7 things that (quickly) cured my procrastination

• Today we're gonna talk about a bunch of methods that I use to stop procrastinating. These are methods that I've developed over the past couple of years, and also methods that I've heavily borrowed from other people, completely ripping them off, and now I'm making money off of their ideas.

Okay, so number one, eat the frog. Mark Twain said, "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first." Knowing that you have to eat a frog is unpleasant to think about, (frog croaking) but if it's something that you have to do every single day, the day starts, the sun rises, and you're presented with a frog that you have to eat every single morning, then why put it off? (ethereal choir music) (frog sloshing) Because if you put it off, the whole day you're gonna be thinking about this dreadful thing you have to do. You'll be haunted by this idea. You'll try to have a normal conversation with other people, you're gonna try to relax and unwind in the bathtub, and all you're gonna be thinking about is the fact that you have to shove a slimy toad down your throat. And in this thankfully hypothetical scenario, if you were to put off eating that frog until tomorrow, you would have two frogs to eat. And if you were to follow this pattern, day after day, postponing eating the frog, then at the end of the month, you'll have like 30 frogs to eat. You're gonna have to have this giant 30 frog mukbang. That's extremely unpleasant. Why would you do that to yourself? But if it's inevitable and you have to do it, why not do it first thing in the morning so that you can live the rest of your day in peace? So do yourself a favor and eat that frog first thing in the morning. (electronic beeping) (man crunching)

Number two, the 3-2-1 rule. Now the 3-2-1 rule is pretty stupid, but it's too stupid to ignore. So the way it works is, say, you've got to write an essay for university or for high school, or whatever the hell you do, I don't know. You hold this thing that you have to do in your head and you reflect on it. And you say, "I've got to go and do this thing." And then you count from three to one. You say, "Damn, I gotta write my essay. Three, two, one." And then you just go and do the thing that you're avoiding. Now that sounds stupid and overly simple because it is, but it also works. And I think what's going on here is that by using this strategy, we are utilizing psychological momentum. Writing an essay seems super scary so we put it off. But counting is easy. Anyone can count. So we're way less likely to procrastinate counting. But once we start counting, we develop momentum towards doing the thing that we're avoiding. It's like a psychological bridge. So next time you're having a very difficult time just diving in and starting a task you need to do, say, "Three, two, one," then just go do it. I don't know why it works, but it works.

Speaking of psychological momentum, number three is the do-something principle by Mark Manson. So most people think that in order to take action on something, we need to be motivated to do it. And motivation comes from some sort of emotional inspiration. First, we're inspired to take action. We have the strong reason to do it, and that generates the motivation we need to take action on the thing. But action isn't just the effect of motivation. It's also the cause of it. Inspiration, motivation, action is not a linear sequence. It's an endless loop and you can start wherever you wanna start. And since inspiration and motivation seem to be hard to come by and completely unpredictable, it's way more efficient to start with action and let that action serve as the inspirational and motivational fuel to power further action. And you might be saying, "Well, how am I supposed to take action on something without inspiration and motivation? That's the entire problem here. The problem is that I can't take action. I need some sort of inspiration and motivation." But that's not entirely true because all of us take action on things with seemingly little or no inspiration whatsoever. And if we didn't, we'd be dead. We do certain things every day that are habitual. We brush our teeth, we take a shower, we put on nice clothes. These seemingly insignificant actions are the very actions we should harness the reaction of to generate inspiration and motivation towards doing further action. It's like a snowball effect. So next time you're avoiding doing your taxes because it's super boring, tell yourself, "Just do something, anything," and harness the reaction from that action to generate the motivation to take further action. And that, in essence, is the do-something principle.

Number four is purge your physical surroundings. So a lot of the reason why so many of us procrastinate so often is because the physical environment in which we live in practically begs us to. And as we've discussed on the channel before, there's an intimate link between our psychology and our physiology. If we exist in a chaotic, disastrous physical environment, our brain often follows suit. A chaotic and distracted mental state very often creates a chaotic and disastrous physical state, which further perpetuates the distracted mental state. It's a paradox, but it's often so much easier to correct and improve upon your physical environment than it is to suddenly feel good and clear-headed all of a sudden. So if you're more distracted than ever and you're finding it increasingly difficult to get any work done, pay attention to your physical surroundings. Improve upon your physical surroundings. Make sure that the space that you take up is conducive to productivity. It's not just a nothing tip. It's a powerful psychological phenomenon that we need to take advantage of if we want to stay focused.

Number five, purge your digital surroundings. Probably even more important in today's day and age is making sure that your digital surroundings and your digital environment that you're a part of aren't begging you to procrastinate every five seconds. And this can often be more subtle and insidious than it might look or seem on the surface. When you get a random email from Old Navy that they're having a 40% off sale even though you haven't shopped there in six years, or when you get a little Facebook Messenger blip on your phone from some group chat that you're a part of saying, "Hey, who wants to hop on Apex right now? Did you see the new Halo Infinite trailer?" These things might seem like nothing, a little bit of a one-second distraction and you can check it really quick and then you can get back to work. But the problem with that is that quite often, the most important work that we have to do in our lives requires deep, unbreaking focus for several hours. And it is almost impossible to reach that deep work state when we're constantly being pulled out of it. Our attention is constantly being grabbed by notifications from phone calls, from text message sounds. And if you have kind of an ADHD-esque brain like mine, that's a big deal. You will follow that notification, you will see what someone said on the group chat, and you'll probably engage with it for 10 to 15 seconds, or even worse, you'll go down a rabbit trail and you'll spend 20 to 30 minutes on YouTube even though you had absolutely no plan on doing that. So one of the most important things you can do to cure your procrastination is to eliminate gateways to procrastination. And it even boils down to the amount of desktop clutter you have, or what's on your toolbar, because every time your phone buzzes in your pocket, it's like Mark Zuckerberg himself is tugging on your shirt, telling you to pay attention to what he wants you to pay attention to, because whatever that notification is is more important than whatever you're doing. But you have to ask yourself, are you the master of your own life, or is Zuck?

Number six, stare at one thing for 60 seconds. So judging by the title of this tip, you might be thinking that, "Wow, Joey is running out of content. He's just trying to fluff up this video and increase the watch time." And you're totally right. I need more tips and this video isn't long enough, but also this tip seems really interesting. I tried it one time and it instantly worked for me. And I got this from Andrew Huberman's Instagram. If you guys don't know, Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford, I believe, and he talked about how one way to dramatically increase focus in 60 seconds, especially if you're already in a distracted, chaotic mental state, is to focus all of your attention onto one specific target; this could be one letter in one word, at the distance that you would be doing that work in for 60 seconds. Do not break that eye contact and breathe deeply as you do it. And at the end of that 60 seconds, your focus collects itself. I think this is another really good example of how intimately linked our psychology is to our physiology and how our actual eye movement, not being chaotic, collects our mental focus as well. When we focus with our eyes, we also focus with our brain. And what we do with our eyes also matters. That's sort of the entire concept of EMDR therapy. You should look it up, super cool stuff. So give that a shot. Focus on one specific target for 60 seconds while taking deep and relaxing breaths. And you'll notice that your brain focuses too and you can penetrate through the resistance in the way of doing the thing you need to do.

Okay, so tip number seven is confront your distractions before working. Now, this is sort of a direct contradiction to rule number one, which is why I saved it to near the end. And I would kind of use this technique as a last resort, although it has been very effective for me recently, especially later in the day when I've already eaten the frog but I kind of have more frogs to eat due to procrastination and things piling up, et cetera. The way this works is that you set a timer for 15 minutes or 10 minutes, or however long you need, to actually engage with the distractions and the escapes that you want to engage with. Because so often what happens is we don't wanna do this super hard thing that we know we need to do, so we escape, kind of impulsively. We open the Word doc that we're supposed to be on, and then we click away and then we just browse Instagram and Facebook or whatever. And you're sort of in this constant battle of just dipping your toes into the distraction, dipping your toes into the work, and it's just this seesaw that never ends. And you actually never have an intentional break or an intentional work sesh. So what I've been doing is setting a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and intentionally diving into each distraction that I want to do. I say, "Okay, I'm checking Facebook now. Right now, I'm intentionally seeing if I have any notifications or if I have any messages." And I'm allowing myself to mentally check that box and clear it. Then I move on to Instagram and I say, "Okay, now I'm on Instagram. I'm gonna have my way with Instagram. Do I have any message requests? Who posted on their Stories? Cool, I've done that now. Now I can put it on the back burner." And this might seem weird, but I think the intentionality is the difference here. When you intentionally check the mental box that you've done everything that you need to do on each of these websites, Sony Alpha rumors, YouTube, whatever, then you can gain some mental clarity to say, "Okay, I actually have no excuse not to do this thing now. I have no excuse not to file my taxes and I would feel very good about doing so." So try giving your primal brain what it wants. Let it feast itself for a dedicated amount of time so that your higher judgment can also get what it wants. It's like a negotiation with yourself.

So that's pretty much it. If you've been struggling with procrastination, I can pretty much guarantee you that if you follow these tips, at least one of these is probably gonna work for you. And if none of them do, I honestly don't really know what to do for ya. That's pretty much everything I could come up with, so yeah, let me know.

All right, a big thank you to Anker for sponsoring this video. If you guys have spent any time on Amazon and you buy things from there, especially electronics, if you're anything like me, then you've almost certainly run into the brand Anker. And if you've ever actually pulled the trigger on an Anker product, you've probably noticed that their stuff is usually higher quality, it gets to you faster, and it's more cost-effective than the big name tech giant companies that have been around forever. And they recently sent me this magnetic battery charger for my phone. It's called the MagGo. It's super slim, super compact. It comes in a variety of colors. What it does is it snaps onto the back of your phone if you have an iPhone 12 or newer, anything with that MagSafe technology, and it basically just snaps onto the back, super slim, and charges your phone. It also doubles as a phone stand. So it's kind of a multipurpose, super useful upgrade for your iPhone. And the price is only around 60 bucks US. I can pretty much guarantee you if this was a proprietary Apple product, it'd be like 250 bucks. So if you're in the market for this kind of thing, absolutely check it out. They just launched it, it's brand new. So hit up my link in the description below to check that out. Thanks again, Anker, for sponsoring this video.

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