Tired of Procrastinating? Here’s How to Manage Your Procrastination Tendencies
If you ever procrastinate, know you’re not alone. All humans on earth procrastinate on some level. It’s sooo easy to get lost in “procrastination loops.” (Enter: scrolling endlessly on social media.)
Procrastination doesn’t just prevent you from getting things done, like doing the dishes or cleaning the house.
Procrastinating also prevents you from being the person you want to be. We even procrastinate our dreams, goals, and habits!
How can we disrupt these procrastination loops and manage our procrastination tendencies?
Today I’m sharing an interview I did with Rachel Nielson on her podcast 3 in 30: Takeaways For Moms. You’ll learn WHAT procrastination is and WHY it’s super easy to fall into endless loops of procrastination and three ways you can better control your procrastination tendencies.
About a few other things…
Reclaim your creative power and rediscover who you actually are! If you’re ready to come back home to yourself, to be able to say that you know who you are and what matters to you, take my foundation course, “Finding Me.” It’s OK that you’ve lost parts of yourself along the way; but as you learn to anchor back into who you are and align your life to what matters to you, you’ll find that you have more strength, more fulfilment, and more creativity to bring to your important roles and responsibilities.
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TRANSCRIPT
Rachel: Hello, Monica. Welcome back to 3 in 30.
Monica: Oh, I am excited to be here.
Rachel: I am excited to have you. This is round three, your third appearance on 3 in 30, but it’s been a while. It’s been several years since you’ve been on here and it was high time that we got you back on here and talking about a topic that I know so many women need and are going to be interested in, and that is how to stop procrastinating.
Is this something you have some personal experience, with procrastination?
Monica: Oh yeah. Yes, of course I do. We all do. And you know when I say “stop procrastinating”. I mean, lessen procrastination in your life. Yeah. It’s not about full-on stop. Cause that will be impossible.
Rachel: Yeah, I’m glad you just started with that kind of that gentle grace-filled reminder. You’re never going to completely eliminate this, but there are some things we can do to move forward in our lives, on our dreams and our goals and our passions. And before we even dig into your takeaways, I think it is important that we address kind of the root, the humanity behind this. Yes, we can get so hard on ourselves when we procrastinate, but why do we as human beings procrastinate?
Monica: Well, I think I want to start by just acknowledging any person that you think has it all together, I promise you that person procrastinates too. It’s just a tendency that we all have as humans and it will never fully go away, but there are definitely times and seasons where it is controlling, what we’re able to not just do, but who we’re able to be.
And that’s why I think it affects us so deeply because of how we know that this procrastination is getting in the way of us being who we want to be, not just doing what we want to do. So it’s a human tendency, right. But we’re going to dig into the roots a little bit. Would that be helpful? Yes.
Okay. So there’s a nutshell. This is the nutshell version of why we procrastinate so much. And it has to do with emotions. You are either avoiding certain emotions or you are waiting for other emotions to come.
I’m going to just break that down real quick. So the emotions that we avoid with procrastination are usually things like anxiety, fear of failure, we’re avoiding feeling overwhelmed or we’re avoiding stress. We’re putting things off because we’re trying to avoid the negative feelings that we are associating with that task.
So an example of this for me as a couple years ago, I have this program called the Progress Program and I coach women. And I knew it needed to be totally overhauled the curriculum. It had just to be completely redone top to bottom. So I took a month off my podcast to do that, and I was going to spend every day working on that. But I felt so worried about if it would just fall flat on its face, if nobody would sign up ,or if it would be total crap. I was basically worried about failure, and disappointing people, and wasting my time.
So that month, and I didn’t realize it until there was a week left in the month, I deeply organized my garage, like every closet in the house. I’m sure I painted a couple of rooms, you know, so procrastination can look like productivity. Yeah. And it could also look like searching on your phone a lot.
But for me, I realized by the end of that month, it’s like, oh, I was procrastinating on motnh and I was trying to make it seem like I wasn’t. But this is what I was trying to avoid: I was trying to avoid feeling like a failure.
So if you find yourself in that procrastination loop a lot, just step back for a second and ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?”
Rachel: Hm, huge.
Monica: Yes. And there’s so much there, right? Or what am I afraid of feeling with this activity? And even if it’s like calling someone on the phone, there’s an emotion you’re avoiding. So think about that. So that’s one.
Rachel: Okay. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve like deep cleaned my desk when I was avoiding getting to work on it. I mean, we’ve all done it or like organized my medicine cabinet. Like what? You know,
Monica: You’re like, oh, this needs to be done right this minute.
Rachel: So yes. I think we are avoiding a lot of time. And what do you mean that sometimes we’re waiting for an emotion? That kind of the opposite of avoiding it? We want it…
Monica: When we are procrastinating because we’re waiting on an emotion, basically we’re waiting to feel like it, you know, where, like, “I don’t feel like it.” So basically we’re waiting to feel motivated or like we want to do it or that we have the energy to do it, or excited, in order to do the task. So we keep delaying until we feel like it.
Spoiler alert: will never make you feel like it. And that to me comes up a lot if I find myself searching on Pinterest a lot or scrolling on Instagram a bunch, it’s because I’m telling myself, I don’t feel like washing the dishes right now. Um, or I don’t feel like putting the laundry away. That’s one of my least favorite tasks, or I don’t feel like doing this huge email that I need to do, it’s going to take a lot of brain power. I just don’t feel like it. And so that’s why we get caught in those procrastination loops. It’s all about emotions. I think it helps to break it down. So you stop shaming yourself.
Rachel: And I think even having the awareness around it to just gently say to yourself, Hey, this is what’s going on.
I see you. I know what you’re doing, but not in a shaming. Like, why can’t you handle the fear or why are you afraid of failure, whatever. But just in a gentle, I understand. It’s okay. Journal it out, do what you need to do, and then take some of these steps that we’re going to talk about today to get moving through procrastination.
I wanted to also add here, Monica, that you are one of the first people that helped me see how much my perfectionism was impacting my ability to put work out into the world, to make a difference in the world. Listening to your show. And particularly in episode, you did with Jennifer Finlayson-Fife about perfectionism was such a wake-up call for me, where she talked about how that’s immaturity and that selfishness to be waiting until you have the perfect thing, or that you can look perfect, before you take a risk and try to make a difference in the world.
And I felt called out, I’m like, oh my gosh. That’s exactly what I am doing is I am withholding the gifts that I could be given to this world, because I want to be seen as perfect. And in your work, you’ve done a lot with perfectionism, and I’ve heard you say that there’s a lot of people who don’t even know they’re perfectionists and they’ll say, no, no, no, I’m not a perfectionist, but their actions would say otherwise. Can you explain that this kind of unexpected perfectionist that you encounter in your work?
Monica: I think like 80% of the perfectionists out there are actually the under-achieving kind. And I put that in quotes and those are people who are waiting a lot on the sidelines in their own lives, because they’re waiting for the perfect time, or they’re waiting for the perfect amount of money, or the skill or whatever it might be.
They’re waiting. And we procrastinate, not just our to do’s, but like I said, at the beginning, we’re procrastinating our lives, of being who we want to be. We discount ourselves from even the trying, because we won’t be perfect or “good enough” at it. Yeah. And I think a lot of women who are listening right now are going to be surprised to hear that they’re perfectionists and you are if you are in a holding pattern in your life. All or nothing is kind of the model that perfectionists follow, which means for most of us, that “all” is so impossible or so extreme or all encompassing,and the cost is so high that we tend to go more to the “nothing.” And if you’re in the more of the nothing side, you are still a perfectionist. And I think that really relates to what we’ve been discussing already about procrastination and how directly tied they are.
Rachel: Yeah, cause I’ve heard women say, oh no, no, I’m not a perfectionist. I’m not an overachiever. I don’t try. I don’t think so. I’m not a perfectionist. And I’m like, no, you’re idealizing perfectionism. Like you think that a perfectionist is someone that’s a super high achiever, when reallyyour perfectionism is what is keeping you from trying. A lot of the women who are the highest achievers, the most productive quote-unquote are actually not perfectionists because they just get out there and do it.
And they don’t care about having a perfect outcome. And so I am, and I’ve always known I am, a perfectionist and it’s held me back. I mean, it took me two years to start my podcast. I knew the format. I knew everything. And I was just waiting and waiting and procrastinating because I was afraid of failure of putting myself out there of the work that it would take.
And you had already started your podcast and I kind of admired you from afar, and honestly felt jealous. That you were out there doing what I wanted to be doing. And we’ve done an episode about that, that I’ll link about what do you do if you’re jealous of a friend and how do you overcome jealousy? And so if women out there listening and they recognize that they feel jealous of people that are doing the things that they’re procrastinating doing, I hope that this episode will be a starting place for how to get going.
So let’s start in with your three takeaways. What are your practical action steps for.
Monica: Well, and I love I’m going to be like, I love these tips because, but I do love these tips because they’re both practical, but also deep. So this will help you with a literal task you are avoiding, and it will also help you with the bigger life picture thing that you’re also putting off and avoiding.
Rachel: Yeah. So maybe even think of a specific task in your mind, hold it in your mind, as we go through these something you are avoiding doing right now that you can apply these takeaways to. And then like Monica said also you’ll get some deeper meaning as well.
Monica: Okay. So the first takeaway I have is to focus on the starting, not the ending. So a big part of procrastination, both with bigger picture stuff, as well as just literal tasks that we’re doing, we are procrastinating because we’re only imagining the ending and all the work that will go into that ending. Like I just finished scrapbooking last night and all of the supplies, all of the little papers and pictures and things. My kids have done have been outside in our main living area, I’m living in my parents’ basement right now. So it’s not a huge living area, but a living area, it’s been out there for six months and I’ve procrastinated doing it for this very reason because I knew it would take me hours to have the finished product. I was focusing on the ending.
And so what you need to do instead of focusing on the ending is to focus on just the starting point. Just the start. And with that, your starting place needs to be so easy that you don’t have to worry about all of the work. It just is something you can do really easily. So that’s actually, the only way I finally got it done is by telling myself I would just focus on going through a little stack of the papers that day. That’s it. Just going through it, not even scrapping it, just going through and deciding I’m going to recycle that I’m going to scrapbook that for a few minutes. And if you focus on the starting, what it does, it creates the momentum you need to get to the ending.
Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a natural law. One of those Newton laws, I don’t know which one it might be…
Monica: Oh, I know because I already recorded an episode that’s airing my show all about motivation. First law of motion: an object in motion stays in motion. If you start with something very easy, you will stay in motion and get more done by the end than if you’re waiting for the big amount of energy it takes to get the finished product right away.
Rachel: Yeah. So I think a really practical way to apply this would be if you recognize that you’re feeling overwhelmed by a task, ask yourself what is the very next thing that needs to happen and I’ll start there.
Monica: How can I start? Yeah. How can I start, the easiest way to start.
Rachel: That might be like, literally getting out the tool.
You need to make dinner and putting it on the counter or picking up one category of items in the room instead of the whole room, but being like, okay, we’re going to start with shoes in the basket. Totally. There’s that frozen song, do the next right thing.
Monica: The thing that, uh, yeah, like a whole kitchen, just think about, instead of doing the whole kitchen, start with one drawer.
I had Gabrielle Blair on my show a few years ago and she talked about this international move they did, which was as a family of eight because they have six children was a tremendous amount of to-dos like. Was hours and hours and hours of preparation to get to that point. And the way she started was just looking up where they’re supposed to get their passport pictures.
That was it. That was her first task.
Rachel: It was an international move with her children, right. That’s right.
Monica: Yes. To France. So where can you start?
Rachel: Yeah. Oh, that’s so freeing to just think about that. And then what’s our next step
Monica: Alongside, this is when you are starting, you need to set limits. So it seems so paradoxical, but when you are setting limits, you’re actually allowing yourself to get things done to actually show up. So setting limits helps you narrow down what you need to do to either a certain time limit, and I would make that short, or a certain number, make that few.
So let me give you some examples on this. Let’s say that instead of having a whole day set aside to organize your papers, cause I just had a client do this and she was really worried about it. Instead of setting aside a whole day, you’re going to start by just going through the files and to do that set a limit about how much time you’re going to do that, and make it so easy that you can do it without much motivation without much energy. And so for her, we did like five or 10 minutes and she literally set a timer and she just went through it for that small amount of time.
Let’s say you have a whole room full of stuff everywhere. Like your kids just exploded stuff all over the house. There’s a lot to put away. Tell the kids, Hey, we’re each gonna put away five items or 10 items you set limits around it. And somehow those limits will paradoxically make it so, also just like we talked about the first tip, it makes it so you can get more done with time. Yeah. Set limits.
Rachel: Ah, that makes so much sense. And I know you have done several coaching certifications that help with this, but in the optimize coaching, they teach you about floors and ceilings. And how setting a minimum barrier, a floor of what you will get done instead of always shooting for the ceiling. The sky. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Monica: It comes from Stephen Guise’s book, How to Be an Imperfectionist, and my friend, Brook.Snow, who is also an optimize coach, she has talked about this a lot in ways that really makes a lot of sense and her analogies are so great. It’s just basically telling yourself this is the baseline. This is the floor of how I’m going to do something instead of shooting for the big end product that you want.
It’s just a way to start so that you can get going and get into momentum, like we talked about and actually move forward.
I love the
Rachel: visual of the floors and ceilings as like a container or as a limit, because if you don’t have a floor, then you’re just floating around aimlessly without a real grounding direction. And that’s where so many of us, we don’t have a container. We don’t have a limit around our efforts. There’s another natural law. I think that says that objects will take up the amount of space that they’re given. And so if you give yourself a full day to do something, you’ll probably only work on it the las half an hour of the day or you’ll work on it all day and overwork on it, or you’ll put it off and work on it the end of the day. So giving yourself a smaller container, a more finite limit, is sometimes helpful to just get going.
Monica: And it also clears the path for you instead of being the mouse, you know, give a mouse, a cookie, that book.
Rachel: Oh yeah. That’s my life.
Monica: I tend to be that person.
Rachel: Oh yeah, me too.
Monica: So if I have a limit where I know, I am only doing this task for this amount of minutes, it keeps me focused instead of getting so distracted, which for me is another way of procrastinating.
Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. And then what’s your third takeaway?
Monica: My third takeaway is to make it enjoyable or another way to say this is satisfying. That comes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, which is so amazing, but we are more likely to do things when it bumps up, all those feel good chemicals in our brain and in our bodies. So what I like to do is pair up blah tasks, like a task that just makes me feel like, like, I hate this, with a yay reward, like that’s something that makes me feel good. And so you can pair.
So, I’ve had to call insurance so much in my time as a mom. Cause I have some special needs kids and I dread it. I hate it so much. I will put it off, but one thing that can help me is literally sucking on a piece of dark chocolate while I’m on hold for the 10th time that day. Or watching a show I really want to watch while I’m also on a whole. Or having something that I know I get to do right after it, because I’ve made it through.
You can also trick yourself into doing things like going on a walk because you get to listen to your favorite podcasts, which is probably 3 and 30 Takeaways for Moms Podcast. So you’re trying to pair it. You’re tricking your brain and to make you think this is not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
I have to do this with laundry. Every time folding laundry, I have to watch my face. Anything Britis on Netflix, like it has to be something British. That’s how I ever get the laundry done. That’s the only reason why.
So think about how can you pair a blah task with a yay reward. Something that feels good and not only will it help you actually do the thing, it will trick your brain into thinking that’s not so bad. We could do that again.
Rachel: Totally. And that will get the momentum going.
Monica: Yes. You’re kind of like you’re intercepting your brain and you’ll be like, no, we go here because it feels good. And it works. You tricked yourself and it works.
Rachel: Yeah, I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve turned to a podcast or a playlist to get through something that I was dreading. So always a really good strategy.
Well, Monica, this has been so, so helpful. I want to hear more about your show and what you have to offer.
Monica: Yeah. So my show is called About Progress and self-development is a really hard field because a lot of people are teaching this an all or nothing ways, like “get up and do the thing. And you’re the only one in charge of your life. And here’s all the extreme ways to make it happen.”
And, you know, you talked about perfectionism. My story is me realizing that perfectionism was absolutely ruining every part of my life, both as an overachieving and then as an underachieving, perfectionist, and I wanted to change. And the only way I could do that was by experimenting with what it meant to live a life based around progress, not perfection. And that’s how my podcast came about. And I did not think about my podcast for years. I thought about it one week and I started it the same day that I finally decided I was like, I’m going to, yeah, I can do that. I’m going to do it. And because of that, I made a lot of mistakes along the way.
And I had to learn about the growth mindset and how to learn from failure and mistakes and, and how to be who you really are in spite of the ups and downs of the things and the passions that you’re pursuing. And so that’s my long way of saying come and listen to About Progress, because that’s where we talk to about progress made practical and it’s for everyday women who want things to change in their lives, but know that the extreme all or nothing model is not working for them anymore.
Rachel: I really love how you have made progress practical. I think you gave some great examples of that in this episode of the grace that you have for women for all of us that are struggling to become as well as some practical steps. You often say that you give your listeners a hug and a kick in the pants to get going. And I love that about you.
I hope that you’ll apply these three takeaways that Monica gave us today. Not just for like the tasks that you have to get done in your home, which are important too, but also for the dreams and the goals and the ambitions that you have. Just start and feel your feelings acknowledge them and then start. And we are rooting for you all the way.
Well, thank you. My dear friend, I have learned so much from you watching you to just do something. That’s kind of your tagline that you say, just do something. It has taught me a tremendous amount. I admire you so much and thank you for coming on 3 in 30.
I appreciate it.
