This Video Will Make You Quit Procrastination

Welcome to Lecture 2 of my User Manual series, the series where I teach you about how your brain works and how you can use that understanding to become more intelligent, more goal-oriented, and do more of what you want to do. So in this particular lecture, we're going to focus on how to stop procrastinating, how to understand what procrastination really is, and how you can avoid it to actually make meaningful progress towards your goals. If you're new here, I'm Erin, welcome to my User Manual lecture series. These are my weekly lecture series that I deliver every Saturday morning. So make sure you follow along so you don't miss out on these. I also post vlogs every Monday and Curiosity Maxing every Thursday, so stick around for those as well. The problem that most people have with procrastination is that they don't really know what it is. It's this vague, abstract concept that you don't want to be doing, but you can't quite define what it is that you're doing that is bad. And so the first step to understanding how not to procrastinate is to understand what procrastination is and why you actually do it. So there's a particular equation that I'm going to give you, and this is not a very good whiteboard pen, so I'm going to swap that out, which kind of tells you a bit of the components that are involved in procrastination. Procrastination can be comprised of emotion, plus friction, plus ambiguity, plus distance. And these are the components that cause you to procrastinate, a mixture of these four. And for this entire video, I'm going to be taking you through what each of these mean, why they cause you to procrastinate, and how you can get around this. So that by the end of the video, I'm not going to tell you that you're never going to procrastinate, but you're going to be able to spot when it is likely that you will procrastinate and how you can avoid that happening from the first instance. And to give you a bit of background, I myself am a student at the University of Cambridge. I read Land Economy. I'm currently building a startup called Egoist Machines, we're backed by Y Combinator. I post on social media to an audience of about 1.3 million different students. I know what it's like to feel the pressure to procrastinate, and a lot of it does stem from perfectionism, but it's pretty easy to get around. I used to be quite a chronic procrastinator whilst I was doing my GCSEs and A-levels, and I've managed to switch that completely on its head, and this is how. When it comes to emotion, the primary thing that is causing you to procrastinate is that you don't want to feel what starting this task is going to make you feel. And a lot of the time, the reason why is because starting the task is going to make you feel bad, either because you're not very good at this particular thing, you've not had a lot of practice, you don't particularly enjoy it, and so you're trying to avoid this emotion by avoiding the task. The problem with doing that is your brain is prioritising the short-term reward of not feeling miserable over the long-term reward of feeling good because you've actually got the task, and this is a fallacy that your brain plays into a lot, it's a systemic bias that we all have to deal with, the fact that we discount long-term events much more than short-term events, meaning that for a lot of people, you'd rather have £100 today than maybe £200 in two months, simply because you want the immediate reward. Now the really annoying thing is that this actually works, because when you procrastinate so you avoid the emotion, what ends up, that's not how you spell procrastinate, but when you procrastinate and avoid the emotion, what happens is that you often do something that makes you feel better. So if you're avoiding doing a task, what are you going to do? Well, you're probably going to open up your phone and have a look at cool videos, and you might be watching me procrastinating doing tasks that you should really be doing. I tell you to watch the end of this video, but you should probably be getting on with your tasks. And this sort of short-form stimulation will give you dopamine, you'll feel really good about it. What you've just done is rewarded your brain for procrastinating, because your brain can't make the distinction as to where has this bit of dopamine, where has this bit of feel-good chemical come from? It just feels good, and it's going to associate feeling good with procrastination. And that's a very difficult cycle to break, because it causes you to then go round and round in this loop of procrastination where you're constantly avoiding tasks by doing things that feel better in the short term, until all of a sudden, you realize there's a massive task that you have not done. And that is a horrendous place to be in. The intervention that you can be doing is actively trying to identify the emotion that you are feeling. So are you bored? Is this going to be a boring task? Well, maybe you can put on some music in the background, maybe you can do it alongside your friends. Is this something you're not very good at, and you don't like feeling bad at something? Well, practice makes perfect, and it's pretty hard, but you've just got to push through these things. When you identify the emotion that you're trying to get around by procrastinating, simply the salience of knowing what that is, putting a name to the feeling, can help you avoid the procrastination. Let's move on to the next component. I've touched on this a bit already, and by distance I don't mean physical distance, although that can play a part. What I mean is the distance between you right now and the version of yourself that you want to become in the future. In order to get to this new version of yourself, you can't just keep doing the same things that you were doing in this version of yourself, because then these two are going to be equivalent. If nothing changes, then nothing changes. So what you have to do is introduce some sort of new change into your life. The trouble is, your brain really likes new changes that provide instant rewards. If you've got an essay that you've got to write and it's due in two weeks, your brain's incentive is to get dopamine today by going and hanging out with your friends or scrolling on social media. That continues to happen until the time period between where you are now and where you want to be, so not writing your essay and having finished your essay, becomes so small that you can't possibly do it well. At that point, what you're doing is reinforcing the emotional negativity of this task, because you know you're going to do badly. And when it is realized that you do do badly, you end up associating this with the fact that, oh, I'm not very good at writing an essay, I'm just not very academic. That's not the problem. The problem is you've been pushing it off so much that you've not been able to put your full capacity behind it. And the solution to this is going to sound really stupid. The solution is actually to create fake consequences. If your deadline is in two weeks' time, let's not, your deadline is in three days, and you've absolutely got to finish it in three days, and you're going to be sat there thinking, that's obviously not going to work, because my brain knows that it's not due in three days. Your brain is very gullible. You are pretty stupid. I'm pretty stupid. I do this all the time. If there's a task that I've got ages and ages to do that I know it's going to slip my mind and it's going to end up on the back burner and I'm going to procrastinate, I just do it in the moment. I tell myself, yeah, I've only got two days to do this, I've got a two-day deadline, and I've got to get it done. I will physically get out a post-it note, and I will write down my deadline, my two-day deadline, and I will stick this post-it note and my workstation just above my desk on my monitor, and I can only take it off once I've done the task. What I do, actually, this is quite a neat one, is my monitor is a bit like this, and I will stick it here, so it actually physically covers part of the screen, and it's really annoying. Then every time I'm trying to use my monitor, I see this really annoying covering, and I want to get the task done. That's a neat little trick that you can employ as well. Ambiguity is the part of procrastination that is most common as a cause. The reason that this is the case is because most of us have been taught that when we want to set a goal, we should set what we want to do. Let's say your goal might be that you want to get fit. Do you see the problem? Maybe you do already. This is the most ambiguous goal ever, so the problem is written in massive fat letters above the goal. What does this mean? For different people, this looks really, really different, and your brain does not deal well with ambiguity. There are different regions of your brain that process specific tasks versus completely non-specific tasks. They don't wire through the same neural circuitry. For more purpose-led intentions, you're very specific about what you're doing. You're utilizing parts of your brain that are more involved in action and decision-making, so instead of something vague and nonsense like this, what actually is it that you want to do? What is getting fit to you? Break down your goal. It might be that you want to be able to run a 20-minute 5K. That is more specific, yay, but it's not very good. It's not a goal. That is something that is an end result, so that is the ultimate thing you're going to achieve, but whenever you want to actually do something, this is easy to procrastinate because on a day-to-day basis, tomorrow, if I'm currently running a 30-minute 5K, am I going to be able to run a 20-minute 5K tomorrow? No. There has to be a process, so it's easy to procrastinate something without defining process, so what do we do here? Well, maybe we say, okay, I'm going to go on three runs per week. I'm going to do one long run, and I'm going to do one maybe training run, and then I'm going to do one test 5K run, so I'm going to go on those three runs. Okay, nice. We've got a bit of a process here. Now, it's easy to procrastinate on doing that if you don't actually tell yourself, well, when are you going to do it, so you're going to break it down, and you're going to take it to your calendar, and you're going to put down the specific days on which you're going to be running, and do you see now, we've taken this really vague, abstract, ambiguous goal into something so specific that it sits in your calendar that you can definitively say, yes or no, are you doing this particular thing, and the magic of putting something like this into your calendar is that you're setting open loops in your brain. There's a bit of a debated concept in psychology known as the Zaganic effect, whereby when you say you're going to do something, when you start doing something, then it becomes easier for you to return to that action over time. Now, the evidence is sort of mixed on how well this applies across domains, but what is shown from across a lot of different studies is the fact that when you set down an implementation intention, so this idea that, okay, to get to this broad goal that I have, I'm going to do these very, very specific things, it is much easier for you to follow through on doing them, and one of the big things that I always propose is when you feel like you're suffering with ambiguity, the moment that you come up with this goal is the moment when your motivation for doing it is going to be at its peak. In future life events, different goals, it's going to cause your motivation to decline. So you can hack that, utilize this, combine with the Zaganic loop effect, whereby when you have this motivation like, yeah, I want to do this, do it, do the thing. As Nike would say, just do it. When you have the motivation, utilize that, get a step forward, and then you can go and default back into a plan that is going to be easier for you to do because you don't have any emotional baggage around it because you've already tried. The last element to consider is friction, and I want to talk to you about friction in terms of something known as activation energy. Now, you might be more familiar with this from biology. I'm not really talking about it in that sense, although the principle is very, very simple. Activation energy is the amount of effort you need to put in to do the thing that you are trying to do. Now, let me give you a bit of an example here. Let's say you've got an essay that needs to get done in a couple weeks' time, and you're beginning to start this out. Okay, if I tell you, like, go write the essay, think about how you feel. That is option one. If I now tell you to come up with a thesis for your essay, which one's easier? I mean, obviously, coming up with a thesis is much easier. There's a lot less effort involved there. This has a lower activation energy. The sort of barrier from you going from doing nothing to writing your essay is a jump like this. The barrier from you doing nothing to coming up with a thesis is more like this. And when you're setting goals, when you're trying to get things done, procrastination occurs when you have a large activation energy. When you have a low activation energy, it's much easier to get around procrastination by just brute forcing it. So what you want to be doing is minimizing the activation energy of everything that you are getting involved in. And the best way of doing that is when you have a big task, like go write an essay, you want to be doing something known as decomposition. I forgot that this pen is so awful. And decomposition is basically breaking down a big goal or task into smaller sub-goals and sub-tasks. And you want to be breaking it down to be stupidly small. Like, you should be laughing at the fact that these are two-minute tasks that you're setting yourself. So if it is writing an essay, okay, come up with a thesis. Maybe spine the paragraphs. Write the first sentence. Write the closing sentences. Okay, and now I'm going to go paragraph by paragraph, and then maybe you're going to go through and edit and iterate. But each step builds upon the last and is easy for you to complete because you're not overloading your brain with this huge task. And this is something that I've really experienced a lot over the summer as I've been working on my startup, where sometimes I set myself a task like, oh, go and do advertising for this new feature. That is so broad. There's no concrete steps that I can tick off a to-do list. That should be your mental model here. What you're trying to do is break down any task that you have into a list of sub-things that you could put on a to-do list and physically tick off. The reason that you're actually going to do this is also this interesting bit of psychology whereby when you write things down and when you actually have a physical action of ticking off, you get this little spike in motivation through reward circuitry in your brain involved in dopamine, and that makes it easier for you to carry energy through all the different tasks that you have to get done. So neat little hack for you there as well. So there you have it. Procrastination comes from emotion, distance, ambiguity, and friction. You can identify those four different areas. You can always, whenever you feel like I don't want to do this task, categorize it into one of those four categories and then pull the required appropriate fix for the different ones of these to make it easier for you to go off and do that task that you need to get done. That's what I've been getting around my procrastination. I hope that's going to help you get over your procrastination as well. As a reminder, I publish videos here on YouTube every Saturday for these lectures, every Monday for my vlogs, and every Thursday for my curiosity maxing. And everywhere else on the internet, including Instagram, including TikTok, including Substack, including X, everywhere I am Erin Merrill Study, except on LinkedIn, where I'm just Erin Merrill. I hope that was super useful for you guys. If it was, please do subscribe to my channel. I am trying to grow the number of you guys here and trying to help as many people as possible with my lectures like this and educate everyone with my curiosity maxing. So send this to any of your friends who you think would enjoy it. Let me know what you think in the comments, if you have any suggestions for future lectures, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.