00:00:00External Accountability that Works
00:03:07Three Types of Procrastination
00:09:04Neuroscience of Procrastination
00:16:18Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
00:20:33Science-Backed Solutions: MCII, ACT, CBT
SOBRE ESTE EPISÓDIO
You know you should start that project. You know the deadline is looming. So why are you watching TikTok instead? It's actually not a willpower problem, and it’s not poor time management.
In this episode, Alex and Moah dig into the surprising science of procrastination. It turns out that the conventional wisdom about why some of us put things off, wait until the last minute, and even miss deadlines entirely is inaccurate. Instead of doubling down on unhelpful advice, they reveal the tactics that can actually help you get work done on time.
Along the way, you’ll learn about a nude French novelist (one of history’s most famous procrastinators), the three types of procrastination (and why only one is harmful), and three evidence-based strategies you can use to break bad habits.
If you've struggled with procrastination your whole life, there's hope. And it doesn't need to involve nudity ;)
Links from the show!
Seminal paper on procrastination https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17201571/
Procrastinators’ brain https://neurosciencenews.com/doer-procrastinator-brains-9724/
Temptation bundling for exercise https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782030385X
Meta analysis of intervention strategies for Procrastination https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1747938X18300472
Party tricks and Naked Writing https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/dec/30/party-tricks-and-naked-writing-the-eccentric-life-of-victor-hugo
Got to-dos? Get GQueues! gqueues.com
Boomerang for Gmail boomeranggmail.com
Boomerang for Outlook boomerangoutlook.com
Inglês
Estados Unidos da América
MOSTRAR NOTAS 🔗
TRANSCRIÇÃO 🔗
00:06
Alex
So as someone who struggled with procrastination for basically my entire adolescent and adult life, I was really excited to really get started early and do some really high quality research for this project. But I bet you can guess what happened.
00:22 Moah You didn't.
00:23 Alex I didn't start until yesterday. I put it off until the last.
00:26 Moah Possible moment is not surprising.
00:31 Alex But you didn't put everything off. So tell me about the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
00:36 Moah So Victor Hugo, the author of Hunchback of Notre Dame.
00:40 Alex Notre Dame, Sorry, Notre Dame.
00:42 Alex Not the football team, the cathedral.
00:44 Moah Cathedral. He's French and he really likes to party. And he was supposed to deliver this novel to the publisher and the deadline came in want after 18 months he still didn't have. He hasn't written a single word but.
01:03 Alex He partied a lot.
01:05 Moah And the publisher said we're going to sue you and you're going to have to deliver it by I think it was like two years after his initial deadline. In six months this is your final deadline. If you don't deliver, we're going to charge you 1,1000 franc a week.
01:24 Alex And this was a long time ago.
01:25 Alex Like a thousand francs a week. Was not.
01:27 Moah Yeah, it's like $13,000 a week. So what he came up with was he locked away all his clothes. He told his butler, do not give me the key to my closet. He had this gray shawl that is quite large and he wrapped himself around that gray shawl so that he cannot leave the house or entertain anybody because basically he's essentially naked except for the shawl and he had to write because he had nothing else he could do.
02:01 Alex In fairness, I'm currently wrapped. I've currently got a big thick gray shawl wrapped around me and I'm otherwise naked in the studio.
02:10 Moah So yes, one of the most famous work of Victor Hugo was written when he was mostly naked and he did finish two weeks before the final deadline.
02:22 Alex So he never got fined any of the money.
02:24 Moah He didn't. So deadline. The negative consequences did work for his procrastination, but until he really implement I cannot have any clothes until I finish writing. It didn't work for him.
02:40 Alex So the solution to procrastination is nudity.
02:46 Alex Hey there, I'm Alex.
02:48 Moah And I'm Moah.
02:49 Alex We met at mit, got married, co founded Boomerang, invented email snoozing and have spent a lot of time geeking out about productivity.
02:56 Moah On Less Busy Lab. We'll share and argue about research backed tips, productivity hacks and secrets from 15 years of running a small team that does big things.
03:06 Alex There are no silver bullets in productivity. But we'll try to help you get more done while feeling less busy. Let's go!
03:12 Moah Why do we really care about fixing procrastination? Because there are some good procrastination, I would say.
03:18 Alex I think what you just said, right, like he figured out a method to use external accountability to overcome the procrastination and delivered a great piece of work. So you can obviously do great work on a deadline. Why do we care?
03:33 Moah Yes. I think there are like three type of procrastination that we can isolate. Right. The first one is incubation for creative strategy work. We've talked about this story before. Frank Lloyd Wright and how he designed falling water in two hours that his client was again, there's an external party that's like, where's my thing that I pay for? Was driving over to his studio, he finished the work and everybody's oh, this is a genius piece of work that was done in two hours. And he was like, not really. I've been thinking about this. And it has incubation time for him to clank it around in his head and then he put it down on paper.
04:12 Alex And that's the same thing with Victor Hugo. He didn't write the Hunchback in just that period of time during those 18 months when he was wining and dining.
04:21 Alex Background, he was in between hangovers, he.
04:24 Alex Was thinking about the book.
04:26 Moah And then the most famous example of like procrastination but still deliver the masterpiece of art is Mozart was writing, was supposed to be writing Don Giovanni, an opera and he was procrastinating so much that they have to delay the opening. And then the delay opening arrived. And the night before, he was still whining and dining and partying. And then that morning at 5am his wife Constance woke him up and said, hey, you have an offer that's opening tonight. So he wrote from.
05:06 Alex I think you should finish that.
05:08 Moah He wrote from 5am to the time that the opera opens.
05:12 Alex Did he have clothes on?
05:13 Moah He did have clothes on, as far as I know. I don't know. I bet he was naked. But that's not the strategy. He just did it. And the musicians, when they got the music sheet, they had never practiced before and the ink was still wet and everybody said, oh, this is the best piece of work. And they loved it. But it was again like he must have had time before thinking about an incubation period for creative piece of work. You have this amount of time go into this hyper focus mode. And deliver a great piece of work. So I don't know. Those are considered procrastination or procrastination that turn into highly efficient creative work.
05:59 Alex That makes sense. He had longer to think about it than he would have had if he'd actually hit his original deadline. There was an extra six or seven months of thinking that went into it.
06:08 Moah And then the other one is higher leverage prioritization that sometimes people miscategorize as procrastination is like an intentional delay. Right. We got lots and lots of, oh my gosh, Google is going to change this API. And usually they announce 18 months to 2 years. And very early on we have a co founder, Mike, who is highly conscientious and he would start on the work the minute is announced. And then a month before the deadline, Google came out and say, actually, we're not ready. Or sometimes they actually cancel the change completely, basically wasting the time that we spend on implementing the change for the API changes.
06:53 Moah So sometime it's a lot better for us to actually intentionally delay until about two months before the deadline to start work on it, because by then we have more information on how likely is it actually going to go in place or they are going to extend the deadline for yet another 18 months.
07:15 Alex But even when the thing you're worried about working on might not go away, One of the things that were talking about when were preparing for the episode is that sometimes we don't. People file their taxes with an extension even when they're owed a refund and they forego the interest income on their tax refund. We do that every year. And the reason we do that every year is because of the time value of money. Like the work we do in January to get ready for what we're going to build for the company. Like, what's the product work going to be? What are our marketing initiatives going to be? Getting those right in January is way more impactful to the benefit of the company than the interest we would earn on our $6,000 income tax return.
07:56 Moah That's different because we have a limited resource. Right. So like, for us, we have to make a choice by saying we are going to delay this. And that's not procrastination. We filed a tax extension and it's an active, intentional delay of something that you could be technically doing now but choosing not to. The actual procrastination is the kind that gives you ulcers from stress because you haven't done it. You should be doing it. Yeah.
08:33 Alex It's not when you're doing something, higher leverage. Or when you're working on a creative piece and you haven't quite figured out all the details of it yet. It's when you are supposed to be doing something and instead you're looking at TikTok or you're looking at Facebook or you're reading a magazine, and the whole time you're reading the magazine, you're thinking, I should be doing this, I should be doing this. And you're still not doing it.
08:57 Moah I think it's both, like you're not enjoying what you're doing now. You have this sense of doom. And then there's also the stress of not having finish it. And there is nothing really creative about it, like filing a tax return for your personal thing. You just need to do it.
09:17 Alex If it's creative, something's going wrong.
09:22 Moah Apparently, 35% of Americans admit to procrastinating on filing their tax return every year.
09:30 Alex So there have been two times in my life where I've dug deep on procrastination. Once was in college when I was.
09:36 Alex Like, why can I not do my homework?
09:41 Moah It's very normal. Most college students are known for procrastination. And I think men and at 30 are the most, like, worst offender of procrastination. It's just from brain chemistry. And as you get older, it gets better.
09:58 Alex It's gotten better. It's not great.
10:00 Moah It's not gone yet. Yeah, but the thing is with procrastination is that it has this doom loop. Right. Because you're procrastinating, you feel stressed. Because you're stressed, you don't sleep that well. And then because you don't sleep that well, you wake up the next morning with less executive function and continue that loop.
10:20 Alex Hold your horses for a second.
10:22 Alex So back in college, I did a deep dive on this. And then when we created the email game back in 2010, that was one of the two products that we started with. Boomerang started with two products, Boomerang and the email game. And the email game was an attempt to try to make it so that email would feel more like a game and it would be easy to overcome procrastination because you're just playing a game.
10:42 Moah Because people tend to procrastinate on dealing with the emails if you don't notice.
10:47 Alex Exactly.
10:48 Alex That's why.
10:49 Alex And you see it less now, but you still see people posting inbox 7800, you're putting that off.
10:54 Alex And usually not strategically. There are a lot of times you're sitting in there looking at it, just not doing anything with it.
11:00 Moah It.
11:01 Alex So things have changed since then. Back in 2010, the big thing that people thought about procrastination as like the root cause of it was a lack of time management skills and an inability to plan.
11:16 Moah A lot of books attribute procrastination to professionism.
11:22 Alex Sure.
11:22 Alex But the main thing that everybody said that you needed to do to fix things was you needed to get better at planning out your time and coming up with time management tips. And I think there's a reason that none of that stuff worked because like,
11:37 Alex I know how to make a schedule.
11:39 Alex It's not like I can't say, okay, from 6:00pm to 6:30 I'm going to eat. And then from 6:30 until 7:15 I'm going to work on this. Like, it's not that hard to color in the different grid on your calendar, different colors with your colored pencils. But then when you sat down to.
11:54 Alex Do it, you couldn't do it.
11:55 Moah It's actually sticking to what you were planning. Yeah. And there's like the intention and action gap. That's the source of all procrastination.
12:03 Alex Exactly. And so now the research that's come out, especially in the last five years, says that the fundamental issue in procrastination doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you can make a schedule organize your to do list. It's about emotional regulation and avoiding bad feelings. So when you're not doing something, the reason you're not doing it is because it makes you feel anxious or it's boring or it's stressful or you're worried you're going to let somebody down or there's something that is making you feel negative about the task so you avoid it. Yeah. So okay, well if I go, I.
12:40 Moah Don't want to feel bad.
12:41 Alex I'm not going to feel bad.
12:42 Alex I'm just going to look at a short form video of people dancing and be happy.
12:46 Moah Well, that's.
12:46 Alex So why would you not want to do that?
12:48 Moah I think there's a lot of neuroscience to explain those feelings. Right. Because like the boring part is boring. All you have low dopamine from the task that you're going to do. But watching a TikTok video gives you a dopamine hit and it will be pain. Because procrastinator literally have a different type of brain in the sense that the fear center of their brain is larger than non procrastinator so they feel the, oh, this is going to be painful. This is Going to be not as good as I would like to be. That part of their brain is bigger and they feel it more and it's.
13:29 Alex Less strongly connected to their prefrontal cortex. So their prefrontal cortex, the planning part.
13:34 Moah Of your brain and emotional regulation part.
13:36 Alex Exactly. It just can't override it because they're not connected that well. So it's not that I wasn't able to time manage, it's that the time management part of my brain couldn't conquer the fear center and the pain avoidance.
13:47 Alex Center in my brain.
13:49 Moah So the other part that was interesting and procrastinator versus non procrastinator, is that the error alarm part of your brain? Right. So hey, if there is something you do, you're going to have to pay a fine or you're gonna be late. All these negative consequences. Normal people or non procrastinating people? Yes.
14:13 Alex I mean 30% of people procrastinate enough that they report that it's an issue. So like, okay, they're normal.
14:19 Moah They're normal. Okay, fine. The non procrastinators respond. They are part of their brain when they do the studies to actually look at it, their brain that alert them from like, hey, there's an error, you're going to, you know, suffer the consequences light up a lot more than the procrastinators. We just don't feel as much of the pain of the negative consequences.
14:47 Alex I feel the current pain rather than the future pain.
14:51 Moah But the part that's really interesting is the temporal discounting. Right. Like a lot of the reason we do it is, oh, I will do it later because I always assume my future self is more free and have more energy.
15:05 Alex I think that really harkens back to.
15:07 Alex The mistakes that people were making in the 2000s. It's not that I think I'm going to be less busy in the future. I know I'm going to be busy in the future.
15:15 Alex I just don't want to suffer the pain now, at least for me.
15:18 Alex Maybe that's not true.
15:19 Moah It's different for everybody. Yeah, I think so. I think it's part of it that the temporal discounting is a part of it. But if you really dig into it, you have to suffer the pain and do it now and deal with the stress now than later. Right. So there is a Baumeister did a few studies on like college students as a longitudinal study and non procrastinator are a little bit more stressed at the beginning of a course, but overall their stress level is lower versus the procrastinator who really are low grade stress along the way and then super stress at the end because they opted for a little bit lower stress at the beginning but ended up with more overall. And they are 20 to 30% more likely to be sick at the end of the high stress period.
16:18 Moah Because your body's been broken down over this whole time of procrastinating and avoiding.
16:25 Alex It also doesn't help that you probably were in the lab until about midnight trying to finish your project for three straight days. I remember those days.
16:33 Moah So yeah, there is a physiological reason why your brain is making you more likely to be a procrastinator. And there is a real physical effect of procrastinating on your body. Right. You are more likely to have 40 to 50% more clinically significant depression and 30 to 40% more anxiety symptoms if you are a long term procrastinator.
17:00 Alex So the other new research that's been coming out is about a new type of procrastination.
17:06 Alex And this guy actually got started on.
17:08 Alex A Chinese social network. Weibo. Weibo. I don't know how you say it.
17:13 Moah W E I B O.
17:15 Alex And it was the Chinese workers who were doing 9, 9, 6, right? They worked from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
17:22 Alex They started feeling, you know, you don't.
17:23 Alex Feel like you're in control of your schedule. You don't feel like you have any agency or any time to do what you want to do. And so people. And this will be really familiar to parents with young children even here, because.
17:34 Alex I definitely do this. It's called revenge bedtime procrastination. I guess you're getting revenge against the people who control your schedule by taking it out on your own body.
17:44 Moah Yes, it is. I mean, we also have the 997 schedule, right? 9am to 9pm Our time is not ours until they go to bed at 9. We don't have our own time.
17:54 Alex Go to bed, kids.
17:56 Moah So yes, it's the same phenomenon. And 11pm hit and you're like, I really need to get to bed. I really need to get to bed. But let's put it off a little bit more.
18:09 Alex Yeah, I'll just read one more Substack.
18:12 Alex Or watch one last episode of tv. And the real problem with that is it creates a cycle. Right? So there are three things that three habits, three behaviors that the research showed were correlated really strongly with procrastination. One of them was not getting enough sleep. One of them was not getting enough exercise. And then one that I was making me scratch my Head a little bit is skipping breakfast. As someone who does not generally eat breakfast, I'm wondering if that might be a source of my problems more than a source of my weight loss. So if you end up doing revenge bedtime procrastination and you don't get any sleep, then the next day you're more likely to procrastinate on other stuff, which makes you less likely to be caught up.
18:50 Alex So you can get any time to yourself, which makes you want to do more revenge bedtime procrastination. So eventually you end up completely blown up.
18:58 Moah One they were doing surveys of adults. 74% of people reported going to bed later than planned at least once a week. And probably more like, I'm shocked.
19:09 Alex 25% of people never go to bed later than planned.
19:12 Alex Like, that's crazy.
19:13 Moah Oh, those are the people who have fully developed brain that we didn't get.
19:21 Alex Stuff always comes up.
19:23 Moah No, no, I think they clarify that, like if stuff comes up. Right. So your kid is sick or there's stuff going on that you're out of the house. That doesn't count as revenge bedtime.
19:33 Alex Oh, I see.
19:34 Moah Procrastination. Yeah. It's if you have nothing better to do and you intend to go to bed at this time and you didn't go to bed because that counts as procrastination. Right?
19:46 Alex Yeah. So the new research is also showing techniques that do seem like they have.
19:53 Moah A chance of working, especially the bedtime procrastination. There were a few studies already out there to combat the problem of like, how would you make yourself go to bed? And they're like simple stuff like turn off Internet. Right. It's very simple, but for like actually getting yourself. They did a few studies on this called Mental contrasting and Implementation Intention. The script that you are supposed to do is you have to step one, figure out the desired outcome. I will go to bed early.
20:34 Alex I will go to bed on time,
20:35 Moah On time, on time.
20:37 Alex Don't be so ambitious.
20:38 Moah I will wake up tomorrow feeling refreshed because I got enough sleep. Right. That's the step one. Step two is like, what's the internal obstacle? The main thing that is stopping me is I can't get off my phone.
20:55 Alex Can I interrupt you for one second? So the first part of that, you set the intention of going to bed because you'll feel better in the morning. Is it okay to set that framework with stuff that's out of your control?
21:10 Moah Tell me more about it.
21:11 Alex I mean, on average you'll wake up more refreshed, but you don't know what kind of night you're gonna have. Maybe there's gonna be a trash truck that rolls down the street at 1.
21:20 Moah O', clock, but you're anticipating what the best outcome is gonna be. The phrase actually they use is, if I do X, the best outcome is. So if I study, the best outcome is I get an A, right? You don't fully control it. You study. You may say get a B, but like, the best outcome is this. And that's what I want.
21:40 Alex I think that's important. Okay, cool. I'm glad I pushed in on it because I was like, it doesn't feel like it's in your control. But if you're looking at the best outcome, I see how that would get you motivated.
21:49 Moah Right. So for me, like, one of the example that I need to do the mental contrasting and implementation intention script that I need to work on myself is cleaning my closet. Right. And if I accomplish cleaning my closet, the best outcome is it will be a lot easier for me to get dressed in perpetuity. Right. And the main thing inside me that is stopping me from successfully cleaning my closet is super boring. And it will take forever. Like, I am afraid of how long it will take and when I start it and I'll feel bored. How am I going to combat that boredom? And how I'm going to combat this eternal feeling? So I'm going to bribe my older son who I watch British baking show with, be like, hey, can you come watch this show in the closet with mama? Right?
22:50 Moah And then I won't feel the time passing because I'm watching something. And luckily I can do two things at once, so I can actually watch the show and also clean and organize my closet. So that is one very specific example, something I don't want to do that you use the MCII script. And they have found, like the MCII as applied to revenge bedtime procrastination is very effective. Well, at least enough effectiveness that they're like, this is a good thing to try because it takes like three minutes of talking to yourself, maybe not even.
23:30 Alex Of trying to plan out. Yeah, that might work. The papers that I thought were the coolest involved a type of therapy called act acceptance and commitment therapy. And I am not a psychological expert on this by any means. You can do this and sit down with a real therapist. But they did a study in a consortium of universities in the Netherlands where they gave folks a 30 minutes a week class. And they had two sessions with a coach who was not a therapist and was not like a Just a guide. Yeah, a guide. And it was called the Get Started program. And they found a 30% reduction in procrastination among the PhD students who took this seven week course.
24:10 Moah So like they have a 30 minute course class every week for seven weeks.
24:15 Alex Self guided on the Internet. Like you didn't have to go anywhere, you just click through. But the main principle was the idea that when you're not wanting to do something, you're feeling some negative emotion and because you're feeling an emotion, you go do something else to make that emotion stop.
24:35 Alex The thing that clicked in my brain.
24:37 Alex With this is because you're feeling an emotion, that doesn't mean you have to do anything about it.
24:43 Moah Just let it be and live with it.
24:45 Alex Yeah.
24:45 Alex So the metaphor they use is you're surfing a wave. So yesterday I had to figure out we're changing who's responsible for something really boring in the company. And I had to figure out how to get some accounts moved to different places. And I didn't know how to do it. And I was sitting there thinking about it and I'm like, okay, I really need to do this, but I don't know how to do it.
25:05 Alex And so I think I know what.
25:06 Alex My fear was yesterday when I'm thinking back, it was that I'm going to spend six hours or eight hours or.
25:12 Alex My whole workday or even until the kids go to bed and I'm just going to be clicking around in these things trying to figure out how to move these stupid accounts.
25:22 Alex And so if you do cbt, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Right. The principle is you're supposed to figure out what the belief is and what the fear is. And does that fear make any sense?
25:35 Moah It's like a more logical reasoning. It's trying to be like, hey, is other thoughts and belief, like where is it coming from and how rational or how distorted it is? And it is distorted in your sense because it didn't take you six hours.
25:53 Alex I didn't solve it, but I figured out a workaround.
25:56 Alex I think it might have taken me six hours to truly solve it.
25:59 Alex So CBT does work. There's a lot of papers that see pretty close to similar between ACT and cbt. They see pretty similar results. They both work well.
26:08 Moah Yep.
26:10 Alex But the thing that really resonates with me about act, about acceptance and commitment therapy is you don't have to ask whether or not that fear is grounded. You don't have to say, does it make sense that this could take me six and a half hours and that.
26:22 Moah This would be A problem how delusional that is.
26:24 Alex And yeah, you just have to say, I'm feeling this right now. And then you take a step back and you're an observer instead of.
26:31 Moah It's very Buddhist.
26:33 Alex Yeah, it is.
26:34 Moah Because, like, feelings will come and you just observe that. Yes. Like, and there's no judgment to it. Like, oh, is it good or is it bad? I think cpt, in a way is like, there's a judgment to it. Right. Like, is the thought actually valid or delusional? You're making a valid judgment that whether that feeling and the thoughts are coming from a rational place. And ACT is saying, just accept it, whether if it's rational or not, is there.
26:57 Alex The thing where you have to make the value judgment is. Is the way I'm responding to this workable? You think of it as a wave. This is a feeling that I'm feeling right now. I'm handling it and I just want to, like, I need to get through this feeling and do what I need to do anyway.
27:14 Moah So cry and do it anyway.
27:16 Alex Yeah, cry and do it anyway.
27:17 Moah Feel it and do it anyway.
27:19 Alex And don't let it control you.
27:21 Moah So what I was looking into these three different approaches. Right. Act, which is acceptance and commitment. MCII is mental contrasting and implementation intention. And then cbd, I think they are effective for different types of personality. What they found is procrastination has a very high reverse correlation to conscientiousness. People who are procrastinators because they have low conscientiousness just need something like the mental contrasting and implementation intention, because for them it's just like follow through on the goal and seeing the end results when you actually do the thing and then have the implementation intention. The other personality trait that is correlates with procrastination is.
28:16 Alex Neuroticism.
28:17 Moah Yes. So people who are highly neurotic tend to procrastinate from this anxiety and the fear that comes with it, and they feel more stress. So for those people, ACT is better because it reduces that neurotic response to not getting things handled.
28:37 Alex Yeah. And I think the more you do it, the better you get at it.
28:40 Moah Right.
28:40 Alex And the lower the linkage between those parts of your brain. Like you rewire the neurons to be where you. You no longer have to listen to.
28:48 Moah Those all the time. Yes. So I think it's like more fear based on. And that gets suppressed.
28:55 Alex Yeah, that makes some sense.
28:56 Moah So I think all these three approaches all have very good results in terms of like actual randomized controlled trial results. And they don't just last for the current thing. There is hope for chronic procrastinator to become non procrastinator or at least less chronic. Yes. Or reduce the amount. Like how extreme your procrastination is to be a little bit more functional. And I think like everybody procrastinate in some parts of the way. There might be some hundred percent, never procrastinate people, but like for some people in the middle, where most things, they don't procrastinate. But there are some, a couple extreme cases where they do procrastinate to like the 100% procrastinator who procrastinate on every single thing. Right. Like, I think it's a range and you just need to figure out what you need help with.
29:53 Moah And there are people who are perfectly fine in 80% of the aspect of their life, but there's 20% that they procrastinate for like things like 401k moving. Like that's just. You don't need any creativity there either. Right. You just need to do the boring, tedious thing.
30:11 Alex But there is uncertainty.
30:12 Moah There is. And you can do it wrong. There is a lot of fear too. What if I do it wrong? Because the penalty and dealing with the IRS is a lot more painful than not moving the 401K. Right.
30:23 Alex Exactly. It's not totally unreasonable.
30:25 Moah No.
30:27 Alex One more thing that came up in the research is what you. I think you refer to it as temptation bundling.
30:32 Moah Yes. And I think it solved the low dopamine problem. Right. Because a lot of the procrastinators procrastinate because it doesn't feel good right now the people who are really good at doing the thing when they need to, they have a better sense of like, when I do it, the reward is great. That imagination of like what I'm gonna get. And they can feel the feel good later part. But for us, procrastinator, we need to make it feel good right now. So what they did was this is Katie Milkman's research on people who are going to the gym. And what they did was, you know, very addictive audiobook that you want to listen to. You can only listen to it when you're at the gym.
31:18 Alex Lots of cliffhangers.
31:20 Moah Yeah. Probably like a serial podcast or something. Right. And you actually, you're not allowed to listen to it outside of the gym and working out. And that increased people's attendance at the gym 10 to 15%. And it lasted beyond the 14, 17 week that they were trying to so bundle something that you don't want to do that. You've been procrastinating. So for me, I really hate writing reviews. So I pair it with getting a pedicure. When you're getting a pedicure, you can have your laptop and you can write your review. But it's not that hard to come up with a reward scheme that give you immediate reward by bundling something good with something you don't want to do. And then the one that we've been talking about, like commitment devices, the same thing, right.
32:12 Moah So back to Victor Hugo when we started from the beginning, like he didn't really get his ass in gear until the publisher said, you're going to have to pay a thousand francs a week. Right. That's the external commitment device. That is serious negative consequence.
32:31 Alex That's the thing that always works on a procrastinator is the deadline and like.
32:35 Moah The fines and the escalating. Right. So I would have been like, hey, it's a thousand first week and the two thousand second week and escalate.
32:45 Alex One of the things that I did back when I was in my first job that kind of worked along these lines, I told my boss, I tend to procrastinate on stuff. So we scheduled with my boss and one other engineer a midway board review on a circuit board that I was supposed to design. And so by that point I was supposed to have some of the pieces in place. These sections of the board, need of the schematic, need to be done. I didn't have to have everything, but I had to have these parts so we could make sure that the core architecture of the board was good. And did we really need that meeting? No. But because we had that 30 minute meeting on the calendar with my boss and with another senior engineer who is, you know, to.
33:22 Moah You don't want to disappoint.
33:23 Alex Exactly. I got, you know, I got halfway through the board design and at exactly.
33:28 Alex Halfway through the period of time where I was supposed to hit the deadline.
33:31 Alex So by pulling in the commitment a little bit, but adding some stakes to it did actually really help. And so that was a technique that at that point he knew though, so he could use it on me without my volition.
33:42 Moah If you go back to the big five like personality trait, the extroversion and agreeableness does help with procrastination when you use the social commitments.
33:52 Alex That makes sense.
33:54 Moah It doesn't work if you're not very agreeable. Be like, I don't care.
33:59 Alex You have your board. When you have your board,
34:05 Alex Do we have a Tip of the Week I think my tip of the week is I'm going to start paying more attention to how I feel when I start to feel the urge to procrastinate. When I start to feel the urge to do something that's not the thing I'm supposed to be doing. Each time I start to feel the call to do something else, to get on, to open up my phone, I'm just going to sit for a second and try to observe the feeling and then see if I can push through it.
34:30 Moah My tip of the week is if you do procrastinate, don't feel bad about it and forgive yourself because they have found that the students who forgive themselves for procrastinating on the last test did much better and procrastinate less on the next test. Kicking yourself and feeling bad about procrastination doesn't help. It just make it worse and you just get into this doom loop. I think it's Douglas Adams quote about procrastination is I love deadlines. I like the sounds of them whooshing pass by and people can change. People can become much less of a procrastinator than they were over time.
35:15 Alex There is still hope.
35:16 Moah Yes, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Less Busy Lab. If you haven't already, please can I say it?
35:23 Alex I want to say it.
35:24 Moah Okay, fine.
35:25 Alex Smash that subscribe button.
35:27 Moah Are you happy now?
35:29 Alex So happy.
35:30 Moah Please subscribe to our podcast to get all our future episodes. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Find me on LinkedIn for more behind the scenes content and updates.
35:42 Alex We'll put the links to all the research papers, tools and templates mentioned in the episode in the show notes.
35:46 Moah We'll also be adding a listener questions segment in the future episodes, so if you have any productivity related questions, send us an email@questionsebusylab.com our sponsors this week.
35:57 Alex Are the same as they are every week, GQueues and Boomerang. Check them out.
36:00 Moah Thanks for listening and we hope you're already feeling less busy and more productive.
00:22 Moah You didn't.
00:23 Alex I didn't start until yesterday. I put it off until the last.
00:26 Moah Possible moment is not surprising.
00:31 Alex But you didn't put everything off. So tell me about the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
00:36 Moah So Victor Hugo, the author of Hunchback of Notre Dame.
00:40 Alex Notre Dame, Sorry, Notre Dame.
00:42 Alex Not the football team, the cathedral.
00:44 Moah Cathedral. He's French and he really likes to party. And he was supposed to deliver this novel to the publisher and the deadline came in want after 18 months he still didn't have. He hasn't written a single word but.
01:03 Alex He partied a lot.
01:05 Moah And the publisher said we're going to sue you and you're going to have to deliver it by I think it was like two years after his initial deadline. In six months this is your final deadline. If you don't deliver, we're going to charge you 1,1000 franc a week.
01:24 Alex And this was a long time ago.
01:25 Alex Like a thousand francs a week. Was not.
01:27 Moah Yeah, it's like $13,000 a week. So what he came up with was he locked away all his clothes. He told his butler, do not give me the key to my closet. He had this gray shawl that is quite large and he wrapped himself around that gray shawl so that he cannot leave the house or entertain anybody because basically he's essentially naked except for the shawl and he had to write because he had nothing else he could do.
02:01 Alex In fairness, I'm currently wrapped. I've currently got a big thick gray shawl wrapped around me and I'm otherwise naked in the studio.
02:10 Moah So yes, one of the most famous work of Victor Hugo was written when he was mostly naked and he did finish two weeks before the final deadline.
02:22 Alex So he never got fined any of the money.
02:24 Moah He didn't. So deadline. The negative consequences did work for his procrastination, but until he really implement I cannot have any clothes until I finish writing. It didn't work for him.
02:40 Alex So the solution to procrastination is nudity.
02:46 Alex Hey there, I'm Alex.
02:48 Moah And I'm Moah.
02:49 Alex We met at mit, got married, co founded Boomerang, invented email snoozing and have spent a lot of time geeking out about productivity.
02:56 Moah On Less Busy Lab. We'll share and argue about research backed tips, productivity hacks and secrets from 15 years of running a small team that does big things.
03:06 Alex There are no silver bullets in productivity. But we'll try to help you get more done while feeling less busy. Let's go!
03:12 Moah Why do we really care about fixing procrastination? Because there are some good procrastination, I would say.
03:18 Alex I think what you just said, right, like he figured out a method to use external accountability to overcome the procrastination and delivered a great piece of work. So you can obviously do great work on a deadline. Why do we care?
03:33 Moah Yes. I think there are like three type of procrastination that we can isolate. Right. The first one is incubation for creative strategy work. We've talked about this story before. Frank Lloyd Wright and how he designed falling water in two hours that his client was again, there's an external party that's like, where's my thing that I pay for? Was driving over to his studio, he finished the work and everybody's oh, this is a genius piece of work that was done in two hours. And he was like, not really. I've been thinking about this. And it has incubation time for him to clank it around in his head and then he put it down on paper.
04:12 Alex And that's the same thing with Victor Hugo. He didn't write the Hunchback in just that period of time during those 18 months when he was wining and dining.
04:21 Alex Background, he was in between hangovers, he.
04:24 Alex Was thinking about the book.
04:26 Moah And then the most famous example of like procrastination but still deliver the masterpiece of art is Mozart was writing, was supposed to be writing Don Giovanni, an opera and he was procrastinating so much that they have to delay the opening. And then the delay opening arrived. And the night before, he was still whining and dining and partying. And then that morning at 5am his wife Constance woke him up and said, hey, you have an offer that's opening tonight. So he wrote from.
05:06 Alex I think you should finish that.
05:08 Moah He wrote from 5am to the time that the opera opens.
05:12 Alex Did he have clothes on?
05:13 Moah He did have clothes on, as far as I know. I don't know. I bet he was naked. But that's not the strategy. He just did it. And the musicians, when they got the music sheet, they had never practiced before and the ink was still wet and everybody said, oh, this is the best piece of work. And they loved it. But it was again like he must have had time before thinking about an incubation period for creative piece of work. You have this amount of time go into this hyper focus mode. And deliver a great piece of work. So I don't know. Those are considered procrastination or procrastination that turn into highly efficient creative work.
05:59 Alex That makes sense. He had longer to think about it than he would have had if he'd actually hit his original deadline. There was an extra six or seven months of thinking that went into it.
06:08 Moah And then the other one is higher leverage prioritization that sometimes people miscategorize as procrastination is like an intentional delay. Right. We got lots and lots of, oh my gosh, Google is going to change this API. And usually they announce 18 months to 2 years. And very early on we have a co founder, Mike, who is highly conscientious and he would start on the work the minute is announced. And then a month before the deadline, Google came out and say, actually, we're not ready. Or sometimes they actually cancel the change completely, basically wasting the time that we spend on implementing the change for the API changes.
06:53 Moah So sometime it's a lot better for us to actually intentionally delay until about two months before the deadline to start work on it, because by then we have more information on how likely is it actually going to go in place or they are going to extend the deadline for yet another 18 months.
07:15 Alex But even when the thing you're worried about working on might not go away, One of the things that were talking about when were preparing for the episode is that sometimes we don't. People file their taxes with an extension even when they're owed a refund and they forego the interest income on their tax refund. We do that every year. And the reason we do that every year is because of the time value of money. Like the work we do in January to get ready for what we're going to build for the company. Like, what's the product work going to be? What are our marketing initiatives going to be? Getting those right in January is way more impactful to the benefit of the company than the interest we would earn on our $6,000 income tax return.
07:56 Moah That's different because we have a limited resource. Right. So like, for us, we have to make a choice by saying we are going to delay this. And that's not procrastination. We filed a tax extension and it's an active, intentional delay of something that you could be technically doing now but choosing not to. The actual procrastination is the kind that gives you ulcers from stress because you haven't done it. You should be doing it. Yeah.
08:33 Alex It's not when you're doing something, higher leverage. Or when you're working on a creative piece and you haven't quite figured out all the details of it yet. It's when you are supposed to be doing something and instead you're looking at TikTok or you're looking at Facebook or you're reading a magazine, and the whole time you're reading the magazine, you're thinking, I should be doing this, I should be doing this. And you're still not doing it.
08:57 Moah I think it's both, like you're not enjoying what you're doing now. You have this sense of doom. And then there's also the stress of not having finish it. And there is nothing really creative about it, like filing a tax return for your personal thing. You just need to do it.
09:17 Alex If it's creative, something's going wrong.
09:22 Moah Apparently, 35% of Americans admit to procrastinating on filing their tax return every year.
09:30 Alex So there have been two times in my life where I've dug deep on procrastination. Once was in college when I was.
09:36 Alex Like, why can I not do my homework?
09:41 Moah It's very normal. Most college students are known for procrastination. And I think men and at 30 are the most, like, worst offender of procrastination. It's just from brain chemistry. And as you get older, it gets better.
09:58 Alex It's gotten better. It's not great.
10:00 Moah It's not gone yet. Yeah, but the thing is with procrastination is that it has this doom loop. Right. Because you're procrastinating, you feel stressed. Because you're stressed, you don't sleep that well. And then because you don't sleep that well, you wake up the next morning with less executive function and continue that loop.
10:20 Alex Hold your horses for a second.
10:22 Alex So back in college, I did a deep dive on this. And then when we created the email game back in 2010, that was one of the two products that we started with. Boomerang started with two products, Boomerang and the email game. And the email game was an attempt to try to make it so that email would feel more like a game and it would be easy to overcome procrastination because you're just playing a game.
10:42 Moah Because people tend to procrastinate on dealing with the emails if you don't notice.
10:47 Alex Exactly.
10:48 Alex That's why.
10:49 Alex And you see it less now, but you still see people posting inbox 7800, you're putting that off.
10:54 Alex And usually not strategically. There are a lot of times you're sitting in there looking at it, just not doing anything with it.
11:00 Moah It.
11:01 Alex So things have changed since then. Back in 2010, the big thing that people thought about procrastination as like the root cause of it was a lack of time management skills and an inability to plan.
11:16 Moah A lot of books attribute procrastination to professionism.
11:22 Alex Sure.
11:22 Alex But the main thing that everybody said that you needed to do to fix things was you needed to get better at planning out your time and coming up with time management tips. And I think there's a reason that none of that stuff worked because like,
11:37 Alex I know how to make a schedule.
11:39 Alex It's not like I can't say, okay, from 6:00pm to 6:30 I'm going to eat. And then from 6:30 until 7:15 I'm going to work on this. Like, it's not that hard to color in the different grid on your calendar, different colors with your colored pencils. But then when you sat down to.
11:54 Alex Do it, you couldn't do it.
11:55 Moah It's actually sticking to what you were planning. Yeah. And there's like the intention and action gap. That's the source of all procrastination.
12:03 Alex Exactly. And so now the research that's come out, especially in the last five years, says that the fundamental issue in procrastination doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you can make a schedule organize your to do list. It's about emotional regulation and avoiding bad feelings. So when you're not doing something, the reason you're not doing it is because it makes you feel anxious or it's boring or it's stressful or you're worried you're going to let somebody down or there's something that is making you feel negative about the task so you avoid it. Yeah. So okay, well if I go, I.
12:40 Moah Don't want to feel bad.
12:41 Alex I'm not going to feel bad.
12:42 Alex I'm just going to look at a short form video of people dancing and be happy.
12:46 Moah Well, that's.
12:46 Alex So why would you not want to do that?
12:48 Moah I think there's a lot of neuroscience to explain those feelings. Right. Because like the boring part is boring. All you have low dopamine from the task that you're going to do. But watching a TikTok video gives you a dopamine hit and it will be pain. Because procrastinator literally have a different type of brain in the sense that the fear center of their brain is larger than non procrastinator so they feel the, oh, this is going to be painful. This is Going to be not as good as I would like to be. That part of their brain is bigger and they feel it more and it's.
13:29 Alex Less strongly connected to their prefrontal cortex. So their prefrontal cortex, the planning part.
13:34 Moah Of your brain and emotional regulation part.
13:36 Alex Exactly. It just can't override it because they're not connected that well. So it's not that I wasn't able to time manage, it's that the time management part of my brain couldn't conquer the fear center and the pain avoidance.
13:47 Alex Center in my brain.
13:49 Moah So the other part that was interesting and procrastinator versus non procrastinator, is that the error alarm part of your brain? Right. So hey, if there is something you do, you're going to have to pay a fine or you're gonna be late. All these negative consequences. Normal people or non procrastinating people? Yes.
14:13 Alex I mean 30% of people procrastinate enough that they report that it's an issue. So like, okay, they're normal.
14:19 Moah They're normal. Okay, fine. The non procrastinators respond. They are part of their brain when they do the studies to actually look at it, their brain that alert them from like, hey, there's an error, you're going to, you know, suffer the consequences light up a lot more than the procrastinators. We just don't feel as much of the pain of the negative consequences.
14:47 Alex I feel the current pain rather than the future pain.
14:51 Moah But the part that's really interesting is the temporal discounting. Right. Like a lot of the reason we do it is, oh, I will do it later because I always assume my future self is more free and have more energy.
15:05 Alex I think that really harkens back to.
15:07 Alex The mistakes that people were making in the 2000s. It's not that I think I'm going to be less busy in the future. I know I'm going to be busy in the future.
15:15 Alex I just don't want to suffer the pain now, at least for me.
15:18 Alex Maybe that's not true.
15:19 Moah It's different for everybody. Yeah, I think so. I think it's part of it that the temporal discounting is a part of it. But if you really dig into it, you have to suffer the pain and do it now and deal with the stress now than later. Right. So there is a Baumeister did a few studies on like college students as a longitudinal study and non procrastinator are a little bit more stressed at the beginning of a course, but overall their stress level is lower versus the procrastinator who really are low grade stress along the way and then super stress at the end because they opted for a little bit lower stress at the beginning but ended up with more overall. And they are 20 to 30% more likely to be sick at the end of the high stress period.
16:18 Moah Because your body's been broken down over this whole time of procrastinating and avoiding.
16:25 Alex It also doesn't help that you probably were in the lab until about midnight trying to finish your project for three straight days. I remember those days.
16:33 Moah So yeah, there is a physiological reason why your brain is making you more likely to be a procrastinator. And there is a real physical effect of procrastinating on your body. Right. You are more likely to have 40 to 50% more clinically significant depression and 30 to 40% more anxiety symptoms if you are a long term procrastinator.
17:00 Alex So the other new research that's been coming out is about a new type of procrastination.
17:06 Alex And this guy actually got started on.
17:08 Alex A Chinese social network. Weibo. Weibo. I don't know how you say it.
17:13 Moah W E I B O.
17:15 Alex And it was the Chinese workers who were doing 9, 9, 6, right? They worked from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
17:22 Alex They started feeling, you know, you don't.
17:23 Alex Feel like you're in control of your schedule. You don't feel like you have any agency or any time to do what you want to do. And so people. And this will be really familiar to parents with young children even here, because.
17:34 Alex I definitely do this. It's called revenge bedtime procrastination. I guess you're getting revenge against the people who control your schedule by taking it out on your own body.
17:44 Moah Yes, it is. I mean, we also have the 997 schedule, right? 9am to 9pm Our time is not ours until they go to bed at 9. We don't have our own time.
17:54 Alex Go to bed, kids.
17:56 Moah So yes, it's the same phenomenon. And 11pm hit and you're like, I really need to get to bed. I really need to get to bed. But let's put it off a little bit more.
18:09 Alex Yeah, I'll just read one more Substack.
18:12 Alex Or watch one last episode of tv. And the real problem with that is it creates a cycle. Right? So there are three things that three habits, three behaviors that the research showed were correlated really strongly with procrastination. One of them was not getting enough sleep. One of them was not getting enough exercise. And then one that I was making me scratch my Head a little bit is skipping breakfast. As someone who does not generally eat breakfast, I'm wondering if that might be a source of my problems more than a source of my weight loss. So if you end up doing revenge bedtime procrastination and you don't get any sleep, then the next day you're more likely to procrastinate on other stuff, which makes you less likely to be caught up.
18:50 Alex So you can get any time to yourself, which makes you want to do more revenge bedtime procrastination. So eventually you end up completely blown up.
18:58 Moah One they were doing surveys of adults. 74% of people reported going to bed later than planned at least once a week. And probably more like, I'm shocked.
19:09 Alex 25% of people never go to bed later than planned.
19:12 Alex Like, that's crazy.
19:13 Moah Oh, those are the people who have fully developed brain that we didn't get.
19:21 Alex Stuff always comes up.
19:23 Moah No, no, I think they clarify that, like if stuff comes up. Right. So your kid is sick or there's stuff going on that you're out of the house. That doesn't count as revenge bedtime.
19:33 Alex Oh, I see.
19:34 Moah Procrastination. Yeah. It's if you have nothing better to do and you intend to go to bed at this time and you didn't go to bed because that counts as procrastination. Right?
19:46 Alex Yeah. So the new research is also showing techniques that do seem like they have.
19:53 Moah A chance of working, especially the bedtime procrastination. There were a few studies already out there to combat the problem of like, how would you make yourself go to bed? And they're like simple stuff like turn off Internet. Right. It's very simple, but for like actually getting yourself. They did a few studies on this called Mental contrasting and Implementation Intention. The script that you are supposed to do is you have to step one, figure out the desired outcome. I will go to bed early.
20:34 Alex I will go to bed on time,
20:35 Moah On time, on time.
20:37 Alex Don't be so ambitious.
20:38 Moah I will wake up tomorrow feeling refreshed because I got enough sleep. Right. That's the step one. Step two is like, what's the internal obstacle? The main thing that is stopping me is I can't get off my phone.
20:55 Alex Can I interrupt you for one second? So the first part of that, you set the intention of going to bed because you'll feel better in the morning. Is it okay to set that framework with stuff that's out of your control?
21:10 Moah Tell me more about it.
21:11 Alex I mean, on average you'll wake up more refreshed, but you don't know what kind of night you're gonna have. Maybe there's gonna be a trash truck that rolls down the street at 1.
21:20 Moah O', clock, but you're anticipating what the best outcome is gonna be. The phrase actually they use is, if I do X, the best outcome is. So if I study, the best outcome is I get an A, right? You don't fully control it. You study. You may say get a B, but like, the best outcome is this. And that's what I want.
21:40 Alex I think that's important. Okay, cool. I'm glad I pushed in on it because I was like, it doesn't feel like it's in your control. But if you're looking at the best outcome, I see how that would get you motivated.
21:49 Moah Right. So for me, like, one of the example that I need to do the mental contrasting and implementation intention script that I need to work on myself is cleaning my closet. Right. And if I accomplish cleaning my closet, the best outcome is it will be a lot easier for me to get dressed in perpetuity. Right. And the main thing inside me that is stopping me from successfully cleaning my closet is super boring. And it will take forever. Like, I am afraid of how long it will take and when I start it and I'll feel bored. How am I going to combat that boredom? And how I'm going to combat this eternal feeling? So I'm going to bribe my older son who I watch British baking show with, be like, hey, can you come watch this show in the closet with mama? Right?
22:50 Moah And then I won't feel the time passing because I'm watching something. And luckily I can do two things at once, so I can actually watch the show and also clean and organize my closet. So that is one very specific example, something I don't want to do that you use the MCII script. And they have found, like the MCII as applied to revenge bedtime procrastination is very effective. Well, at least enough effectiveness that they're like, this is a good thing to try because it takes like three minutes of talking to yourself, maybe not even.
23:30 Alex Of trying to plan out. Yeah, that might work. The papers that I thought were the coolest involved a type of therapy called act acceptance and commitment therapy. And I am not a psychological expert on this by any means. You can do this and sit down with a real therapist. But they did a study in a consortium of universities in the Netherlands where they gave folks a 30 minutes a week class. And they had two sessions with a coach who was not a therapist and was not like a Just a guide. Yeah, a guide. And it was called the Get Started program. And they found a 30% reduction in procrastination among the PhD students who took this seven week course.
24:10 Moah So like they have a 30 minute course class every week for seven weeks.
24:15 Alex Self guided on the Internet. Like you didn't have to go anywhere, you just click through. But the main principle was the idea that when you're not wanting to do something, you're feeling some negative emotion and because you're feeling an emotion, you go do something else to make that emotion stop.
24:35 Alex The thing that clicked in my brain.
24:37 Alex With this is because you're feeling an emotion, that doesn't mean you have to do anything about it.
24:43 Moah Just let it be and live with it.
24:45 Alex Yeah.
24:45 Alex So the metaphor they use is you're surfing a wave. So yesterday I had to figure out we're changing who's responsible for something really boring in the company. And I had to figure out how to get some accounts moved to different places. And I didn't know how to do it. And I was sitting there thinking about it and I'm like, okay, I really need to do this, but I don't know how to do it.
25:05 Alex And so I think I know what.
25:06 Alex My fear was yesterday when I'm thinking back, it was that I'm going to spend six hours or eight hours or.
25:12 Alex My whole workday or even until the kids go to bed and I'm just going to be clicking around in these things trying to figure out how to move these stupid accounts.
25:22 Alex And so if you do cbt, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Right. The principle is you're supposed to figure out what the belief is and what the fear is. And does that fear make any sense?
25:35 Moah It's like a more logical reasoning. It's trying to be like, hey, is other thoughts and belief, like where is it coming from and how rational or how distorted it is? And it is distorted in your sense because it didn't take you six hours.
25:53 Alex I didn't solve it, but I figured out a workaround.
25:56 Alex I think it might have taken me six hours to truly solve it.
25:59 Alex So CBT does work. There's a lot of papers that see pretty close to similar between ACT and cbt. They see pretty similar results. They both work well.
26:08 Moah Yep.
26:10 Alex But the thing that really resonates with me about act, about acceptance and commitment therapy is you don't have to ask whether or not that fear is grounded. You don't have to say, does it make sense that this could take me six and a half hours and that.
26:22 Moah This would be A problem how delusional that is.
26:24 Alex And yeah, you just have to say, I'm feeling this right now. And then you take a step back and you're an observer instead of.
26:31 Moah It's very Buddhist.
26:33 Alex Yeah, it is.
26:34 Moah Because, like, feelings will come and you just observe that. Yes. Like, and there's no judgment to it. Like, oh, is it good or is it bad? I think cpt, in a way is like, there's a judgment to it. Right. Like, is the thought actually valid or delusional? You're making a valid judgment that whether that feeling and the thoughts are coming from a rational place. And ACT is saying, just accept it, whether if it's rational or not, is there.
26:57 Alex The thing where you have to make the value judgment is. Is the way I'm responding to this workable? You think of it as a wave. This is a feeling that I'm feeling right now. I'm handling it and I just want to, like, I need to get through this feeling and do what I need to do anyway.
27:14 Moah So cry and do it anyway.
27:16 Alex Yeah, cry and do it anyway.
27:17 Moah Feel it and do it anyway.
27:19 Alex And don't let it control you.
27:21 Moah So what I was looking into these three different approaches. Right. Act, which is acceptance and commitment. MCII is mental contrasting and implementation intention. And then cbd, I think they are effective for different types of personality. What they found is procrastination has a very high reverse correlation to conscientiousness. People who are procrastinators because they have low conscientiousness just need something like the mental contrasting and implementation intention, because for them it's just like follow through on the goal and seeing the end results when you actually do the thing and then have the implementation intention. The other personality trait that is correlates with procrastination is.
28:16 Alex Neuroticism.
28:17 Moah Yes. So people who are highly neurotic tend to procrastinate from this anxiety and the fear that comes with it, and they feel more stress. So for those people, ACT is better because it reduces that neurotic response to not getting things handled.
28:37 Alex Yeah. And I think the more you do it, the better you get at it.
28:40 Moah Right.
28:40 Alex And the lower the linkage between those parts of your brain. Like you rewire the neurons to be where you. You no longer have to listen to.
28:48 Moah Those all the time. Yes. So I think it's like more fear based on. And that gets suppressed.
28:55 Alex Yeah, that makes some sense.
28:56 Moah So I think all these three approaches all have very good results in terms of like actual randomized controlled trial results. And they don't just last for the current thing. There is hope for chronic procrastinator to become non procrastinator or at least less chronic. Yes. Or reduce the amount. Like how extreme your procrastination is to be a little bit more functional. And I think like everybody procrastinate in some parts of the way. There might be some hundred percent, never procrastinate people, but like for some people in the middle, where most things, they don't procrastinate. But there are some, a couple extreme cases where they do procrastinate to like the 100% procrastinator who procrastinate on every single thing. Right. Like, I think it's a range and you just need to figure out what you need help with.
29:53 Moah And there are people who are perfectly fine in 80% of the aspect of their life, but there's 20% that they procrastinate for like things like 401k moving. Like that's just. You don't need any creativity there either. Right. You just need to do the boring, tedious thing.
30:11 Alex But there is uncertainty.
30:12 Moah There is. And you can do it wrong. There is a lot of fear too. What if I do it wrong? Because the penalty and dealing with the IRS is a lot more painful than not moving the 401K. Right.
30:23 Alex Exactly. It's not totally unreasonable.
30:25 Moah No.
30:27 Alex One more thing that came up in the research is what you. I think you refer to it as temptation bundling.
30:32 Moah Yes. And I think it solved the low dopamine problem. Right. Because a lot of the procrastinators procrastinate because it doesn't feel good right now the people who are really good at doing the thing when they need to, they have a better sense of like, when I do it, the reward is great. That imagination of like what I'm gonna get. And they can feel the feel good later part. But for us, procrastinator, we need to make it feel good right now. So what they did was this is Katie Milkman's research on people who are going to the gym. And what they did was, you know, very addictive audiobook that you want to listen to. You can only listen to it when you're at the gym.
31:18 Alex Lots of cliffhangers.
31:20 Moah Yeah. Probably like a serial podcast or something. Right. And you actually, you're not allowed to listen to it outside of the gym and working out. And that increased people's attendance at the gym 10 to 15%. And it lasted beyond the 14, 17 week that they were trying to so bundle something that you don't want to do that. You've been procrastinating. So for me, I really hate writing reviews. So I pair it with getting a pedicure. When you're getting a pedicure, you can have your laptop and you can write your review. But it's not that hard to come up with a reward scheme that give you immediate reward by bundling something good with something you don't want to do. And then the one that we've been talking about, like commitment devices, the same thing, right.
32:12 Moah So back to Victor Hugo when we started from the beginning, like he didn't really get his ass in gear until the publisher said, you're going to have to pay a thousand francs a week. Right. That's the external commitment device. That is serious negative consequence.
32:31 Alex That's the thing that always works on a procrastinator is the deadline and like.
32:35 Moah The fines and the escalating. Right. So I would have been like, hey, it's a thousand first week and the two thousand second week and escalate.
32:45 Alex One of the things that I did back when I was in my first job that kind of worked along these lines, I told my boss, I tend to procrastinate on stuff. So we scheduled with my boss and one other engineer a midway board review on a circuit board that I was supposed to design. And so by that point I was supposed to have some of the pieces in place. These sections of the board, need of the schematic, need to be done. I didn't have to have everything, but I had to have these parts so we could make sure that the core architecture of the board was good. And did we really need that meeting? No. But because we had that 30 minute meeting on the calendar with my boss and with another senior engineer who is, you know, to.
33:22 Moah You don't want to disappoint.
33:23 Alex Exactly. I got, you know, I got halfway through the board design and at exactly.
33:28 Alex Halfway through the period of time where I was supposed to hit the deadline.
33:31 Alex So by pulling in the commitment a little bit, but adding some stakes to it did actually really help. And so that was a technique that at that point he knew though, so he could use it on me without my volition.
33:42 Moah If you go back to the big five like personality trait, the extroversion and agreeableness does help with procrastination when you use the social commitments.
33:52 Alex That makes sense.
33:54 Moah It doesn't work if you're not very agreeable. Be like, I don't care.
33:59 Alex You have your board. When you have your board,
34:05 Alex Do we have a Tip of the Week I think my tip of the week is I'm going to start paying more attention to how I feel when I start to feel the urge to procrastinate. When I start to feel the urge to do something that's not the thing I'm supposed to be doing. Each time I start to feel the call to do something else, to get on, to open up my phone, I'm just going to sit for a second and try to observe the feeling and then see if I can push through it.
34:30 Moah My tip of the week is if you do procrastinate, don't feel bad about it and forgive yourself because they have found that the students who forgive themselves for procrastinating on the last test did much better and procrastinate less on the next test. Kicking yourself and feeling bad about procrastination doesn't help. It just make it worse and you just get into this doom loop. I think it's Douglas Adams quote about procrastination is I love deadlines. I like the sounds of them whooshing pass by and people can change. People can become much less of a procrastinator than they were over time.
35:15 Alex There is still hope.
35:16 Moah Yes, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Less Busy Lab. If you haven't already, please can I say it?
35:23 Alex I want to say it.
35:24 Moah Okay, fine.
35:25 Alex Smash that subscribe button.
35:27 Moah Are you happy now?
35:29 Alex So happy.
35:30 Moah Please subscribe to our podcast to get all our future episodes. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Find me on LinkedIn for more behind the scenes content and updates.
35:42 Alex We'll put the links to all the research papers, tools and templates mentioned in the episode in the show notes.
35:46 Moah We'll also be adding a listener questions segment in the future episodes, so if you have any productivity related questions, send us an email@questionsebusylab.com our sponsors this week.
35:57 Alex Are the same as they are every week, GQueues and Boomerang. Check them out.
36:00 Moah Thanks for listening and we hope you're already feeling less busy and more productive.
PESQUISAR EPISÓDIOS PASSADOS
Pesquisar episódios anteriores de Less Busy Lab.
Aviso: O podcast e a arte incorporada nesta página são de Aye Moah & Alex Moore, que é propriedade de seu proprietário e não é afiliado ou endossado por Listen Notes, Inc.
EDITAR
Obrigado por ajudar a manter a base de dados dos podcasts atualizada.
