, and then the work will come. And there are practical things you can do in terms of scheduling your work and things like that, that I talk about in detail in the course. But this is a question from Jenny and Jenny is talking about she's recently taken the course. She's determined to change her perception of work away from this have to mindset that I talk about in the course, which is toxic to motivation. Have to, have to, have to, need to, must, must, must all the time. Changing the language is a part of the course that I talk about away from have to into choose to, want to. And it's already had an effect and she agrees with the approach that I'm using. However, she says, I struggle in seeing half an hour as a win. So by that, what I mean is in the course, in my approach to procrastination, I emphasize, well, what is our biggest hurdle? What's our biggest obstacle? And for many of us, it's the feeling of being overwhelmed. I'm so overwhelmed. I don't know where to begin. And our nervous system goes into this. We've all heard of the fight or flight response of the nervous system. We're procrastination. It's freeze. It just freezes. It gets so overwhelmed. Okay. Our nervous system is telling, sending the signal. This is too much. I don't know where to start with this. And then we freeze. So I tell people, look, only focus, never tell yourself you're going to do three hours of work or four hours of work, or these long sessions. Only ever tell your nervous system to commit to doing 30 minutes at a time. Now you may well end up doing more than 30 minutes, but you only consciously ever commit to doing 30 minutes, because that's a conversation with your nervous system. You're having when that's happening. You're trying to take the side of the nervous system. You're trying to say, look, I hear you. We're only doing this easy step, this next easy step. And then the whole point of this is that that will make it much easier for you to move off the couch into work or to actually start this thing. I also tell people, if at the end of 30 minutes, you're struggling with it or anything like that, you stop. Okay, you stop and you go and do something else. But Jenny says here that she's struggling to see the half hour of work that she has put in as a positive thing. She's currently studying for a test to get to university, and she's constantly thinking that a half an hour of work won't be enough. Even though, as I've pointed out, I wouldn't do anything if I am for longer hours. So do you have any tips on still feeling bad when I'm not studying after having completed the 30 minutes? Yeah. So I bet, Jenny, you are very motivated by this and by the goal. I know that you're motivated by this, and I know that you want to do well in this 100%. So it's not a question of one thing, because I know consciously that you do want to do well in this. The issue is always, what can I get my nervous system to agree to? Okay. Now, over time, if you just stick with this plan of small steps, small steps over a... It's very, very hard for us to perceive this, but consistent small efforts over a long enough frame of time leads to enormous benefits down the road. What we don't want to have is no effort, no effort, no effort, huge effort, no effort, inconsistently like these huge spikes in productivity and huge long periods of lows in our productivity. There's many reasons for that. Momentum, psychological momentum is one of them I've talked about in the past. But I get where your question is coming from here, because it is hard for us to perceive 30 minutes consistently as going to make a difference. But that's only because we can't perceive it in the short term. If you stick with this philosophy over months and even years, it is inevitable that you're going to come out well ahead on this. So we're aiming for 30 minutes as a baseline for your productivity every day. Because for many of us, when we struggle with procrastination, our baseline for effort is zero. Many days will go by when I don't do anything. I have zero hours done. We're just raising that up to a new threshold, a new lower threshold, which is 30 minutes. At least every day now is going by and I'm doing something towards my goal. And then you can have days when you have, like I say, you mix consistency with rare moments of greatness. So there's 30 minutes, I'm doing things every day, something towards it. And then when I feel that positivity, I feel that motivation, I feel like my nervous system is on my side, I would put in much higher effort on occasion. Now, this is rolling 30 minute blocks, I usually say to people. You only ever commit to 30 minutes at a time. So you say to yourself, look, I'll do 30 minutes. You do the 30 minutes, maybe you feel like continuing, maybe you do an hour, maybe you do 45 minutes. Beautiful. Take a break. Next step, continue to only commit to 30 minutes at a time. And at the end of the day, you might look back and you've got two and a half hours, three hours done. Okay. When I was doing this, I was, again, I've said this in so many videos here, but I was a chronic procrastinator. Weeks would go by when I wouldn't do anything. And it was all this guilt story, this not good enough narrative. But when I started to do this, I started to become, finally started to get consistency and there was no longer these long, long breaks in this. And I had these moments then when I would actually do at times when I started to get over this procrastination stuff. Some days, and I'm not advocating this, but some days I was doing nine hours of solid work and it was pretty regular. Nine hours of solid focused work. Now, again, I'm not suggesting that that should be the norm at all. 30 minutes should be the baseline. And that's all you're aiming for. Everything beyond 30 minutes is a baseline or is a bonus. What I am saying here is you have no idea how capable you are and how capable of massive productivity you are until you really resolve this issue of procrastination. You're doing the work, you're putting in the effort, you're well on track and see this as a long term growth process for you. Okay. This is not something you have to get perfect at straight away. Your growth trajectory here is like this. Okay. You're going up and up and you're improving all the time with this. You're going to improve the relationship you have with yourself. You're going to develop self trust. And once you get more of that self trust and we stop that self sabotage cycle or mechanism that is inherent to procrastination, your trajectory is only going to go one way and it's up. So can you reach out again? Let me know if that was helpful. I hope it was. And for anyone else that's interested in this, you can go to my website. The link is below. You can either buy my book on procrastination or you can sign up for my online video course, which you can also get the book as a bonus in that. And I'll show you exactly how to overcome this issue. And so far, it's helping a lot of people. So I'm really, really pleased about that. I'll leave it there for now. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye.