- 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.
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Thanks again, Anker, for sponsoring this video.
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(soft music)