How to Have No More Bad Days with Procrastination

So when we're talking about procrastination, I'm going to show you how to no longer have terrible days with it. We're not going to have the goal here of having super productive days overnight. There's actually a sort of a transitional phase we go through. It's kind of the point of my new book, which is no more bad days. We're going to start having better days for a while. And that will ultimately lead us to having these much better days down here where we're actually becoming much more productive and consistent in our goals. But let's try and identify or define what a really bad day looks like when we have procrastination. Now, what the better day will look like might be a little bit surprising. But again, it's a transitional phase that we're going to go through here. So it might be a little bit surprising as to what I think a better day looks like because it doesn't initially look particularly productive. But remember, we're not going to jump from inactive and inconsistent to completely consistent and super productive overnight. There's a sort of a process or transition we go through. So the first thing is about these bad days that we're having. What does that look like? Well, typically, it's going to start off with making a commitment. So let's say you're starting off here. This is your day. You're going to start off and you're making this commitment to, I'm going to start at this point. We show up at this point here. Actually, we don't show up at that point. And what happens is in the book I identify, we make immediately after not showing up for that point, that commitment to ourselves. We change it to, well, actually, no, not at that point, but I'm going to start here. We don't show up there. Well, actually, hold on, I'm going to do it here. So we're getting these sort of series of commitments that we're not honoring. And what we're doing is we're trying to scramble to salvage it. OK, I didn't do it yet, but we're recommitting and re-promising. OK, so these are a series of promises without commitments. And this can go on in a really bad day. I've been there myself. Well, not here. I'll do it here. And we come up with these sort of reasons why. And we can have a series. This is a really bad day. It looks like we're trying a hell of a lot. OK, and that's what self-help and muscle culture encourages us to do, which is to try more. And it would identify, it would say, the reason you're doing this is that you're not trying hard enough. You're not meaning it hard enough. That's what it identifies. That's the culprit. That's the problem, according to this hustle culture, right? So lots of trying, lots of efforting, lots of promising, but not much happening. And this dynamic has a really bad impact on your self-esteem and your self-trust. OK, do this enough. How many have we got here? We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven commitments. And what we're actually doing here with this is we're training ourselves or conditioning ourselves into not trusting ourselves. We've literally reinforced it seven times. OK, so again, my approach in my new book, my approach in general is about forget the trying stuff. It's not about trying more or meaning it more or committing better or having a better plan. It's about the pattern of no longer doing this, reinforcing and literally training ourselves to not trust ourselves. OK, so that's what a really bad day looks like. I've been there way more than seven commitments. I would have made and honored none of them at the worst of it. So in the transitional phase, and this is the idea in the book after you don't show up, basically and again, don't expect it to look impressive. But this is a much better day by my definition. So let's look at this. Here we are at the start of this day and we're going to make a commitment. It's important that we do make commitments to do the thing that we want to do. Now, typically we would make a commitment here and this is the really weird thing about it. What I'm advocating for is that it's actually not that important that you show up to do the task that you commit to. And in this transitional phase, very often you will not. And it's about taking all the fear and shame out of that and making it actually something that's OK for you to do. So it's OK on a better day for you to say, well, I didn't show up there. Again, the book is called After You Don't Show Up. So what we're actually interested in now is, well, now what's going to happen here? You see, we've noticed what happened here on a really bad day. It's a recondition. It's the reinforcing of the promising and it's undermining your trust in yourself. So what we're going to do is we're going to actually at that point on, we're going to go into making zero new commitments for the remainder of that day. Now, that space opens up and really what you're going to be doing in that space is, well, anything else effectively other than the task you committed to here at the start. But what you're going to be doing there is reflecting. F-L-E-C-T-I-N-G, reflecting. OK, that's what we're going to be doing for this the remainder of that day. Now, reflecting doesn't mean analyzing the crap out of it, right? But it just means we become curious as to what actually happened at this point, right? Up here, we're actually not curious about what happened here because we typically think we know why we didn't show up at that point. Lazy, not good enough, not organized enough, not mature enough, not trustworthy enough, etc., etc. All a barrage of self judgments is what it is. That's what we think is causing all of this. But actually, when you stop, you're allowed to not show up. But if you don't fill it with more of these commitments down here, you've got the space now to reflect. And what you will realize is there was actually a very good reason why you didn't show up at that point. And notice also, you are no longer reinforcing this pattern. So this is now a much better day because you've only got one instance where you fail to show up for something. Now again, day one and day two, neither of them are productive. But this is a much better experience to have than this, OK? Because it's making the space for reflection. And it's going to inform you, right? You see, the immediate thing is when you're reflecting, you'll look at, OK, why didn't I show up there and do the thing? Well, there's something wrong with me. I'm a bad person. But if you give yourself enough space, you'll realize, well, that explanation doesn't really mean anything, and it's not helping me. And you'll realize something deeper. You'll get some sort of a deeper insight will emerge here where you're actually beginning to, OK, that's why. And now I'm beginning to realize why I didn't show up at this point when I said I would and wanted to. Typically, it's going to be about overwhelm. Probably what you did here when you tried to attempt the task was it has to be done. I have to do a lot of it. It has to be done perfectly. It means something about me personally as a person. My self-worth is wrapped up in it. All these things reveal themselves now when you give yourself space to reflect. And that informs your strategy, OK? And when you're no longer reinforcing that thing of recommitting and repromising, you're no longer undermining your self-trust. Self-trust reemerges. And when you know, look, if I don't show up there, there's no recommitting. Your future start times, your future commitments start to carry a lot more weight because you know it's either I do it at the time or I will step away from it. It becomes a lot more certain. So what a good or a great day looks like is you start your day and you start to realize, OK, there's my commitment. That carries a lot of weight now, OK? Because if I don't do it, I won't be trying to salvage the situation. I won't be down here in this space wondering what's going to happen with my day. When will I do it? You're just stepping away from it, OK? Now, because it carries more weight, you've gone through that transitional period where you're no longer undermining yourself. You will show up to that. And what you will do then is you just make another commitment to yourself and you will also be showing up for that. And you do it. This is what I call a series of rolling start times where you start to notice there's no big plan involved, but you're showing up for these different commitments throughout your day. And at a certain point, maybe you don't honor one of them. And then as soon as you don't honor one, you step away, right? There's no more recommitting at that point. But you're noticing that you're becoming consistent now. You're starting to show up for these things without a big plan, but you're realizing that the whole thing hinges on what is it I'm doing after I don't show up for a commitment. I stop and reflect. This consistency down here only becomes possible through the process of reflecting deeply and honestly on why I didn't show up for something that I said I wanted to do. OK, that's what makes this possible. This is not achieved. Having great days, productive days, is not achieved through you pushing yourself and wishing and wanting yourself to be productive. It's something that you learn through the process of deep, honest reflection on failures to show up for yourself. Again, not judging yourself. Judging yourself is part of the problem with this. But you start to become much more, when you're doing more of this reflective work that creates this, the possibility for great days to happen, you start to become much more well-informed, much more discerning, much more careful when you're setting start times for yourself, much more realistic in terms of what is acceptable for me to commit to right now and what isn't, what's too much. And you start to learn a lot more about your own resistance to taking action, whatever the task is. OK, so it's about learning and understanding your resistance instead of wishing it wasn't there, pretending it wasn't there and forcing yourself through recommitting more and more. So, isn't it weird, with all the personal productivity stuff, that encourages us to try harder? Trying harder can actually be a problem. Now, some trying is legitimate, like we do need to get into the practice of committing, right? We want to start committing, but it's what we do after we fail to show up that turns the whole thing around. This becomes second nature after a while, right? It's not because you're more productive or impressive or disciplined or you've got better willpower. You've just learned about your resistance, how it works, what helps it, what doesn't help it, etc. And this can become a way where you can actually have a lot more great days. But don't try and go from bad days to great days. That's what hostile culture and self-help is kind of all about. This is what my book is about. It's about teaching you about this, how to have better days where you are no longer undermining yourself and you're developing that self-trust in yourself. So that's how we go from having a lot of bad days to having better days to ultimately having great days consistently in our productivity. I hope that's useful. And if you want to learn more, the link for my new book on this is below. And you can also find my information to reach me for one-on-one work. Thanks so much for being with me. Hope you enjoyed this video and I'll talk to you very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.