MM#262--Declare A War On Procrastination

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. We have a good deal to cover, so let's jump right into today's wisdom for today's episode. In the previous section, we introduced a simple time management system to help you plan your day intelligently. That was the easy part Anyone can find five minutes to figure out what they should be doing. The real challenge is marshaling the motivation to actually do the work once it's scheduled. Without some control over your schedule, you cannot be a happy and successful student, no matter how good your intentions. As you might expect, in conducting interviews for this book, I put a significant focus on the issue of procrastination. Anyone who makes straight as has clearly found a way to consistently get work done when it needs to be done, and I wanted to find out how. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise. Every student I interviewed was asked the following question how do you defeat procrastination? As soon as the first responses were returned, it became clear that something was not quite right. I received answers such as I don't Rarely, I didn't, I don't think you can. These were not the responses that I had expected. It didn't make sense. Everything else they told me about how they studied and wrote papers, clearly indicated that these scholastic studs were kicking some very serious procrastinary. I will add the appear. But so why were they all claiming that they didn't defeat procrastination? What was going on here? Fortunately, many students went on to qualify this first reaction, and it was in these qualifications that I began to figure out what they really meant. Quote I didn't think you can was how Lee, a straight A student from Columbia, began his answer. But he soon added you just have to try to limit it. Ryan, a straight A Dartmouth student, started by claiming really I don't defeat procrastination. But then he continued or at least I don't think I do, although I suppose, compared to the majority of students, I'm not as bad as I think. And the last quote comes to us from Christine, a straight A Harvard student, who said I don't know that I have yet defeated procrastination. And then she concluded but I have found ways to make this inevitable tendency less destructive. These stories come to us from chapter two in a unique little book written by one of the authors that we already love, cal Newport. Now Cal wrote this book how to Become a Straight A Student the unconventional strategies real college students use to score high while studying less. He wrote it back in 2006. And even though nearly all of our listeners are out of college or never went to college which we think is a rip off nowadays to go to college, but that's a mojo minute for another day and another time I thought we adults could gain some understanding of human nature from some of these nuggets of wisdom I found in this book. All about college and all about becoming a straight, a student, just especially after what we just heard how to Defeat Procrastination Plus, at this time, so many kids are going back to school, some of the young ones are going off to college, and so we thought we'd give you some nuggets of wisdom to help you, help them to begin to build a flourishing life and, frankly, for yourselves in your own workplaces. This book still applies to you and your effectiveness and your efficiency at work. To help us understand this book a little bit better and to provide some context, cal grabs some of the top performing students from these most elite schools from all around the country. Now, some of these top performing students were all the Phi Beta Kappa members, you know, the elite of the elite. But here's what I thought was fascinating they had to perform well in their studies and and is the most important part they had to gain those results without grinding away. So, essentially, they couldn't do what most of us imagine that the real elite of elite students had to do and what half of my friends did when I was in college. They'd park themselves at their favorite table in the library for hours upon hours upon hours and just grinded away with highlighters and notes and six cups of coffee and plenty of snacks, and they would read those notes and they would read those books and bear down and try and learn the stuff for each and every class and that was not me, by the way. I was not in that category. Now I wish I had this book. I wish I had read it before going to college. I think it would have helped me dramatically. But then again, it wasn't until my junior or senior year of school that I started reading as a habit. Now it's a junior or senior year of college, not not high school, so even if I did have this book, I doubt I would have read it anyhow. Nevertheless, these students that Cal had interviewed were the highest achievers in their schools and they did it without killing themselves, without grinding away, so I thought that was pretty cool, so I'm going to share with you, and especially this book. It's all about their tactics, their strategies and their wisdom that Cal has discovered while researching other books. So he wanted to confirm all of this by going to our nation's top schools and with our nation's top students. Now let's go back to the, to the book for our next nugget of wisdom, because this is fascinating. Over time, these extended responses began to paint a clear picture. When the Stridey students answered I don't defeat procrastination, they really meant to say I don't defeat the urge to procrastinate, and this makes perfect sense. To put it simply, some work just plain sucks, and you, like the Stridey students interviewed for this book, will want to procrastinate on this sucky work. It's unavoidable. Therefore, the goal in this step is not to teach you how to love all work and never feel like procrastinating ever again. Instead, I'm going to describe some targeted strategies to help you sidestep this unavoidable urge when it arises, not destroy it altogether. This is how Stridey students prevent procrastination from destabilizing their schedule. They don't rely on willpower and good intentions, but instead they deploy an arsenal of specific, tested rules that help them short circuit their natural desire to procrastinate. These students, of course, aren't perfect and they still occasionally put off work for no good reason, but overall, their strategies made them significantly more effective at following a study plan than their peers, and this made all the difference. What follows are five anti-percrastination battle plans drawn directly from my Stridey student interviews. And these techniques are not theoretical. They are exhaustively used by real students to beat down procrastination again and again. So you should trust them. Put them into practice immediately and make them into a habit. The effect will be immediate in your life, holy smokes. So did you catch those nuggets of wisdom? Briefly, they were Don't rely on willpower alone or your good intentions. They will ultimately always fail you. Instead, deploy that arsenal of specific, tested rules to short circuit your desire to procrastinate, essentially, to declare a war on procrastination. You make these practices into habits. Hopefully, cal goes over five of these, and they are number one keep a work progress journal. Number two feed the machine. Number three make an event out of your worst tasks. Number four build a routine. And number five choose your hard days. Now be sure to check out the book for four of the five of these, because we won't talk about all of these, but we will. We will talk about. Number four build a routine, because we're always talking about building a routine here at the Mojo Academy, and a routine is just a system that you perform each and every day. It's a system that is almost on automation. You want it to be on automation. That is how good habits become even better habits and that's how you break bad habits. So let's go back to the book to quickly grab this more in depth knowledge. Procrastination battle plan. Number four build a routine. Your schedule varies each day, but you should be able to identify at least one hour on each weekday that is consistently free. If you have an early class, make this the hour right after it lets out. If you have a late morning class, make this the hour right before it starts. In general, the morning and early afternoon are the best times to find this consistently free hour. Time in the late afternoon and evening is much more susceptible to being hijacked by unexpected events, such as your friends finishing up their class and starting to knock on your door. Once you've identified these quote protected hours and that's the important part these protected hours you use them to do your same work each week. For example, maybe Mondays, wednesdays and Fridays are for chipping away at your history reading assignments, and Tuesdays and Thursdays are for making progress on your weekly statistics problem set. The idea is to build a routine in which you use the same reserve time slot each week to do the same thing, with the goal of transforming these slices of work into a habit, something you no longer have to convince yourself to do. And if you need any validation from a college kid, here you go. I'm going to go back to the book to hear this testimonial. I figured out pretty early on the most annoying thing about bad habits, namely their tenacity, could be very useful if it was applied to other things, explained Simon, a straight, a student from Brown. I found that good habits, like making sure I do certain work at a certain same time each and every week, is really hard to get rid of. Yes, bingo. As adults we all know the power of bad habits. But to take that energy, that passion and that tenacity as Simon puts it, of doing the bad and then you make it a habit of doing the good, that's powerful. So in today's mojo minute, if you don't have small routines, small good habits that you have installed into your life, or if you're trying to break a bad habit. Install good habits to replace the bad habit and harness that same energy you're using for the bad by doing the good and in doing the good, you will be on your way to defeating procrastination and to building a flourishing life. And a little PS here come back on Thursday when we discuss the other strategies to help you win the war against yourself and against delaying doing the things you should be doing, because those are a little bad, oh oh, and a little teaser here we will talk about the little things, because the little things in college and in life do count, and Cal has a great Q&A on these little things. So we'll see you Thursday for our next mojo minute.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at team mojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.