ERP041 - The Science of Procrastination

Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. Today on the podcast, I'm talking to Pierce Steel, professor at the University of Calgary and author of the Procrastination Equation. Pierce has spent years researching the reasons and impacts of procrastination. Today, we chat about the reasons why you fail to follow through despite best intentions. It's a surprisingly complex topic. This is a fascinating mixed conversation on self-help, psychology, biology, and productivity. I'm sure you'll find the conversation as fascinating as I did. Enjoy. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast from. Also, be sure to check out the web page evolvedmt.com/podcast for show notes, links to my guests and to check out previous episodes. Now, let's get started. And welcome Pierce. Before we started recording, we were talking about different productivity methodologies and uh GTD and seven habits of highly effective people by Covey and uh you have some thoughts on that if you want to start there. Um, it's based on his dissertation that was in Brigham Young. And it was actually what he was trying to do is look for crossovers between religious advice and more established kind of self-regulatory advice. But this was way back in like 1970s, right? But and actually if you I you can download the dissertation. It's available online. And he cites actually surprisingly a lot of these same people who are my advisors, the people who trained me from University of Minnesota. So, it was kind of really interesting, but it also kind of reflects the time. I mean, this is, you know, psychology, our understanding of motivation, self-regulation has moved forward so much in the last 40 years. That, you know, I won't say it's bad advice, it's just preliminary advice. So, when we're talking about the seven habits and one of them ones was, you know, do first things first, right? Um, that's not really a cure for people who procrastinate. It's like, gee, thank you. I people know they have trouble getting this done. They know they should be doing it first, they don't. And it's equivalent basically to saying somebody who's depressed, be happy. Right. Right? And, you know, well, gee, you're on a roll now. Start curing the rest of the world. You know what, you know what the problem with famine? Not enough food. Here we go. Now we're solving the world's problems. Boom. I am I people should just listen to me. I got all so, yeah, that's having a little fun with it. I think it's a it it is a it's an interesting and the seven, he was really the first one. I mean, they're all over the place now, you know, top 10 lists and top, you know, you know, top five reasons. But the Stephen Covey was really the first one to kind of um what what's called intellectual arbitrage, which is just a fancy way of saying taking something from science and making it popular, you know, something more digestible. And you um Malcolm Gladwell is famous for that. Right. Of course he's almost famous for getting it kind of half right. Which he absolves himself of by saying, well, they're just conversation starters. Right. Even if people believe everything I say. Uh, you know, so he just pushes, you know, I'll take the money but not the responsibility. So the the example of the 10,000 hours and even the author of the study that that comes from says, that's not exactly what it's means, right? That's right. And you have a friend of mine uh uh Fred Oswald who was on a paper where she actually looked about how much does this really change? You know, and it it you know, how much does it really create expertise? And it said, well, you need it, but there's no guarantee. There's lots of musicians out there, for example, who've put in their 10,000 hours and, you know, there's very few of them that become superstars. Right. Right? So, you know, it it's it's there's no guarantees. But that's what we like. We like to have these recipes, these of success. You do A B and C and you'll get the results you want. Um, certainly, I think they increase the chances that you get them. And and that but they're portrayed as guarantees. Um, and, you know, that's why I think um, a little stoicism doesn't hurt in life that you really can't guarantee a lot of these outcomes. So you've got to prepare yourself for being okay with things not happening exactly as you choose. And you had said uh just a second ago that um um Covey sort of uh the it being early stages for for those sharing those ideas. Do you think it is a change of the times that there was maybe a little less self-reflection in the 40s and 50s? Like you you had to be more hardened and that that period was just opening up on the idea of you should reflect on yourself more and and and carrying those ideas forward. Is that part of it, you think? Yeah, I um I mean there's been a long line of of self. I mean even uh Benjamin Franklin wrote a book about self-help. And then you, you know, go all back to, you know, Napoleon Hill and so this idea it it's it's I think it's really kind of the idea of self-improvement and self-actualization instead of just being who you are and like it's kind of a it's kind of a changing culture where beforehand you might have been you had your station in life. Right. And it was now we can we can be anything. You can go from from people have you know these these success stories. Um, they're great. I and I I but they're oversold too. Um, so if things don't go your way, that's always going to be your fault. Right. And that's not exactly true either, right? So, um, people but people don't like that nuance. They like things to be very simple and forward and they like this idea of bad things happen to bad people, not bad things happen to good and bad people. In fact, the some of the reasons that failure happens often for the same reasons to bad people as they happens to good people. You can't be um, there's no cartoon characters out there who succeed without being aware of like the real exigencies of politics, the problems of life. Um, and dealing with it in a rational manner. Now, part of it, part of this package of success though is going to be your motivation. So, um, it and it's helpful. It's helpful to kind of get your get your stuff together and to do all these particular elements that that will help you get stuff done. And it can make a difference. I mean, I often like it to, you know, you're playing, um, you know, you're playing poker and I'll say, I'll let you take one card out of your hand and replace it with any card you want. And you think, wow, it's amazing, right? That still doesn't guarantee you're going to win. Right. Right? But I'd certainly I'd rather have that um than, you know, just being able basically just have the five I'm dealt with. So, and if you think about, you know, there's multiple factors that determine whether you're going well. One of them is your own motivation. Um, that's a useful thing to have. Of course, you know, you there's times when um, you know, you're you're trying to start a business and and the economy goes really down, right? Or you start off something and all of a sudden it becomes automated or, you know, you become sick or you love this is life. Life is happening to us. But I don't still even having said that, that's a lot of caveats there. and having said that, you should still want to take that one card out of your hand and replace it with something better. And that's what a lot of these things are doing. So, um, the the idea, I mean, we're building on on each other's work. Um, seven habits, it's a great piece for its time. Um, right now, it's the you know, it's the Franklin Covey just markets the hell out of it. So it's and, you know, marketing counts. But if you actually kind of look, there's, you know, there's a lot better advice than what's contained in that. Um, you can even talk about, you know, get things done, which I think has a lot of good elements. I think it's incomplete, but I think there's a reason why people follow it and there's a lot of good elements. I we can deconstruct that too and talk about, you know, what works and what doesn't. But, um, for the most part, people are kind of they're they're uninformed of their own operating manual. Right. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. So they don't really know when, you know, they want to, I mean, people want to get stuff done. They want to get the motivation they have before deadlines earlier. They just don't know how to evoke it. And some of these things get closer to the conditions which will give you motivation. And help you have an easier life. I mean, there's so many times you might think if only you started an hour earlier or a day earlier, what a difference that can make and it's true. Yeah. It's, you know, and so sometimes small changes will have a a significant difference in your quality of life. Um, and that's that modest that modest outcome is what I'm selling. as a psychologist and a professor and um, somebody who's tenured and doesn't really have to worry about um, having to promote everything all the time in this um, hypermediaized world. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, and I think that that's important because um what what I liked about uh there's sort of several things I I liked about what I was reading from uh the material that you were producing and the comments that that I saw you making about about the topic of procrastination is uh so much of it is is kind of a crossover on uh the the the some of those self-help things and uh the deeper psychology of why are you procrastinating? And I think people tend to look for tactics to overcome what they think are uh sort of failures in system, um but it's in a lot of ways it's much more about the motivations. Um, you know, there's there's uh some touches on uh depression and uh external or external locus, those types of ideas that are a lot more relevant to that. And and I I like the idea that uh procrastination is an indication of something probably much deeper. It requires a little bit more exploration and why um uh individual uh habits or tactics will have better results for people versus others because the the the reasons are probably much more individual, right? Yeah, it's not one size fits all. Yeah. I mean, it it looks the same in the fact that you didn't start it when you meant to. And actually that's that's what we kind of define procrastination is putting off despite expecting to be worse off. So this is from your own standards. So somebody else might say you should do that now. You said, no, I I'm totally comfortable with doing that later and you might be 100% right. So it's by your own standards, but at some point you might say to yourself, I want to get this done, I should get this done, I'd be better off if I got this done and started it now and yet you don't. And for no particular reason then you didn't find the will within inside you. And that's procrastination. Of course, that's why bad things happen because it's by your own standards. I mean, that's why people who procrastinate tend to be less healthy, less wealthy, less happy. Because you can think about the most important thing in your life that if you did not address this, it would be disastrous. And there are people who are in the same situation and not addressing it. Right. And that was the quote that that I read that that really tweaked my interest was you you described procrastination as a form of self-harm. Yeah. You go a little little deeper on that because I thought that that was a sort of an evocative and quite profound thing to to to to put on on procrastination. Well, it it's it's considered a subset of irrational behaviors. Which actually, which's interesting enough, economists don't even believe exist. They don't believe people can ever be irrational. So, but it's where you knowingly do something that's against your own self-interest. And in order for that to happen, there actually has to be um more than one actually you inside your head. And some people call this a dualistic or the uh theory of the mind and some people the limbic system versus the prefrontal cortex. And there's actually like analogies of this going all the way back to Plato. He talks about the mind being like two horses. But, you know, when we actually put people in FMRI machines and see it, we actually see that there's two different seats of decision-making. And one is this earlier limbic system which really is kind of close to your your, you know, amygdala, which is the source of your strong emotions. And it it it wants things with a capital W. It it feels things strongly. That's where your cravings come from. And then you have this great kind of neo cortex, literally meaning new bark, it built on top of the limbic system. And some people call this a cluge, which is kind of a sloppy design. And it's great for thinking about the future. You know, abstract thoughts. What are you going to do next week? And next week isn't here. Well, next week I'm going to get up early, I'm going to call my mother and I'm going to go exercise and do all these virtuous things. But next week comes around and now I'm really in a real bed at this point and I'm feeling really comfortable and I can really turn off or put the snooze button and I can change my mind. And that's a limbic system trumping basically your your plans from the prefrontal cortex. And there's certain things which makes this trumping a little bit easier to happen and some things that make it harder. And it seems to do with your environment and your energy levels and where you are and what you've got to do. And you can arrange things so it's more likely you're going to follow through. Sometimes way more likely. And if you don't, it's just basically it's almost, you know, psychophysics. If if when you drop a rock off a building, it's going to fall. There's no wrong or right about it. If you don't arrange your life so your motivations are in line with what you want to do, certain outcomes will happen and it just does. It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't even make you lazy necessarily. Lazy people never intended to do it in the first place. Um, it just makes you struggling with the vagaries of life. And actually, a lot of cases, it it's the most normal thing to do is to put it off. It it it it makes you, I would say, human. Right. You've you've you're counting your humanity that you're a member of the human species. That's about it. Yeah, and that's uh that's an interesting point that uh sort of the idea that uh so much of this is is us placing expectations on ourselves and that's where sort of the anxiety and uh sort of the self-loathing comes from is is not necessarily the decision but the management of our own expectations. That's that's really, you know, um is that sort of self-flagelation uh involved in that? That like you said, the lazy person never intended to do that. You're one step above and at least wanting to improve yourself and not procrastinate or do things better. But you just struggle with the action of that, right? Yeah, Tim Pitchel, who who also does uh a lot of procrastination research. He always kind of really emphasizes that we should start with self-forgiveness. A lot of people when they procrastinate, they, you know, actually there would be a certain amount of people, unfortunately, who when they heard this was about procrastination, wouldn't be able to even listen to it. They're they're they're guilt would be so great and reminded them. Even though I forgive you, you should forgive yourself. If you got it this far, right? Good good for you. Um, but it's it is something that you have to have to forgive yourself with. Because when people find such have such an emotional reaction to it, like it's a it's an indicator of their identity and and they want things and they they feel shame for giving in. Um, it stops them from actually taking positive, productive subsequent steps to deal with it. Like, for example, um, when people try and quit smoking, they said it takes about seven times, right? So, the first few failures, that's normal, right? And you learn from them and you get a little closer until eventually you get, you know, after finding all the tricks and habits that have been leading you down, you you learn from it and you get to where you need to be. Um, but you need a plan, you need some strategies that will work for you. And actually, I mean, depending upon who you are, this is what I I catalogued in my book, the procrastination equation, there was about 23 of them. Um, there's other ones, but they were actually even more than that. But there was they weren't scientifically vetted and I made that as my rule. They had to be tested, proven, they had to work. And then it's simply a question of matching the right technique to the right person and which is a bit of a challenge at times. And then seeing them implemented correctly, which is also a challenge. But if you can get the right technique to the right person and have them implemented correctly, it works. But those those are two big steps. And the the uh the tactics that you that you lay out there, the the book helps people sort of self- assess on potentially areas that that uh they're going to struggle with and does that Oh yeah, I put in I put in a diagnostic. Right. And does that does the diagnostic match with particular tactics that will support those those failings or Yes, they do. Well, it gets you kind of it gets you down into classes or categories of tactics. Um, I would say the ones that typically work almost always for everybody, um, is ones that dealing with people's impulsiveness or sensitivity to time. We tend to all to have too much of that. So, um, and we can it's it's it's just a trait of humanity. That we have difficulty getting motivation for um projects that happen way into the future and the consequences that happen in the future. That's why surprise, we feel most of our motivation just before the deadline when the consequences are short. That's not always convenient. Yeah. But we, you know, people try and do make do. And sometimes, I mean, you think about the amount of power, productive power we have in the 11th hour. It's just it's amazing what we could do. You know, we're some people I'm almost I've described as superhuman. Um, but uh that it doesn't always work. You can't always recover the error of not starting in time. Sometimes you have multiple projects, sometimes it's bigger than you think it's going to be. Sometimes other responsibilities happen and not to mention the stress and worry of all that and the sleepless nights. And so when you ask people, sometimes you have this funny thing people say, no, no, no, I've got it figured out, you know, I I I work best just before the deadline. Yeah. And they say it like it's a choice. It's like, I choose to work before the deadline because that's where I have the most energy. And I said, oh great. So you would have you could work earlier with the same energy if you wanted to. And you know, well, no, I know I can't. So it's not really a choice. And then I say, if we could give you some of that same energy earlier, would you want it? And said, of course, right? So, basically, here's the problem. Some people when start too early, it's like drinking from an eye dropper. And when it's just before the deadline, it's drinking from a fire hose. And really, how do you want your you want your motivation like the same way you want your drinks, like in glass form, enough, right? Sip at a time. Sip at a time. That's good. I I have enough to do this. And we we we don't usually have it at that particular point. And there's a lot of variety of reasons. Some of it's who we are, a lot of it's where we are. Um, we've reached actually epidemic. I mean, we 500% increase, 600% increase in chronic procrastination over the last 30 years since about the 40 years since the 1970s. And um, reason has a lot to do with the environment which we work in. And the better temptations, the more easily available, the more likely we're going to procrastinate. And it it's Yeah. You know, if you have it's very difficult to do work in the middle of a party. Right. Right? I'm going to bring my That's right. And now with social media, there's a constant party And there's a constant party perceptively around us, right? And it's it's it's amazing how bad it is. And essence that yeah, sure, there was always a lot of content. And actually we we track this through history. I mean, it was kind of unique when they talked about the allure of the silver screen causing people to procrastinate as they left their offices to sneak in to a, you know, but they had to leave their office. They had to go to a town and pay money for it. Right. And it was only what's it was available what was showing. So nowadays, almost instantly, um we have every video and clip and it's not that they're available. They've also all been algorithmically selected for you. Right. to be the most temptation, most tempting, which is that's I mean, nowhere, no time we're we're not built for this level of temptation. We simply aren't that where um we have this level of these AI driven algorithms. AI which I understood that they um it self- taught itself these algorithms like uh Google's Alpha Go, how to beat um not only the go player, but every the previous um um most expertly constructed um chess human chess algorithm, right? that we actually built with all of our, you know, Terraflops trying to solve it. It beat it by teaching itself chess in 14 hours. Yeah. From nothing. And you you think you're going to be able to kind of outsmart this? No, if you have expose if you're exposed to um any type of social media, it'll be there something you really, really want to see and it's going to lure you away from work. Yeah. Because they they're that good. Yeah, because I I I was going to ask you about that whether or not um sort of the the the panic and the concern around the impact of social media and and the devices and things like that. Whether or not that was legitimate. And I guess you're saying it is, but I kind of wondered if it was the same idea of like the, you know, people being less personal. And then they contrast everyone staring at their smartphone with the old old-timey pictures of everyone on the train staring at their newspaper. Like is it just sort of the in and you mentioned like having to go to the silver screen and you know, the the the movie theater being, you know, the death of uh public interaction and things like that. Uh is, you know, but people used to be concerned about books saying that people wouldn't interact with each other and stuff like that. Oh yeah, I know I know. I think it's about the family just sitting down and watching a television show, right? Not interacting. And I said, wow, that would be pretty incredible if I could everyone in one place watching the same show. That would be like success from We used to think that was the death. I mean, our standards have changed a little bit. But it's the uh in Silicon Valley, um, where they produce this, um, they see it as something that we as the common people should consume, not them. Right. They they consider it on the scale from candy to crack, they describe this closer to crack. They want to make it as addictive as possible. And they're really successful at that. And they go by the the rule of not letting their own children consume the devices they themselves create. Like uh Steve Jobs never let his children have uh any of the iPads or iPhones. And they go by the rule that the last one in their class which gets a phone wins. So, are we the chumps, right? We just Um the thing here's the problem with it. It's that some of it is great. I mean, there's some social media consumption is is fantastic. I mean, I wouldn't want to live a life without chocolate, right? It's or um, you know, having a glass of wine. But, you know, having a, you know, two bottles of wine, that's a bad idea. Every day. Yeah. Every day. Or you know, an extra large to. And yet, occasionally we find ourselves slipping into this. And with social media, it's the problem not of it existing, the problem is designed for us to overconsume it. It's like we're as I say, we're we're a little bit of an inescapable cage of temptation. We're living in a candy store that we cannot get out and we're kind of people are saying, well, it's your fault for eating too much candy. Right? Even though you live in a candy store. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's got a lot to do with the environment. So, I mean, we're slowly getting tools out to um constrain or basically kind of make it a little bit harder to get. And there's a lot of simple things you can do. Um, remember, we are very susceptible to how close rewards are. So they found out even if they could put like a 10-second delay on people's access to social media, they they used it about a half as much. Right. Right? It was the instantaneousness of it, not necessarily the size of the reward. Or some people did that old one where they gray scale their phone, so it's not just as a visually as appealing and that kind of they just didn't feel like doing it anymore. Right. So, you think about our enjoyment we get from these. And when we're when we're doing them, we're doing something that gives you just a little trickle of dopamine, just a little tap of it. But it's quick. We love quick. We love the the the speed of which a reward comes has an exponential effect on how tempting it is. So if you can get to something in a few seconds, really tempting, but if you only have to delay it to like 15 seconds or so for it to drop off really, really steeply. Um, that's the exact opposite world we live in, right? The want to have it instantly available and which makes it very difficult for us to take rational use of it. So we find ourselves doing these games on our on our phones and sets that aren't we we can acknowledge that really perhaps they're not as fun as we kind of want them to be. But they're better than the work that we have to do. Yeah. And so, and you actually get this even problem with emails, right? People spending all their time on emails, you know, that quick, quick. Yep. Someone wants me. Someone wants me, right? Someone wants me. That's right. Or it's also people liking it to like pulling of a slot machine. What could it be? Yeah. What could it be? What can I go? Oh, it's nothing. Yeah. Info roulette again. the next one. Exactly. Yeah, that's that's a good one. Um it's one of the the sort of again like the tactics and and giving some people to some tools to deal with this. The first thing that I tell people around productivity is turn off the email toaster, right? When when the the Outlook push uh attracts your attention. Like interrupts you with whatever you're doing with this little tease of like, you have an email. Here's the first subject line. Would you like to come read this? Like it's so distracting and it's really unnecessary. And and I like I like you bring that up. A lot of, I mean, for historically, I mean, you can think about all these different lines of books, but as they evolve, we convert, right? There's a truth to who we are. There's a truth to the situation we're in. And consequently, a lot of our attempts are sincere. They might come start from different starting places, but the more we learn about them, the more we start saying, hey, we really can't handle obvious temptations constantly interrupting our straight sense of concentration. In fact, I heard like it takes about 15 minutes from after using an email to get back to your fully concentrated state. And within that 15 minutes, you're probably get another email. So you never get to that place. The task switching tax is what I've heard it referred to. Yeah. Switching task is tasking. Yeah, that's right. You go there. a little little rhyming for you. Yeah. The uh, but it's, yeah. So we try and create conditions which create flow states. Um, there's other ones. Everyone knows about smart goals, even though it's from a 1982 Greg Doran newsletter. Um, and he got again, like a good early attempt. He got about, you know, I'd say a good 60% right. It was kind of it it's a little bit. He was actually talking about how to organize teams, not individuals. And it was just his own experience. Um, we we could refine that a little bit more. But what we simply have done, and us as a profession is almost uh reverse engineer naturally occurring deadline. Right. So when you find you where do you find you have most of motivation just before deadline? Okay, let's see if we can go with a naturally occurring one. Let's see if we can get an artificial one. Artificial diamonds, for example, are detected because they're better than naturally occurring ones. They have more perfect carbon lattice. Huh. That's how they that's how they determine. This thing is so perfect, couldn't exist in nature. And you can have artificial deadlines of the same nature. And so, I mean, the one that there's a lot of different elements of them. I I kind of try to get a nice acronym like smart, but I think smart is really good. Yeah. That's right. So I I got I tried different ones like the chow, uh, and the CSI approach. I'll go with the CSI. Um, they should be somewhat challenging. So you don't want to leave motivation on the table, you know, you don't want to make them so easy that you could see feel you could do more. Right. Um, they have to be specific. The people really fall down on specific. I mean, they don't know, I really understand how specific they have to be. That's actually activating the limbic system. Limbic system is basically your dog brain. And it responds to what you can smell, touch, taste, hear. Um, and if you have something that is almost like a trigger, like, and I usually use this example of, you know, 8:30 Saturday morning after breakfast, I will pick up my bag that's already packed by the door so I can leave to make it to the 9:00 gym class where I'll see my friend, right? There's a lot of things going on there. Yeah. But a lot of it is specific. If I'm saying an exercise this weekend, that isn't going to happen. Exactly. Yeah. Right. And um, you have to be somewhat immediate. Sometimes some goals have a lot of inertia to it. So you almost want to take your goal and sharpen the point of it down to a pin. like a 10-minute goal to pop it. And some people say, I I can't, you know, this goal is too big. I I can't feel like I commit to it. So, no, no, don't commit. Commit to doing 10 minutes of it. Yeah. Then see how you feel. And usually, of course, after you've popped it, you know, you've pushed through that surface tension. That's a really good one. I think I I want to pause on that one for a second because uh I've found this to be tremendously helpful in my own life as well. But just the activity and the momentum of that is often enough to overcome sort of the the resistance around doing something. And I think it's important to have the idea of not necessarily completing something by a particular time, but at the very least starting it, right? And this comes up in writing all the time. Writers are always saying, you know, you got to have the first shitty draft. And that's that's the only goal is just to start putting stuff to paper. And the the momentum of doing that, you'll actually sort of get eventually towards the goal if you do it enough. But it's the activity more than it is the completion, I think is important. Oh yeah, and I I um, I do a lot of writing. Even I have though, even within that writing, I'd say I have procrastination is an issue that I still have to manage. So it's not like I'm giving up my humanity. I still manage it. Um, but I can recognize I think, oh, I've been doing actually too much of this, I would say projects that I can get out of the way within like a couple weeks. And some of the bigger ones still get put aside and I said, okay, I have to bring out my tool chest again, right? I recognize this problem. I have to kind of figure out my when is my power hour, start kind of breaking it down and using it. And so, a lot of the times I if if it's it's kind of like physio. A lot of these things if you do it right, they just go into your subconscious, you get a routine. Um, and then you don't have to worry about them again. But other times you think, oh, no, this is something I have to actually kind of it's posing a challenge. I have to go in my tool chest and think about what to do. Yeah. Well, let's um let's maybe compare tool chests a little bit. some of the things that I've found effective and you've found effective. Um and that's a great one. So, uh one of them in particular, the reason we've we've sort of chatted about GTD before. And and I I like uh the getting things done methodology from David Allen because to me it acts a bit more like a framework. It's a structure that gives me a way to think about and to and more probably more importantly, not think about certain things. So just getting things out of my head and getting them into a system to organize them later is really important for me. And then the other piece that I really like is the Pomodoro technique. So just using a particular uh set of amount of time and then forced breaks, right? So you can kind of look forward to the little dopamine hits. You can go check social media after you've spent, you know, 15 to 25 minutes doing a particular task. Um those are those are two that uh and also the uh um chunking activities. So like setting goals or uh dealing with overwhelm in particular. I do this a lot in in exercise and managing staff is if they feel overwhelmed, let's just talk about all the stuff that you have to do, put it on an Eisenhower uh matrix and figure out what's urgent, what's important. and start to compartmentalize that that focus. And I think people tend to view their to-do list as the be all and end all. And they've got 40 things on there and they they feel like, well, I'll never accomplish all of these 40 things. And I tell people it doesn't matter how much you have to do. You can only do one thing at a time. So take one or two things and just start with those, structure the time, structure the approach and and start knocking a few things off the list. And then that momentum will feed itself and you'll be able to carry on. Yeah, they they start off, there's an infinite amount of work to do. Okay. Yeah. Always is, right? Yeah, there always is. There there they were there's more work to do than you have time. So, uh let's accept that as a starting place. Um, so really what you're doing is just prioritizing. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And um there's different levels of that. I mean, um procrastination, I would say some usually takes the form of we're doing something of lower priority. Right. When you should be doing something of higher. That's not necessarily a worst thing in the world. Um, there's some people who call it productive procrastination. I'm a victim, for sure. Yeah, yeah. So you have one thing you really don't want to do and it drives productivity throughout the rest of your list. Right. That's a great way to view it. Well, it's like great students like clean their desk the night before exam, right? Right. Well, that's not perhaps the best choice. But if you're doing something like candy crush instead of what you should be doing, that's a big cost. So really it's the cost between the different levels of priority. If I should be doing number one and I'm doing number two, maybe it's not that big a difference, right? And um, but still, okay, we want to do things higher on our list. Um, I like the get things done because there's actually a subset of procrastination, which is called decisional procrastination. And so right up from the back, when you asks, it get things done asks, is it actionable? So it says, okay, you know, you know, you've got to just don't leave this lingering on decide if you're going to do it or not. And um, then it kind of goes into um, what's it next one? Is it a single step, right? And if it is, and you can do it in two minutes, you just get it done, which we like. Because we like things that are can be done in the short term. And you also don't want to have this cloud hanging over you of all this, you know, what did Cove call it? the thick of thin thing, right? So you can get this stuff away. And if it's not, then you want to break it down to sub step. That's where goal setting can come in. If they actually going to develop a little bit more, you impact the planning and develop more talk about motivational goal setting. I think it would actually add to it. a little bit more in that particular place. Um, but you know, that's this is just a science we're continuing developing. So there's you think about all these systems evolving as we become more sophisticated and you can upgrade certain sections. I would say plan project, planning the project could be we could bring in elements about making it specific, challenging and but it could go in there. Um, then, you know, at the end, for example, we get into specific day and time, right? When um, you know, if if it's something that you're you have to do, when do you want to do it? So if we can get a that one could be even more specific. But yeah, it has a lot of good elements that we already shot about. It's so a lot of these things I say they're not in conflict with each other. They're just emphasizing different steps. And I like also that it gets into routine. Um, a routine is something that um we should strive to do. If you want to make your life hard, try creating everything you want to do and make it unpredictable when you do it. Right. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah, the routine, same place, same time, same bat channel, same bat time, right? Yeah. Um, it that is a way of you just not deciding to do it. It's like taking the off ramps um off the highway. So if you're going down your work productivity highway, once you get started, you continue driving along until there's certain off ramp. And some of the ones are, you know, if you get a a ringer from the email, that's going to create an off ramp. And if you have a long routine, it once you get started, you'll continue that routine and find yourself doing it for several hours without thought. In fact, a lot of professional writers, um, the way they do it is like from 9:00 to noon, right? They do it for three sometimes longer, but they they don't whatever happens, they always work during that particular time because that's the only way they can manage it. Um, Hemingway used to say about three hours or 300 words, which isn't very much, but I guess he really crafted them. Yeah. And if he got his words in quickly and he liked them, then he went fishing. Yeah. But if he couldn't, if it wasn't coming for him, he never gave himself an out. He said, you know, I have to be there for three hours. So Yeah, and I think that hits on something that we I I sort of uh mentioned earlier is is how much of this is all just self-discipline, right? Like that seems to be the underlying factor of this. And it's something that I believe in pretty heavily. Like uh the uh one of my favorite quotes in the that I've heard um probably in recent memory is from Jaco Wilnick, which is discipline equals freedom. Right? And I love the idea of that. Is that just structuring your life, you're free to do anything you want as long as you you you you maintain the discipline to to hold to the things that you feel are important, right? Then you're free to do whatever you want, right? And also in management, if you get things done, then people will not harass you. You're free from sort of what people perceive as micromanagement when really they're just trying to manage you producing outcomes. So if you're if you're accountable to those things, you have discipline around it, then you're free to do what you want, right? Yeah, that's right. In fact, I find that if I get my stuff done earlier in the day, and I get like I find I really only need to be really concentrative, productive work for about four or five hours. Yeah. And I'm already outstripping almost everybody else. And then sometimes I do more than that. Um, but during the rest of the day, I can pretty much, you know, take it down a notch or two. Yeah. And still have done far, far more than most people because I'm tapping into some of that motivation we get just before deadlines. And, you know, we did one study, we found people working at approximately, believe it or not, 12 times their normal pace just before a deadline. Wow. I know. It was like they could have 12 of them almost working compared to their regular. That was the most extreme, but it it it it shows that perhaps if you just could do a few hours of that concentrated work, you would have so much more and that so much more spare time. And that's that's where the payoff is. It's being able to have dinner with your family. You know, going and getting that exercise routine, just, you know, be here now, right? With whatever you want to do. Um, but yeah, it's not new wisdom. I was actually kind of, I mean, um, I mean I was even going by to my book and I have quotes from, you know, Marcus Aurelius, um, to John Locke, which also kind of talk about this, the same type of thing. Not as quite as short as self-discipline equals freedom. But I think it's it's something we kind of recognize as a species that um, when you don't have self-discipline, what's driving you? And it's not you. Yeah. You you are are being ridden by vices and external rewards and by situation. And all your personal dreams and aspirations, they're not being pursued. So self-discipline, I think is being able you being able to live your authentic life. Yeah. And in order to build that discipline, I think a lot of it requires framework or habits, right? I'm a big fan of uh BJ Fogg uh his work on tiny habits and just looking for, you know, what are the habits you already have in your life? And how can you hijack them to create new habits, right? I know. Yeah. I think the the starter one I usually recommend people is get to bed. Yeah, sleep is so important. It's a foundational one. It's like I can't I we have a chronobiologist at our university. Um, ironically, he has in a he's got a basement office without a window. Not great for his chronometer. No, no, no. He just, you know, he said, I think he he was aware of the irony, but he can't get it. But it's the uh, I there was some of research and I saying about, oh, if you give teenagers apparently an extra hour to sleep in the morning, you start things later. Um, there's a half grade improvement in the performance. He said, no, it's not right. It's a full grade. Wow. full grade performance. And it's like it shows you how fundamental, you know, just an extra hour of sleep can be to your performance and how, you know, how much sharper, how much happier. And also people tend to replace sleep with food. Yeah. You know, for energy because they're tired. They use the quick energy from that. It's it's everything comes better. So and that starts with a routine. And the routine is, all right, you've got to start putting away things that you find um engaging before your bedtime, right? Which is usually your phone and usually all the, you know, the the Blu-ray, um, the blue light. And um, you have to have this kind of calm down period and you should try and go to bed at the same time every night and until you get in the habit of it. And it's good advice. Yeah, absolutely. You'll uh we do the opposite. Yeah, and and uh to I think how that influences uh procrastination as well is is um the that decision fatigue, right? Like if you're tired and and you're you're you've not eaten well and you're you're too tired to exercise and everything becomes Yeah, it's it's sort of a self-perpetuating spiral, right? Yeah, number one reason people say for putting stuff off is they're too tired. Right. The the other half of it, I think is also under appreciated. And we're starting with the easy stuff. This is stuff that anyone can do, right? And it's all good stuff. Is what are you doing with your power hours? So when do you have the most energy during the day? And it it's not it's a four or five hour shift and some people are a little bit earlier and they're called morning larks. Some people are later and they're called evening owls. And it's it has to do with your chronobiology again. But whenever it is, what are you doing with it? Are you are you use doing it your most productive, your most valuable work? If so, that's great. That's that's the lesson for a great life. If you're doing it with just mindless email and you're putting it off and then around 2:00, 3:00 in the afternoon, you're getting to what you think you really should be doing. And that's when your circadian rhythm slumps at the worst. And you're find yourself difficultly going for it. Well, it it it was almost inevitable by you trying to start it during that time. In fact, you know, hard projects should be started when you have the most energy. Yeah. And the hardest thing is the first step and that happens in the morning. Yeah, I'm a fan of uh scheduling the important things as standing meetings for myself at those times that I know that I'm most productive for writing or any strategy thinking, strategic thinking. All that stuff is is scheduled in my calendar as a as a regular meeting with myself to to capitalize on that time, right? Oh, that's good. Do you ever do you try the unschedule? Uh, unschedule. No. Oh, yeah, this is like uh Neil Fiori's work. It's it's where they also schedule in. Some people say, well, I don't have enough time for myself. I know. All right. Yeah. And so I said, okay, well, great, let's schedule that in first. What, you know, what do you need? What do you need to be okay with this? Well, I want to have like, you know, go and have my Sundays off. Okay, great. And what do you want during the week? Well, I want to be able to exercise Tuesday. Okay, let's and we'll schedule in all those moments that you need to feel okay with it. Yeah. And what you find mostly is that before that I got to be out of here by five, right? You get a nice pop in productivity through constraining your time. by only giving yourself so much time to do in a project. Usually people give themselves too much time. And there's no urgency, there's no sense of um immediacy to it and they're doubling or tripling the amount of actual effort they have to put towards it. Yeah, I definitely unschedule time. I have uh several blocks and sometimes entire days that I block off just to sort of give my my brain rest and and take time for myself or spend time with the family. I think that that's definitely important and is a matter of prioritization of your schedule, right? Yeah, I I I think of that as parenting myself. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know, if you're if you're an outside person, if you're outside manager, managing yourself and somebody who cares about let's say you yourself as your own employee, saying, well, you know, I want to make this person, yeah, they get this time off. This is when they should work. And that should be kind of your mental context. And then you can kind of go through it. The um, and that's a much better system than just doing what you feel. Because Yeah. As we've talked about, we're kind of a terrible judge of that most of the time. We're terrible at it. I mean, acknowledge it. Yeah. It doesn't make you a bad person. Trust me, it just makes you human. It's Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so there's a lot of these things that you can do. Some people don't have to do all of them. I find that for some people there's like two or three things, um, and it makes a big difference in their life. They were just so close to actually tipping it from choosing A versus choosing B, choosing work versus play. And um, we we could talk about how again, the work environment is really poorly designed. Right. It it is to have, let's say, a medium which um is simultaneously a casino, a strip club and a movie theater. Also, you do work there too. You know, what could go wrong with this design? Yeah, absolutely. No distractions at all. No distractions at all. It's like, really, this is this is it's crazy. But it it's the you begin to realize that the world isn't designed for us. We're designed to be consumers. Um, it's not designed to help us live our dreams. It's designed to help other people make money off us. And most operating systems, computer systems, everything is along these lines. It's all about seeing how they can increase our consumption. Regardless of whether we had something more important to do. It's not there to enable us, it's there to distract us. So, um, it it is kind of difficult. I mean, people, for example, I like playing games, right? You used to be able to do a board game, right? And you play a board game and it'd be fun and that'd be done. Now, oh, there's these games I can play against other people on my uh on my phone. I'll do that. And all of a sudden it's reminders and say, hey, do you want to play another game? And it's like, your clan needs you. Log in now. Your clan needs you. Come on. That's right. It's like, wow, I got to do it for my clan. And then it's like, oh, there's oh, you didn't play today. You don't get the treasure box or whatever, right? Right. So, um, yeah, those these choices, these these steps, they're I mean, we've deconstructed them. I mean, the amount of science that goes into creating temptation is impressive. Yeah. I I go around with it saying, gee, these people know more about our flaws and our operating system than I and I'm an expert in this. And they've lovingly coaxed each and every one of them to the maximum extent. So, the strange thing, the more technology develops, the less rational we become as a species because the better the technology is of finding these operating system flaws. And the more important it becomes for people to learn how to defend themselves. Um, I would I would like to think that we're in a just this period of our civilization which is temporary and then maybe, you know, my grandkids will be living in something that's designed at a level to help them get stuff done rather than designed just to have them consume. But um, you know, you got to take the good and the bad with free market capitalism. That's right. This ain't the good part, right? Right. Okay. Well, the the um what about helping other people? Like we've kind of talked about the self. Um you know, I I uh do a lot of work with executives and um uh team leaders and managers and things like that. And they I think they see the effects in a lack of productivity or sort of a lack of motivation, what they would maybe describe it, usually sometimes described as a lack of accountability. And I think a lot of that is is born out of people's procrastination and motivation, um sometimes sort of missing the note on on how they're uh reflected in the goals that other people are setting for them. and and determining their own motivation towards those. So what would you recommend to people in supporting other people for their motivation and and uh procrastination issues? Oh yeah, there's a lot of ones. I mean, if you're focusing on the workplace, um, try and have your meetings in the afternoon, not during during less productive hours. Um, don't Really? Hang on, because wouldn't it make sense like the the cognitive power to be really engaged in a meeting? Because I've always thought you should have the meetings earlier, not in the afternoon because you get the 1:00 p.m. slump and everyone kind of checks out. Well, I would say I would say, well, then let's classify. If it's not a priority meeting, have it in the afternoon. Okay, I see. Yeah. Um, the other one would be that there's a lot of cult organizations which have a culture of if somebody gave you an email, you have to respond to it, you know. And the amount of productivity that that is destroying by having people always attend to their email, I think is just absolutely unfathomable. Yeah. My favorite is the email courier. Someone sends you an email and then walks into your office and say, hey, did you read that email I just sent you? That's right. Or another email. I sent you an email half an hour ago. Why haven't you responding? It's like, it's like, well, okay, you okay, you've chosen because people themselves, they love immediacy. Right. So they love asking something. So that's a, you know, they want an instant response, but by indulging in that, that's a luxury good. You've just destroyed. I think people say about two months of productivity a year that are I think one to two months that it by having forcing people to attend to their email and respond to them quickly. Um, it, you know, you're talking about a a sixth of salary for that one indulgence, which is, you know, you must really love it because you're willing to pay through the nose for it. Right. Um, the other one is um, when people start new projects, you can do the, you know, there's used to be management by objectives. So helping people craft those goals. saying, okay, here's the goal. Well, how are you going to start on it? You know, when are you going to start? And um, okay, so when is your first deliverable? Okay, why don't you come back and talk to me about this at this particular moment? And you really, um, them coming to talking to you about it, you don't even even it's really not that important. They just had to have that deadline and just to talk and all you're there is basically saying, great, you're making progress. That was pretty much the only thing you had to do during that initial meeting. So it's very, very easy. And it's like, just give me a two-minute check in, you know, by my office and say how it's going at this particular time. This is this is golden. So people have to pick up on this as one of my primary recommendations for managing people is assign the assign the reporting, not the deliverable, right? Because then they they that like you said, it constrains their time. They're more likely to start on something uh if they have to report to you about it on Thursday versus two weeks from now, I want this done. They're their their attentiveness to starting on that activity is going to be very, very different if you assign reporting early. That's right. And and again, it don't make it it has doesn't have to be onerous. It can be just give me a two-minute report. Right. Um, yeah, so uh you can think also in terms of um distractions. Do you have uh is there a lot of people, for example, they'll have the IT be able to block certain websites from them. And some people do appreciate that. So give people the option or at least the capacity to block their temptations from where they are. Um, some people don't like it as because it's too paternalistic. But most people like that you have some way of doing it. And I know a lot of, for example, um, again, professional writers who have blocked their access to the internet in some really severe way. I mean, even going out and getting their MacBook modem blown out. So So it's basically like a typewriter because they can't get trusted with it. Right. But what what are they doing? They're they're not they're very productive people. And they do that by recognizing their vulnerability. They recognize that they're human. So I'm human. This is I can't have this around. I'm going to do something about it. And then again, it starts with that. It starts with acknowledging our own humanity, forgiving ourselves for it, and then doing something. Yeah. Excellent. Well, we're uh we're at just about an hour. So uh I I think uh I would love to chat with you more on this. If you're if you're willing to come back and and chat further, I'd be happy to have you, but uh we'll uh we'll wrap up. Um I really appreciate you spending some time and and chatting on not just procrastination, but the the general psychology that that we deal with and where some of this stems from. So I really appreciate your input on this, Pierce. Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I I've been doing this for 20 years, so I guess I I do have more than an hour to talk about it. Yeah, absolutely. If you want to do it again, I'd be happy. Yeah, yeah, as I said, I we the intention was procrastination and we just got got into so many other areas of psychology that relate to it that it's it's really fascinating. So uh awesome stuff. Really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks, Pierce. Okay, bye-bye.