procrastination in my eyes is a chronic disease that everyone suffers from from time to time or
maybe even every day for some of us it not only hurts productivity but also increases stress and
anxiety i've definitely procrastinated a lot in my life but over the years i've been able to solve it
and boost my productivity scale my business and overall reduce a lot of stress so how does one go
from being a chronic procrastinator to someone who gets things done way before the deadline
even when you have adhd or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder like i do in today's video
i'm going to cover the strategies that have helped me from actionable productivity tips to overcoming
deep rooted issues with dopamine okay so growing up i had a lot of issues with procrastination
i never paid attention in school i never had the motivation to revise or study i left everything to
the last minute but somehow i still managed to do okay in my exams and the same issues ran true when
i first launched my business and it wasn't until last year that i understood that i suffer from
adhd or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder okay now i'm not somebody to label myself but i
was trying to figure out why my brain works in this way so i took a test online and i was off
the chart and then wanted to take four more to validate that and i broke their scales as well
and so i then spend a lot of time looking into adhd and add trying to understand it and see
how i could make sure that procrastination wasn't something that was going to get the better of me
how i could eliminate it to the best of my ability without having to use drugs like adderall or
ritalin that's what i'm going to be going through in this video today how i have managed to squash
procrastination or at least keep it at bay within my life so i can remain a top 1 performer now we
need to understand that procrastination has a close relationship with dopamine and so
it makes sense that that is the place we begin now dopamine is a neurotransmitter in our brain
which essentially acts as a reward center when we fulfill certain tasks we are rewarded with
dopamine which feels like a hit of pleasure now there are four dopamine pathways in the brain
think of these like roads they transport dopamine from one side of the brain to the
other two of these pathways affect motivation the first one being the mesolimbic pathway
that transports dopamine from the middle of our brains to our limbic system now your limbic
system processes emotional memory so when we experience something pleasurable this part of
the brain is activated by dopamine and we learn this activity equals pleasure now that pleasure
can be something simple like eating good food or having good sex or just great social interaction
or validation from somebody else and this is what i mean by a dopamine reward we eat chocolate we
realize chocolate feels good and we desire to have more chocolate likewise if we knock a task off our
to-do list and it's successful we realize that hard work produces success and we desire more of
it now the second pathway that affects motivation and procrastination is the mesocortial pathway now
with this pathway we transport dopamine to our prefrontal cortex this area of your brain is
responsible for motivation and functions like working memory general thinking and decision
making with adhd this pathway is impaired because we have less dopamine transport protein to carry
dopamine across the pathway it's like a supply chain issue in the brain the truck can't carry the
load and so we're not getting the same signals to give us reinforcement for motivation for thinking
and making big decisions and this ultimately results in less ability to stay motivated to
actually get tasks done so we're more likely to fuel ourselves with dopamine from the mesolimbic
pathway relating to pleasure like sitting on our phone for a couple of hours scrolling through
tiktok looking at dog videos and that is why we procrastinate so we need to work harder
to detox our dopamine and even more important than that just remove the distractions so how do we do
that well the first thing i would recommend is not keeping your phone anywhere near you whilst you're
working in fact have it in a different room and for those of you that are thinking well i've got
a business where i need my phone get a separate phone and don't have any social media apps on it
only have the apps that you need to get your tasks done our phones are like a dopamine machine that's
how they are built that's why we are addicted to them and we are addicted to apps like tick tock
where people have spent millions to understand the human brain and understand how to trick people to
be addicted to the dopamine they're getting from their phone so our phone is cancerous to
procrastination and the most efficient way to cure ourselves from that addiction is by removing our
phones from our eyesight entirely i hate it when i see people with desk setups where their mobile
phone is mounted next to their computer they don't even need to be on their phone but the brain is
sending signals to their limbic system they're getting rushed with dopamine telling you to pick
up that phone and start scrolling through your news feed because that is how they are built
remove the phone from site entirely i actually have a safe in the corner of my room where i put
my phone so if i want to it's a chore there's a barrier to get my phone i have to put in a code
and take it out now that barrier is enough to stop me from checking my phone even when my brain is
sending me signals and giving me dopamine to do so so get rid of it now what we're mainly
talking about here is social media and just by getting rid of our phones we're not getting rid
of social media it's on our laptops and on a computer now if we're trying to run a business
we cannot have it taunting us throughout the day and so i've actually found that using apps to
eliminate social media is a really effective way to just get rid of that mode of procrastination so
i would recommend you using the app focus and this is on max and you can actually choose websites you
want to ban yourselves from through certain periods of the day and for those of you that
actively need to use social media still for your business just get rid of the news feed because
that is what is distracting you the most it's everybody's statuses all the images it's all the
videos okay so you can use an app like news feed eradicator which is on google chrome which simply
eliminates the news feed from facebook from youtube and so on so at the very least get rid
of those dopamine pits now the next thing i like to do every single day i do this every evening but
you could do it every morning if you want to is make sure my whole desk area is clean and there is
method in this because if we're working on tasks throughout the day and we've got clutter all over
our desk we're going to be sending signals we're going to be sending dopamine to our limbic system
because we get pleasure from cleaning up now even if we cannot be bothered to clean up our
desk right now we are still surging ourselves with dopamine and so we're thinking about getting away
from our current task which isn't pleasurable for us and so we might not even clean up in that
instance and distract ourselves but we're going to trigger that for and we're going to procrastinate
in some other way maybe we'll go call a friend and it will turn into an hour conversation wasted or
we'll go into the kitchen and we'll eat something that we don't need to eat just to avoid the tasks
we're working on it's the triggers that we need to look out for even if we don't have the intention
to clean when we're thinking about it it triggers us to procrastinate in a different way so once
i've done that i make sure that i can always see a filled in must-do list this is different
to a to-do list where people just put all these tasks and actually can wait that aren't actually
priority tasks a must-do list is as it sounds it's the tasks that you must do
on that day and i keep an ipad on my desk where you could i can see that list at all times or
you could do it on a split screen monitor or you could maybe just have it written down in front of
you you want to make sure this is somewhere you can see at any point throughout the day so you
can hold yourself accountable to those tasks it's very easy when writing a to-do list in the morning
to forget what those tasks are by the end of the day and then all of a sudden they're carrying over
and you haven't done them and you've got a backlog okay so you need to make sure that this list
is always visible in front of you and you need to treat this like a game where every day your
number one goal is to get rid of everything from that list after a couple of weeks this will become
a habit and you'll become guilty when you still have things on that list before the end of the day
and the key is making sure it is visible on your desk at all times that is what i have found has
worked for me the best so build must-do lists with the major tasks that you need to fulfill every day
you can create to-do lists with all the micro stuff if you want to but a must-do is essential
now finally once i've got my list my desk is clear my phone is out of sight i need to get in the zone
and i need to eliminate all external distractions for me i live relatively near to a road so when i
hear cars coming past people talking outside or i can hear my girlfriend around the house it's a
massive distraction and again i am sending signals to go and procrastinate in some way so what i like
to do i haven't got them in front of me right now is i put my air pods in okay so any wireless
earphones that have noise cancelling and this is very important they need active noise cancelling
airports pro have this when you put them in it makes everything silent makes me feel like i'm
in a bubble and it's just me my must-do list i'm just gonna smash through it now
some people would like to work on that complete silence i personally like to have some kind of
mental stimulation so sometimes i use brain.fm which is a scientifically backed audio website
which has a lot of different audio music tracks which are proven to enhance cognitive ability
and focus so i use brain.fm and other times i'll just go on youtube and i will watch either
binary or beats playlist or i'll watch various focus playlists with piano music but the key
is to make sure that there are no vocals you don't want vocal music it's going to distract you
and your mind is going to be on the words instead of the task at hand in fact i'll put some links
in the description of videos and playlists that have helped me that i listen to when
i am working i'd recommend each and every one of you trying that out but make sure they are active
noise cancelling earphones so guys apply all of these things and you'll get twice the work done
in half the time i promise you that and if you think i've missed anything you've got any further
ideas things that work for you drop them in the comments below and i'll see you all soon cheers