Improve your productivity with the advice of a former procrastinator.
Plus, Caveday, the app that proves peer pressure works.
Welcome to another edition of ProductiveGrowth 🌱, monthly stories about productivity, leadership, motivation, and anything else that allows us to work less and achieve more.
First time reading? Sign up here.
Understanding procrastination to achieve deprocrastination.
Have you ever scheduled yourself to work on a task on a specific day, and then kept pushing it off until you had no other solution but to do it or miss the deadline?
Maybe you thought it was going to take too long, it was going to be hard, or that it was going to be plain boring. So you pushed it further away. That’s what a procrastinator does. We’ve all been there or know someone who struggles with procrastination.
But according to Vita Benes, co-founder of Deprocrastination, a guide with actionable tasks that help you overcome procrastination, “The issue is not you as a person, you aren’t lazy.” According to Vita, “All of us have things we do out of enthusiasm. We are productive in some aspects of our lives, but not in others. It’s more about a fit between you and the work. Something about the task is making you procrastinate.”
Vita is a writer, designer, developer and entrepreneur. He’s based in the Czech Republic and got into studying productivity after he launched a finance literacy app. While the business side was tough (his app unfortunately didn’t catch on, he says), he learned to be productive on his own. So he educated himself both on productivity and behavioral science and came up with the project “Deprocrastination” as a way of dealing with his own struggle to avoid distractions.
What exactly is procrastination?
Procrastination is much more complex than putting a task off until later. It’s the accumulation of stress, and, according to Deprocrastination, making a habit out of it.
I never thought of procrastination as a habit until I read it in Vita’s guide. But reading the word “habit” as part of the definition made me curious. Then Vita explained that giving in to distractions as a way of avoiding work, and doing it over and over again, is how something becomes second nature.
“When we feel some kind of discomfort about work, the impulse is to look for something else to do, to escape. This could be to reach for the phone or open a new tab and escape that way. Every time we do it, even if we think it’s just for a minute, we wire that habit into our brain. That whenever we get distressed, we grab our phone, for example,” Vita explained.
He also mentioned it can be very easy to pick this habit up, especially if you work with your phone anywhere near you. A 2014 study by the University of Southern Maine showed that the mere presence of your phone can make you distracted. The reason being that phones “may serve as a constant reminder of the broader social network that is potentially available,” the study explains. Hence, we disconnect from whatever we’re doing to engage with technology.
Vita explains that the need for checking your phone is much more than FOMO. It’s not only that we fear the possibility of missing out on something; it’s also that these apps and distractions are extremely easy to access. “It's easier than ever to satisfy any kind of trivial curiosity,” he explained.
We have the world in the palm of our hands, and it takes a lot of discipline to decide not to access it.
What causes procrastination?
For Vita, “Procrastination is the symptom. It's the tip of the iceberg. It’s what’s underneath procrastination that is the most interesting.” We push tasks away and get distracted. But we don’t really see why that happens.
People tend to procrastinate for several reasons. In Deprocrastination (p.90-93), Vita and his co-author, Mat, bucketed these reasons into thirteen causes:
Ease of distraction: Picking up your phone whenever you feel a bit bored by work.
Stress and anxiety: Being constantly anxious or stressed — whatever the reason — can cause you to be less productive. If your mind is wandering all over the place, then your brain is constantly switching between different contexts, and even when you’re not doing any actual work, your brain is getting exhausted.
Being overwhelmed: Feeling like you have to do hundreds of things, and that you have to do them now, can be overwhelming. That feeling limits action.
Lacking structure: Not knowing when to start, or not having a routine, can cause you to procrastinate.
Being bored by work: It’s almost impossible to love everything you do at work, but that doesn’t mean that you can avoid it. Boredom causes procrastination.
Having low self-esteem: Thinking you’re not good enough, or not having confidence in yourself, is harming your productivity.
Having an inner dictator: Saying mean things to yourself about how you’re not doing the work, how you’re lazy, or other self-criticisms, is counterproductive.
Fear of failure: Thinking you’ll fail before you even start makes you never start at all.
Perfectionism: Iterating on something until it’s perfect, or not doing it because it will never be perfect, limits you from doing anything at all.
Fear of success: The idea of succeeding can sometimes be more overwhelming than failure itself, and it can also make you procrastinate.
Fear of being controlled: Procrastination can also be a form of rebelling from a mandatory task that you don’t want to do.
Fear of endless work: Work is infinite, and sometimes we think that finishing a task only leaves us time to do more work. This idea can cause you to put off your responsibilities to feel somehow free.
Lack of motivation: Motivation plays a huge role in how we operate. Fortunately, according to Deprocrastination, motivation is not as unpredictable as we may think.
As you can see, procrastination can occur due to a variety of reasons and none of them include laziness or the lack of willpower. Charlotte Lieberman from The New York Times was so surprised by that fact that she wrote a whole article about it.
“Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond,” Lieberman explained.
Circling back to the idea that procrastination doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re lazy, but that we have an aversion to a certain task, means that we can experience more than one cause of procrastination. Maybe we tend to procrastinate on manual work because we find it boring, but we procrastinate on strategic tasks for fear of failure. Plus, those causes can change over time. The only thing that will help us overcome procrastination is understanding what’s causing it.
How to find the root cause of procrastination?
First, we need to find out why we’re putting off some tasks. We need to find the root cause. For this, Vita shared an interesting experiment to do every week to reflect on the previous week. Vita recommends trying it on Fridays or Mondays.
“Grab a piece of paper or open a doc and write down ‘What haven’t I done yet?’ The ‘yet’ part is crucial. And then write ‘Why haven’t I done it?’ Take as much time as you want to write what it is about that specific task that makes you procrastinate. Writing down why those tasks are making you procrastinate will leave you with a list of reasons. Then you’ll need to identify the root causes and start addressing those,” he said.
Make sure you do the experiment in a distraction-free environment.
In Deprocrastination, Vita and Mat share an actionable guide for each of the causes to procrastination mentioned before. You need to pay for the guide to access them. However, Vita shared some of those problem-solving techniques with us below:
To overcome distractions: Using the Deprocrastination Chrome extension will help you block sites that can cause you to easily get distracted. You can also access your behavioral data later. Paying attention to this data can help you notice if the distraction is coming from the way your team communicates, for example. Vita explained that if your boss expects you to answer every Slack message within 5 minutes and that’s interrupting your focus, the way to overcome it is to “have a conversation where the manager and report can discuss if anything they do affects the other person’s focus and ability to do their job and work on it.”
To overcome a lack of motivation: A good idea is to visually record your progress into a spreadsheet, a whiteboard or a piece of paper that can constantly be seen. “Sometimes we work on the same email, the same document, the same piece of code forever, and we don’t see any meaningful results. Or the difference is so small that it’s barely noticeable. That's not good for us mentally, because we like to see the results of our work, and if there are apparently no results, it’s very easy to get demotivated. It’s important to make your efforts visible to yourself,” Vita said.
To overcome the fear of failure or perfectionism: Vita explains that it’s a good idea to try new ideas in private, and follow the technique called the “three draft system” by Neil Strauss. “He writes a first draft just for himself. He shows it to no one. He just does it to put his thoughts on paper. In the second draft, he edits it to show a friend or someone who’s not critical to read it, and he shows it to a handful of people. The third draft is tailored for critics and the haters, a slightly bigger group of people see it, and that is the same version that the public reads after some edits,” Vita said.
To overcome a lack of structure and missing deadlines: A good first step is to set small goals and commit to them before slowly building up your momentum. “Instead of promising that you’ll do four hours of work tomorrow, do thirty minutes of work today. Make an easy promise to yourself and keep that promise. That will create a more positive feedback loop of work, because if you do some work, you start feeling good about it, and you’ll be able to increase the responsibility,” Vita explained.
To overcome having an inner dictator: We say “Silenzio, Bruno”. We have the power to stop ourselves when the negative self-talk begins. “When people don't do the work and they beat themselves up, they constantly remind themselves that they should’ve started a week ago. They remind themselves that they’re lazy and idiots. And that kind of negative self-talk statement only contributes to the problem,” Vita shared.
The idea is to take a step back and think about the reasons we procrastinate. From there, we can treat the root causes instead of saying mean things about ourselves.
Another thing that helps Vita overcome procrastination is to have input-free time in his days. As mentioned before, we’re constantly exposed to distractions that come from living in a hyperconnected world. This makes it harder to be productive and to disconnect.
Vita explains input-free time as time devoted to being alone with your mind and away from devices. Think of it as space to go on walks, meditate or ride your bike to calm your mind. It’s “Free time when you're walking, when you're not staring at screens, when you're not accepting any outside input, but you're just processing the thoughts that are already in your mind,” he said.
Whether we realize it or not, it’s not healthy for our creativity to do everything in the same room, on the same computer and in the same position. And we are exposed to an enormous amount of information that comes from technology every day. The only time we’re alone with our thoughts might be while showering or sleeping — that is, if you don’t listen to a podcast or TV show during those times.
As I explained in April's issue of this newsletter, being productive is highly related to emotions, including how you’re feeling and whether you can or cannot understand and process your emotions. Input-free time can help you to reflect on your emotions and potentially treat the root cause of your procrastination. Knowing why you do what you do can lead you to solve the issue and increase your productivity.
If you want to read Vita’s book and get the full guide to becoming a Deprocrastinator, click here.
Thanks for reading.
Best,
Camila.
Edited by: Lauren Maslen.
EDITOR’S PICKS
Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path- It’s common to think that the only way of vertically growing in an organization is by having a managerial career. However, technical leadership is a path we often forget, but it’s as crucial as other managerial roles. Keavy McMinn is the senior principal engineer at Fastly, and she thrives on making an impact through a technical leadership role. Click to read her story.
How to focus when you feel anxious- Curt Steinhorst is the CEO of Focuswise. He hosts a weekly 5-minute podcast called “Focus Break,” and in this episode, he shares three ways to focus when you’re feeling anxious. I must say, finding something that makes you feel distracted helps you reconnect with the things you have to do.
Benefits of Walking [For Anyone]- For most of us, walking sounds like a trivial activity. We do it every day to get from one place to another. But walking for a determined period can bring great benefits to your health and well-being. Also, as writer Klim Y references in the article, walking can help you organize your thoughts. Read how to get better at walking here.
6 Steps For Getting Into Flow State and Maximizing Productivity- In my opinion, the best productivity hack is wanting to do something. But unfortunately, we cannot rely on motivation all the time. This article shares 6 steps to follow that will help you get into that same flow state and achieve more with fewer resources.
DISCOVER
Caveday is a service that connects people with others in the Caveday community to do deep work over Zoom. But according to PC Magazine, it’s much more magical than that. It’s like a guided and time-limited work retreat to help you achieve your goals. Plus, you have others on the other end of the screen to keep you accountable.
SCROLLING THROUGH
Remembering that you will have time to do it all will help you organize your time and take one step at a time. It’s a good idea to start with easy tasks and build up from there.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Four steps to target your employees' pain points - Your people can make or break your business. Having a small business is no excuse to ignore performance management systems, and while you may already know that, you might be extremely overwhelmed with other processes. We get it! In this article, we share 4 ways to manage your employees’ performance without implementing a system.
Is Life Better When You’re Busy?- It seems like we love the idea of being busy. While we often use it as an excuse, many of us actually love having several things to do at all times. Being too busy can lead to burnout, so we need to understand how to navigate the busyness throughout our lives. In this blog post, author Scott Young explains why it feels so good to be busy, and how to make the most of it.
Performance management systems: a beginner’s guide - Managing your people’s performance is crucial to having an engaged and results-oriented company. Read our September issue to learn all about Management by Objectives (MBO), OKRs the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), and how you can put these performance management systems to use.
WORLD EXPLORER
I grew up with a private highway in my backyard, Queens, NY. Now owned by NYC the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway is a hidden bike path and jogger paradise. It’s hidden in plain sight, nestled between homes and elevated above cross streets like the High Line in Manhattan. It starts at the edge of Fresh Meadows in Cunningham Park continues as an elevated roadway ending at Alley Pond Park in eastern queens as a hidden oasis.
The parkway doesn’t look like much by today’s standards. Patches of asphalt and cement, that at most can fit a two-lane road lined by the backyards of houses and tree overhangs. It was a premier racetrack when it opened, later expanding to a toll road and get away for bootleggers.
Built by the heir to the country's largest railroad and shipping empire. William K. Vanderbilt II started the first international auto race in the United States, the Vanderbilt Cup Race. It was so popular that people charged $25 dollars for parking which is $768 today’s dollars. Its popularity resulted in the death of spectators which forced William to build the first concrete highway that was exclusively for automobiles, you guessed it the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway.
What did you think of this issue? 🤔
Amazing 🙌 • Good 👏 •Meh 👌 •Bad 😴
See you next issue,
Steve 👋
SUPPORT, CONTRIBUTE or SPONSOR
If you liked this issue buy us a coffee to support our work.
Ask a question, Write a guest post, share your story, or recommend an article: reply to this email or submit it here
Sponsor a post or social media by getting your media kit: here
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, consider sharing 📨 it with friends, or subscribing if you haven’t already.
Totally agree on structure and motivation! That's the basis behind Groove's social focus sessions (https://links.groove.ooo/substack).
I'm biased since I'm on Groove's team ;) but I'd use it all the time even if I wasn't.
Pretty similar concept to Caveday, but Groove is free, the groups are only up to 4 people, and you're off video and sound after the initial check-in until the regroup. We like to say it's a way to get sh*t done the fun way. Would love to see you on a Groove!