How to Stop Procrastinating

Welcome to Solved, the self-help podcast for smart people. My name is Mark Manson, threetime number one New York Times bestselling author, and this is my co-host and longtime lead researcher, Drew Bernie. Now, Drew and I have been in the personal growth and mental health space for a combined 30 years now. And we've had enough. We've had enough of the empty promises, and fake solutions. Every episode of Solved, our goal is to create the most comprehensive evidence-based valued delivering podcast on earth on that specific topic. And today's topic is procrastination. Now, the catch of Solved is that whatever topic we cover, our goal is that it is the last time you will ever feel a need to listen to a podcast on that topic. And this is the last time we can make an episode covering this topic. Therefore, our promise to you is that if you make the commitment to get through the entire episode and implement the advice, your procrastination will be [Music] solved.

Drew, I have two things to say before we get started. Okay. Before we solve procrastination for the entire world. You're welcome everybody. Uh first thing is uh so listeners don't know this but this is the second episode that's going out of this podcast but it this is actually the first one we're recording and uh ironically we procrastinated this episode like three months. How many months did it take us to shoot this thing? Pretty close to that. Yeah. So be confident listener that uh your your hosts are are experts very familiar with the topic you're about to discuss. Yes. Yes. Exactly.

Uh, and then the second thing I want to say is is just I want to get in before all of the comments from people who are going to say, "Oh, I'll listen to this later. You're not funny. You're not clever. The same joke. I've been doing this for 15 years. Every time I create any content around procrastination, the first comment is always, "Oh, I'll get to this later." And I'm like, "Yeah, you're very cute." Those people haven't even made it that far yet, though. This far yet. So, yeah, that's true. So, All right. So, today is procrastination. We are solving procrastination. Just a reminder to the listener, the whole premise of this podcast is that this is the last podcast that you should ever have to listen to on this topic. Drew and I and our research team have gone just absurdly in depth researching trying to understand this topic. It is, this episode is absolutely comprehensive. It is everything you need to know about procrastination. and then some. Uh, you're probably going to want to vomit when you hear the word procrastination by the end of this. But the goal is that you don't have to ever listen to anything about procrastination ever again. You don't have to read another book. You don't have to take another seminar. It's all here.

So, first some statistics. Procrastination is something that pretty much everybody struggles with. This is not surprising. 95% of adults report procrastinating at least some of the time. To me, the most surprising part of that stat is who the are the 5%? Yeah, show me that. They're liars. Who are these superhuman robots that never procrastinate? Uh, yeah, I think 5% of people are liars. Um, 42% of adults report procrastinating regularly. Uh, and then 25% of adults report being chronic procrastinators, which is essentially means that you are just literally procrastinating everything all the time, right? anything you try to do you end up procrastinating which that is that's a shocking amount 25% of people. So this is a huge problem. This is like this is a massive affliction that you know gets to us all. Um so some of the things that we're going to go through procrastination as a topic is really interesting because it it is it is such a common human occurrence that there is thought on it going back 2500 years.

So, we went back 200 years and we're going to cover basically the entire corpus of human thought and approach towards procrastination uh since the beginning of civilization. And it's actually kind of surprising because a lot of things that we take to be true or a lot of our assumptions of what procrastination is are relatively modern. They're not they're they're pretty recent and and and you know people in the ancient world or people in medieval times wouldn't necessarily agree with us and how we approach uh the topic of procrastination.

Ultimately we're going to get to the bottom of what is procrastination. What like fundamentally like what is happening in your brain? What is happening psychologically when you're procrastinating something? When you're not doing the thing you know you should be doing uh and why does it happen? Why is it even possible? Right? like if I know something is good for me, like why is it possible that I can choose not to do that? That that like kind of doesn't make sense in a in a certain philosophical way.

Of course, we're going to cover all the latest research on procrastination. We're actually going to cover the entire history of research on procrastination. Uh and because a lot of it got it wrong and a lot of the conventional wisdom and typical self-help advice today is based on that old research that got it wrong. And the new research is says some things quite different than uh maybe what you're expecting. And of course, we are going to go through at least a dozen different tactics and strategies that the listener can implement uh to help lessen procrastination in their lives. Uh I think if there's one thing that I've learned preparing for this episode, Drew, is that I don't think procrastination's ever something that we just like completely get rid of.

I think that it is it just seems to be kind of a side effect or a cost of being humans who have agency and have complex brains. Um we'll get more into that, but I do think it is incumbent on all of us to do all the things that we can to lessen or mitigate the procrastination in our lives. And I do think that is very much attainable for most people uh relatively quickly.

So before we get into it, anything you want to add, Drew? Um, what are you most excited for? I mean, this what are you procrastinating? Oh, god. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. This is a very common, very pervasive problem. And um, we all struggle with it. And I think there's just there's a tragedy kind of a tragic side to it as well cuz you know what what else is there to do but do the things you want to do in life, right? And then we put those things those very things off.

So, I think a lot of people are going to find a there's just going to be a big nodfest going on while you're listening to this. And um yeah, I'm excited to get into it because it's something I struggle with quite a bit. I don't know if I'm a chronic procrastinator, but there's chronic strains of procrastination that I sometimes run into for sure. Sure. Um I have a lot of experience with this just being an author, a self-employed person um for my entire career. So, we'll we'll get into that.

And you mentioned something which is like kind of the tragedy of it is that what we we'll actually discover later on the episode is that the proportion of procrastination is actually uh directly correlated to how important we see a task being in our lives. So it's like

the more important the task is the more likely we are to procrastinate it

which is so screwed up right like like that's so unfair. Why does that happen? Yeah.

We'll dig into why that is but yeah it's fascinating. But before we dive in, uh there's going to be a lot of information in this podcast. And between me and you and our research team, I think we went through like what 13 14 books and 100 research articles. So to help everyone get through this, we've put together a companion PDF guide. It's 65 pages, includes a full summary of the show, all of our citations and references, has book recommendations, and it includes some practical takeaways and lessons as well. So, if you're listening to this, you can get the PDF guide for free by going to solvedodcast.com/procrastination. That's solvedodcast.com/procrastination. The link is also in the description if you want to get through there. All right, let's get started.

Okay, so let's start off with uh a couple definitions first because it it I was actually surprised how hard it was to actually pin down a technical definition of procrastination. And even the one that I chose, as we'll see, there's a little bit of wiggle room with it. So, there's a researcher named Pier Steel in up in Canada. He did a big meta analysis in 2007, which is basically what a meta analysis is is for listeners is that it's when a researcher takes all of the the relevant studies or data and then kind of like finds a way to combine them into like a super study. So this guy still did this in 2007 and he crafted this definition of procrastination based on all the research at the time which is this

procrastination is the act of unnecessarily delaying something despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing

so and when I look at this I kind of like break it down into three factors.

So the first factor is an unnecessary delay, right? I think this is important because prioritization is not procrastination. Like if my plan is to uh write a a script this morning but uh then my wife gets in a car accident and I have to go to the hospital like that's not procrastination because something more important has now interfered. It's only when the delay is completely unnecessary uh and fabricated.

Um the second one is that there are negative consequences. So a lot of times when you delay something there actually are not negative consequences. There are plenty of things that you can delay and there's actually nothing that immediately there's no immediate feedback that makes you feel bad for that. I think this is why so many people procrastinate uh things like working out or eating well because the that feedback loop is so insanely long. You know it's like 10 20 30 years before you actually experience the repercussion for that decision. uh it's very easy to convince yourself that like there is no downside to eating the pizza tonight and uh sitting on the couch for another day.

Uh and then finally the third factor is despite knowing and this is where it gets tricky.

Like I actually found this whole definition very interesting because all three of these factors are ultimately subjective. Like who says a delay is unnecessary? Who's to decide what's necessary and what's not necessary, right? Who's to say what a negative consequence is? Like you say potato, I say potato. And who says that you're aware or that you know?

My personal experience is that most of my procrastination is I'm I'm usually bullshitting myself on all three of these factors. I've convinced myself that there is no negative consequence that's going to happen or the negative consequence is very minor. It's not a big deal. I've convinced myself that the delay is actually extremely necessary. Like when else am I going to be able to watch this Netflix show if if not for right now? And and then of course I myself of saying that like I'm aware I know that this is going to cause a negative. It's like well who knows, right? Like maybe you know a book will write itself, right? It happens all the time.

Yeah, I definitely ran into this too when talking with people about this, you know, kind of prepping with this and just talking with people around my life too. I definitely ran into this. They're like, "Well, is it so bad that you put this off? is I there was a lot of that that goes into it.

So yeah, it's very subjective. It's Yeah. And it it is there's a whole question around this of of awareness and knowledge uh which is actually very much well we we'll get into that. We're getting a little bit ahead of myself. So the other thing that kind of surprised me and I guess well I I guess it makes sense is that there there is a cultural element to this um that I think is worth discussing at least just for a few minutes especially because I know the the audience for this podcast is extremely international.

So it turns out that procrastination is to a certain extent culturally defined or culturally relative. There are some cultures where showing up late it's not a huge deal. Turning something in late is not really judged or viewed as as something negative. Um, it actually reminded me, so I I lived in Brazil for a few years. My wife is Brazilian and and it's one of the things that drove me crazy as an American down there is that if you if you ever do a business meeting with a Brazilian, um, first of all, they show up like 20 minutes late. Uh, then they spend the first 20 minutes like talking about their weekend and uh, telling you about like their kids soccer game and uh, you know, asking you what kind of beer you like. And uh and then it's like not until like minute 45 that you actually get to the thing that you're supposed to be talking about. And what's interesting down there is that if you ever like cut try to cut that time down, they see it as as impolite and rude. Like they see you as doing something wrong.

Um whereas coming from American culture where I'm like, "Dude, I was here at 10:00 a.m. It's 10:45. We still haven't even like talked about the the business thing." I see it as rude that they're like wasting my time. So this concept of time and punctuality uh is very culturally dependent.

And what I found interesting there there's a a social psychologist from from the Netherlands named Gear Hof who did a bunch of work on just like cultural factors. He I think he called it I think it's called cultural dimensions theory or something like that. And um he talked about how certain cultures have different orientations towards time and they have different understandings of like what is something that's done on time or not. Um, so some cultures very much prioritize.

So like western cultures or like Anglo-Saxon cultures very much prioritize uh like following the clock. Like if I say we're going to do a thing at 11:30 and you show up at 11:35 to me, you've now delayed things unnecessarily. It's causing negative consequences. So on and so on. It's procrastination. Some cultures, if you say 11:30 and they show up at 11:40, as long as they show up in a way that's like feels justified or is like emotionally consistent uh with the people around them, it's not seen as being late, you know?

It's like, oh well, yeah, we were going to be here 15 minutes ago, but like uh I was hanging out with my my my brother and my cousin, and we were having a great conversation. Um and so it just took longer. And like that's seen as a completely justified response.

And so it's interesting that I guess coming back to the subjectivity of procrastination, some cultures see it very strictly in terms of tasks getting completed on time and some cultures see it more in terms of like emotions and relationships. like in Brazil, if I don't sit there and kind of chitchat for 20 minutes, um that is seen as some sort of productive failure because I'm not doing the work to maintain the relationship with that person. Okay. Yeah. Um anyway, it's just very interesting. We're not going to spend a ton of time on this, but I like I said, I'm bringing it up simply because we do have a big international audience.

There are going to be people listening to this in Latin America and the Middle East and the Mediterranean and some of these places that are not so rigid with the clock itself. They're more kind of emotional, social and emotionally based. Um, and it's just worth considering. And I think it it really just comes back to I think probably a more effective way to just frame this entire discussion is why do we consistently fail at doing the things we wish we could do, right? Like we have things that we know are good for us and we want to do them yet we don't do them.