How To Stop Procrastinating
The Goal Achievement Podcast, hosted by Matt East, is all about helping you find clarity, design a plan, and most importantly achieve your goals.
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How To Stop Procrastinating
Podcast Transcription
Hey, guys, it's Matt.
Hope you're all doing really well, if you procrastinate this episode is for you.
We're going to talk about why people procrastinate and we're going to talk about some solutions that you can implement to end procrastination. So if you procrastinate, stick around you're going to love today's episode.
Today is another episode where I am sharing a patreon recording. So every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning, I'm posting new audio clips that are motivational and inspirational and designed to help you, too, to reach your goals and achieve your dreams. And this is one of those recordings.
So let's get right into it, I hope you guys love it.
If you do go subscribe and become a patreon, it's 7 dollars and 99 cents a month and it's awesome. You get one of these recordings every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to start your day. So check it out and if you have any questions, let me know.
Here we go.
The big question we all face every morning is this: How can we focus more time on the project's activities and relationships that are most important and meaningful to us and less time on the stuff that doesn't matter so we can actually move closer to our goals and dreams?
That is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name is Matt East and welcome to the Goal Achievement podcast. I'm so glad you're here, now let's dig in.
Hey, guys, it's Matt. Hope you're all doing really well, today is April 15th, 2021. It's a Thursday or one hundred and five days into the year, we've got two hundred and sixty remaining. So we're at twenty-eight point four nine percent in the year with a touch over seventy-one percent remaining.
First off, thank you so much for supporting my patreon page, I really appreciate it. It's my intention to challenge, motivate and inspire you each day to help you achieve your goals and dreams. I'm releasing this content every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So you should receive a new post on those days. They should just be emailed to you so you don't have to hunt them down. If they're going to your spam folder, move them into your regular stuff, into your regular folder, or your primary folder.
Remember, as a supporter, you can always comment or you can send me a direct message within Patreon. So I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas, and if you have questions, you can let me know, and that's exactly what one of you did, so thank you very much. I have my first question to answer.
Here it is.
They say, Matt, even that I'm doing much better now than ever before I'm still procrastinating occasionally, I'm trying to figure out why, I want to get to the root cause. When we spoke, we chatted about procrastination and your ideas helped a lot. Can you re-share some of that info so I can reference it when I need? It's a great question.
So first, let's just define procrastination.
It's the action of delaying or postponing something.
And something people don't realize is that procrastination is almost never a basically never, let's just say never. Procrastination is never a time management issue, and I'm going to tell you what it typically is. It's..there's usually four root causes behind it that I've witnessed, that I've seen through work and one on one with people or just working with people, I shouldn't say one on one, just in general, working with people, even like mastermind members.
So here are the reasons:
Reason One is that there's an emotional concern you're having and that's driving the procrastination, that's the root cause.
An example of this would be like if you're... What would be a good example... If you're, like wanting to be a YouTube star, so you want to start producing YouTube videos and maybe not a star, you just want to start producing YouTube videos and get a little following. So you want to do that, but for some reason, you can't even, like sit down and do your first video. Like, you literally can't sit down and turn on the camera and do the video, but you want to be a YouTube sensation.
Well, that's going to be a problem.
The reason you're having that problem is that you're worried about how others are going to perceive you, and that can often be, I shouldn't say that's the only reason, but that can be a key reason you're worried about the perception of the work that you're putting out there.
Another example of this would be that you just strive for perfection. So that would be another emotional concern, an emotionally tied concern is that you're striving for perfection and you're just anxious about perfecting whatever you're doing and it's keeping you from even getting started, and that's that's a huge thing.
To solve this you usually just take some baby steps, and through mastery of activity, you know, if you're trying to do a YouTube video, meaning you just got to sit down, you got to practice, you got to actually ship your work so that you can get feedback and get better. But usually mastery of activity practice is going to be the number one thing that can help solve this.
Reason Number Two is, it's just something you don't feel like doing.
Hey, that's a real thing, right? I mean heck I've dealt with that, I deal with that all the time. It's you just don't feel like doing something in order to solve that is you have to tie that action to a clear goal and a clear outcome. And... and you kind of want it to be tied to a... you want it to be tied to a bigger goal too, something that's like you're aspiring towards.
So let's say you need to make 25 sales calls, nobody wants to make 25 sales calls. So it's time to make 25 sales calls, you have to tie that to a non-abstract goal instead of saying, like, I have to make twenty-five sales calls so I can make some money, that's not a good goal.
Make some money is not a good goal, it should be very clear.
So maybe your goal is to make 25 sales calls so you can transition two of those into a demo stage or to a discovery call and you have your math figured out that if you do 25 discovery calls, you're going to back into a certain... Not 25 discovery calls, if you're going to do a certain number of discovery calls, you can back into the math and know you're going to hit your financial goals.
Like maybe you want to get into like six figures or seven figures if you know why you have to make those calls, and you know what the goal of those calls is, you know, to transition people into a demo or discovery session and then, you know that you're going to be able to close a certain number of those discovery calls, and that's going to back into your big financial goal.
That's what you're looking for, and that takes some of the weight off of those calls. You're not just making the calls to make a little extra money or not just making the calls for the sake of making calls, you're completely tying those... the action of those calls into larger goals. And that's what we want to do to try to minimize procrastination.
Reason Number Three, you lack clarity.
This is monstrous, this is huge, I see this every single day with clients. So the lack of clarity about exactly what needs to happen is a huge reason people procrastinate. You know, you just... you just don't know the first step that you need to take you...
An example of this would be like you want to start a business. Well, where do you start? You have to have that clarity. Clarity is absolutely required to minimize procrastination, there's no doubt about it. This is a huge one, you're you know I think every member here or every patreon does their top three with me. Your top three should absolutely help with this, having clarity about what you actually want to do is a... Is I don't know, it's a huge benefit to ending procrastination.
So you'll see people when they join the mastermind, a lot of people say they want to end procrastination. And you'll see, I don't really like take that head-on initially I just say, hey send me your top three, because ninety-nine percent of the time we're going to make some serious progress on their procrastination if they actually do their top three and execute every day, and... and... so doing your top three and executing on them is a huge move forward in ending procrastination.
Reason Number Four. You’re overly optimistic about what you can accomplish in the future.
Yeah, you're overly optimistic, yeah. So you're putting yourself at a disadvantage by thinking you're going to be able to knock something out in the future quicker than you are, and you're almost always wrong. I mean, virtually every single time you think this, that you're going to be able to knock something out quickly in the future so you don't need to do it now, you're wrong.
Tasks will almost always take longer to complete successfully than you anticipate. So, you know the strategy here is to not put yourself in that situation, get started, take action, and start to realize like you're putting yourself on a major disadvantage with this thinking. It's false, thinking it's wrong, and you need to be doing the exact opposite, you need to get started right away so that you have plenty of time to wrap up the project in a way that you're proud of.
So let's talk through some actionable things you can do five things, you can act like actionable things you can do to end procrastination.
One is I mentioned this prioritizing your time to... And just finding laser-focus each morning, that is the number one thing that will help you a ton.
Number Two is, I freaking love focusmate and recommend focusmate sessions to virtually anybody that will listen, it's a great way to do deep work if you're working on your computer and you have something to knock out. Focusmate, 100 percent their 50-minute sessions, they're free, at least a handful are free a month. It's totally worth doing, if you struggle with procrastination, try focusmate. I'm not even going to describe what it is here, there's entire podcast episodes about that, and... and you can just Google or focusmate, but it works it's awesome. I don't know one person that's ever tried it that was like I was terrible, so try it.
Three is just getting an accountability partner, you know, not even hire a coach. Just go find a friend and have them act as an accountability partner. That's a great, great plan, great idea.
Number Four is do exactly what we talked about yesterday, which is getting started on the activity and letting motivation follow as opposed to waiting around for motivation to strike. So you don't want to wait around, you want to get started, let motivation fall.
And Five, this one feels weird it's the truth, this thing works... I've used this on so many clients. If you've... If you're a... someone who has procrastinated, like chronically throughout your... your life and it's like weighing on you now and you feel like you could be so much further along if you didn't procrastinate, forgive yourself. Take some time, like one minute, two minutes, and do it quickly, don't procrastinate on this. Like pause this right now if you need to and just forgive yourself for past procrastination and just start fresh, start fresh today.
Just forgive yourself and start with a fresh start with... a fresh like today... that is from psychologists recommend that and man it works. That works because so much of procrastination is so much tied to emotion, and I've seen tremendous results with that.
And lastly, this is your bonus, I already gave you five... Stop making freakin excuses... Like I need to be in the mood, I need the right work environment, I need to be under pressure, I'm waiting on someone else to do something so I can take action. Like stop it, get real, dig into your work, let's execute, let's go stop the B.S. Be honest with yourself. If anything, you owe it to yourself, to be honest. Stop the B.S. and... and stop the excuse-making.
Let's go, man go make it happen.
Absolutely go make it happen. Stop the B.S. excuses and let's go. There's no reason why you can't. If there's something you want to do, there's no reason you can't just start it, take action, and move forward on it. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I am saying stop making excuses that it's impossible if one other person's ever done it. The chances that you're able to do it are... are high, that they figured out you're going to be able to figure it out if you put enough effort and energy into it and don't wait for the last minute to get going.
So you don't need to be in the mood, you don't need the right work environment, you don't need to be under pressure to execute, you don't need to wait on others. Let's go and that's it.
Be honest with yourself, stop the excuse-making, and let's go execute.
If you want to take action on something, go do it. Go get started and the motivation and inspiration will follow.
Let's go, guys. Let's make it a great day. If you need anything, let me know. And I hope you guys are all doing really well let's wrap the week up strong bye.
Hey guys, it's Matt again. Hope you love that episode and I hope it was helpful, hope it was insightful, hope it inspired you, hope it motivated you.
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