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How to Stop Procrastinating (Forever)

2023-07-25 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Ali Abdaal (channel) · recording, 13:38 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Evidence-based framing, Family, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

In a Book Club episode Ali shares five insights from Tim Pychyl's Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: procrastination harms health, grief and happiness; it is an emotional issue, so name the fear; motivation is not a prerequisite for action, so act like a professional; strengthen the goal intention; and use implementation intentions.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Book Club: five insights from Solving the Procrastination Puzzle by Tim Pychyl

  • ★ Ali describes Tim Pychyl as a psychology professor at Carleton University who spent his life studying procrastination, thinks he has now retired, and says his short book sums up four decades of that work. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): Solving the Procrastination Puzzle cites evidence that procrastination is a bigger problem than people think: it bleeds into all other areas of life. — 00:00:29

00:00:32 — Procrastination is a major problem: health, regret and happiness

  • ★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): Procrastinators tend to have worse health, for two reasons: procrastination causes stress, a point from Fuschia Sirois, and procrastinators also put off exercise, healthy eating and going to the doctor. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): When someone close to us dies, regrets of omission, things we did not do, weigh more than regrets of commission, and those caused by our own procrastination are the most troubling in grief. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): Procrastination sabotages happiness, because psychologists and philosophers agree that happiness and fulfilment are often found in pursuing self-directed goals. — 00:02:26 · identified motivation
  • ★★ Whenever Ali catches himself procrastinating, for example on filing his tax return, he reminds himself that procrastination will bleed into the other areas of his life as well. — 00:02:55

  • ★★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): The main thesis of Tim Pychyl's and Fuschia Sirois's work: procrastination is fundamentally an emotional issue, an internal resistance to a task with a negative emotion underneath it. — 00:03:24

    “procrastination is fundamentally an emotional issue”

  • ★★ In Ali's experience the negative emotion behind procrastination is almost always some kind of fear; he counts doubt as a kind of fear, the fear of not being good enough. — 00:03:24

00:03:26 — Procrastination is an emotional issue: name the fear

  • ★★ When Ali procrastinates he asks what his underlying fear is (what others will think, not being good enough, failure, success, boredom); the bad feeling about starting makes him give in to feeling good, which fuels the cycle of procrastination. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ Ali says that generally 95% of the time there is an emotional blocker behind procrastination, which means steps can be taken to overcome it. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ To name the fear behind something he has put off for a long time, Ali thinks about what he is actually scared of, or journals about it in Day One or with pen and paper. — 00:04:22 · Day One
  • ★★★ The first step against procrastination is to name the fear: in Ali's experience and according to research, bringing the fear out into the light reduces its power over us. — 00:04:52
  • ★★ Chapters four, five and six of Ali's upcoming book Feel-Good Productivity are about beating procrastination, and chapter five deals with fear. — 00:04:52 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

  • ★★★ Motivation is not a prerequisite for action: you do not need to feel motivated in order to act, as Tim Pychyl says, which Ali has long preached. — 00:05:21

    “you do not need to feel motivated in order to act”

00:05:24 — Motivation is not a prerequisite for action: approach it like a professional

  • ★★ Ali points to Jeff Haden's book The Motivation Myth, which he covered in an earlier Book Club episode, for more on acting without motivation. — 00:05:51 · Book Club
  • ★★★ Ali's strategy against not feeling like it is to lean into identity: as a doctor he went to work without having to feel like it, and "I am a healthy person, therefore I go to the gym"; identity leads to behaviour. — 00:06:20
  • ★★ When he first started writing his book, about three years earlier, Ali struggled with imposter syndrome because he did not see himself as a writer, nor as a YouTuber when he started his channel; now he fully embraces being a YouTuber and somewhat embraces being a writer, so he writes and films whether or not he feels like it. — 00:07:04 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

  • ★★★ If you are procrastinating in an area, Ali advises asking what would change if you approached it like a professional: an amateur acts when they feel like it, a professional acts regardless of how they feel. — 00:07:04

    “An amateur acts when they feel like it, a professional acts regardless of how they feel.”

00:07:47 — Strengthen the goal intention

  • ★★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): A strong goal intention, a self-directed goal you intrinsically want and value rather than one foisted on you by society, makes procrastination less likely. — 00:07:54 · identified motivation
  • ★★ Tim Pychyl (quoted): A weak goal intention or controlled motivation, pursuing a goal for a reward, to avoid a punishment or out of shame, makes procrastination much easier. — 00:07:54
  • ★★ Struggling to motivate himself to study maths for his university entrance exams, Ali's brother set his computer wallpaper to a photo of Oxford University to strengthen his goal intention. — 00:08:23 · Taimur Abdaal, University of Oxford
  • ★★ To strengthen his intention to go to the gym, Ali watches superhero films such as Marvel's, and a few years ago he unfollowed pretty girls on Instagram and followed men with six-pack abs instead. — 00:08:52 · Instagram
  • ★★★ Implementation intentions, plans of the form "if X happens, then I will do Y", are a surprisingly effective tool for beating procrastination. — 00:09:22

00:09:47 — Implementation intentions: if X happens, then I will do Y

  • ★★ Ali attaches habits to making coffee: while it brews he drinks water and does shoulder mobility exercises with a kitchen towel, which James Clear in Atomic Habits calls habit stacking. — 00:09:55 · James Clear, Atomic Habits
  • ★★ Ali's implementation intention for tidying his room, which he often puts off, is to listen to a podcast before bed and spend five minutes tidying; it works about half the time. — 00:10:53
  • ★★★ The other main way to use implementation intentions is time-based ones, which simply means putting the thing on the calendar; Ali says it is basically time blocking. — 00:10:53
  • ★★ Ali's time-based implementation intentions: every morning after breakfast he makes coffee, plays a song on the guitar and then films a video, and at 5 p.m. he stops work and goes to the gym. — 00:11:23
  • ★★ Evidence from Professor Gollwitzer and hundreds of studies shows that a specific implementation intention makes procrastination much less likely. — 00:11:23

00:12:00 — Skillshare sponsor read and a pointer to the Trident method video

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): The channel replies that a paperback pre-order of Feel-Good Productivity is coming for India soon, to a viewer who could find only the Kindle edition. — creator comment · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: implementation intentions · Solving the Procrastination Puzzle · Tim Pychyl

Also: People: Fuschia Sirois · James Clear · Jeff Haden · John Mayer · Peter Gollwitzer · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: Book Club · Deep Dive

Works: Atomic Habits · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · The Motivation Myth

Organizations: Carleton University · Marvel · University of Oxford

Concepts: extrinsic motivation · habit stacking · imposter syndrome · Trident calendar system

Products: Day One

Also centred on implementation intentions: How to Be Effortlessly Disciplined: 5 Mindset Shifts · How to actually exercise consistently 🏃‍♀️

Also centred on Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: One of my favourite productivity books ⏰

Also centred on Tim Pychyl: How to actually beat procrastination

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