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The reason I’m writing about procrastination is because at the end of the day, procrastination is ultimately what will hold you back from escaping the office.
I used to be a serial procrastinator because I used to carry the belief that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to achieve my desired goal.
I believe this is the fear that many would be office escapees carry around as well. They believe that no matter what they do, they can never escape the office, so they either do nothing or avoid the mission critical tasks by making the excuse that they are too busy with something else.
Below I’m going to talk about 4 simple ideas that helped me overcome procrastination and push myself past the mental barriers that were holding me back from escaping the office and living the life I wanted.
Trimming the Fat – Applying the 80/20 Rule to Everything
When I learned of the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto principle), it changed everything for me.
I used to be a hoarder. Not just of stuff, but of information as well. I used to feel that in order to learn how to do something well, I needed to know everything.
Along with this I’m also an efficiency addict. I hate wasting time and like to do things as quickly as possible with maximum impact.
This meant that often times I would get frustrated from trying to do or learn things, as I would always try to learn every single thing there was to know about a subject in order to be good at it, which in reality is impossible if you don’t have all the time in the world.
The 80/20 rule taught me that in the majority of cases, only 20% of what you need to know is actually high impact.
The other 80% is just icing on the cake so to say.
For instance, if you talk about baking a cake, most could agree that making the base is the easiest but most important part.
The part that really takes up all your time is the time spent decorating it and putting all the intricate detailing to make it look better.
You could have left out all the decoration and you would still have what most would agree is a cake, and most people would be happy to eat it if you put it on a plate.
This is just a simple example of the 80/20 rule, but I’ve found that I can apply it to almost everything, especially activities I don’t enjoy so I can get through them as quickly as possible.
The rule isn’t perfect, but for me believing that there is always a simpler and faster way to do something to achieve the most important results has done alot to help me overcome procrastination and to feel excited about doing new things.
Understanding Yourself – The Rules of Pain and Pleasure and The 6 Human Needs
When I first came across Anthony Robbins audio course entitled Personal Power I was skeptical. I’d had experience with motivational guru’s and they usually never provided practical information that I could use.
I thought this course was going to be same positive thinking mumbo jumbo I’d heard so many times before, but this course came recommended to me from a friend who usually wouldn’t send junk my way.
After going through the first 10 days of the course in a few hours, I was quite impressed by the simple ideas he presented which I could apply to myself immediately.
The key lessons I got from the course were the rules of pain and pleasure and the 6 human needs.
The rules of pain and pleasure
The rules of pain and pleasure state that all our actions are determined by our desire to avoid pain and feel pleasure and that we were ‘hard wired’ to function this way.
This didn’t seem right to me until I understood his definition of pain and pleasure.
Pleasure doesn’t refer solely to physical pleasure; there is also emotional pleasure, which sometimes gets referred to as psychological or spiritual pleasure .
This applies to pain as well, whereby we experience physical as well as emotional pain as well.
An example of when physical pleasure and emotional pleasure can clash is taking drugs to feel good but feeling guilty later because you feel your family wouldn’t approve.
Another example is the man who experiences physical pain and hardship climbing a mountain in order to feel emotional pleasure later in the form of pride and achievement.
Understanding the simple fact that we will always try to avoid pain and gain pleasure, and also understanding at the same time that physical and emotional pleasure don’t always go hand in hand, allowed me to better understand why I did things and also to change negative mindsets and behaviors that were holding me back.
For instance, I remember the day when I wanted to ask for my telecommuting agreement. I was nervous and my whole body was racked with tension from the thought of finally taking the steps towards achieving the goal I had spent so many months preparing for.
Thoughts of failure filled my head and my focus was moving in completely the wrong direction.
Taking a moment, I reflected on the pain I was instinctively trying to avoid and realized that it was the pain of failure.
I was afraid that all my effort would have been for nothing and that as long as I avoided walking into the office and talking to my boss, there was still hope that my plan could succeed.
I was avoiding the chance that I could fail.
The next thing I reflected on was the original pain that had caused me to attempt to gain a telecommuting agreement in the first place.
The stress of being in the office even if I didn’t want to be there, the feeling of being trapped and having no freedom, the pain of having to get up every morning at 7am whether I wanted to or not to go to an office where I would sit and stare at a computer for 8 hours, the pain of not being able to spend my most productive hours doing things I enjoyed instead of working, the pain of gradually getting more and more unhealthy with each passing month from spending too much time sitting down, the pain of coming home feeling too exhausted and wanting rest to do anything fun with my partner and friends… and the list goes on.
Putting all my focus on those pains (I usually find it easier to focus on avoiding a painful to gain pleasure than to simply focus on pleasure) I got up the courage to go and ask my boss for what I wanted.
Had I not known exactly how to personally ‘brainwash’ myself in that critical moment to take action, I may not have done anything and I would still be in the office.
Telecommuting for me has been a life changing event and this simple idea contributed to making it possible.
The 6 human needs
According to the course, there are 6 human needs and that in order to feel fulfillment in life, all of these needs must be met.
These needs are the need for certainty (comfort), the need for uncertainty (excitement and variety), the need for significance (personal identity), the need for connection and love (belonging), the need for growth (achievement and success) and the need for contribution (making the world a better place).
By my definition, fulfillment is a feeling of oneness and contentment with ones life.
Taking sometime to think about times when I felt fulfilled in my own life, it became clear to me that the above needs are indeed fairly accurate.
This helped provide me with a blueprint of sorts in order to find fulfillment in my daily life.
Some people would like to believe that fulfillment is something that just happens and you can’t control it. For me though, I believe that understanding the rules to finding fulfillment significantly improves your chances of finding it.
For example, a time when I really felt fulfilled was when I was a youth leader back when I was in school and college.
During that time I felt fulfilled because I had this feeling of certainty that what I was doing was good. This met my need for certainty and contribution. Through speaking and playing music, I felt I had something unique to offer the youth community and this met my need for significance.
I also made many good friends through my work as a youth leader and this met my needs for connection and love.
The work was also very interesting and challenging which met my need for excitement and variety.
Understanding what to look for in order to achieve fulfillment in my daily life helps me take real steps to move away from activities I don’t find fulfilling ( working 9-to-5 for example) and to take steps towards doing things that I do find fulfilling (constantly learning and growing, spending time with friends and family).
Use Next Action Lists Along with To-Do Lists
Knowing how to 80/20 my activities and understanding how pain and pleasure worked wasn’t nearly enough.
I still had a tendency to get overwhelmed with to-do items and would always carry this fear that no matter what I did, I could never complete certain to-do items.
This led to stress, uncertainty and ultimately procrastination.
Understanding that I needed to find a way to overcome this ‘pain’ of frustration, I sought to find an answer.
My search led me to David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity.
His book introduced me to the idea of using next action lists instead of just simple to-do lists.
The reason he recommends having a next actions list is to allow you to know exactly what you need to do in order to complete an item on your to-do list.
An example of this would be instead of simply writing “Cook Dinner” on my to-do list, I would write the following action items under it:
- Go to supermarket and buy beef roast and marinate sauce
- Go home and put beef roast in bowl with marinate sauce
- Put bowl in fridge and leave for 2 hours
- At 6pm, preheat oven to 200 degrees
- Place beef on a tray and place tray in oven
- Set timer for 1 hour
- Begin setting table at 6:50pm
- Take roast out of oven when timer goes off
- Place roast on table
- Dinner is served
Each of the listed action items needs to an actual action that is clear and easy to understand.
The reason why you want to create to-do lists along with associated next actions is because having a clear start to finish procedure on how to complete a to-do item prevents you from constantly worrying about it.
If you want to understand what I mean, try this simple exercise.
- Think of a to-do item that has been on your mind for some time but you have been procrastinating on for whatever reason.
- Next, list down all the next actions required in order to tick off that to-do item as complete.
Once you’ve written it all down, you’ll probably find that you feel more relaxed if you were stressed. The reason for this is because you are no longer wondering what it is you need to do in order to complete that item on your to-do list.
Also, since it’s all listed down on paper, you now have a reference outside your head to remind you of what you need to do whenever you feel unsure and start wondering about that to-do item.
If you have been procrastinating on it, what you will tend to find is that there is at least one action item on your list that leads to some form of pain.
For example, if lets say you’ve been procrastinating to call the plumber to fix the toilet, you might find that one of the action items on your list is “clear toilet of crap before plumber arrives”.
I don’t know about you, but clearing out crap is not high up there on things I enjoy doing that lead to fulfillment.
Listing out action items allows you to do three things to help you overcome procrastination:
- It gets you absolutely clear on all the necessary actions to complete your to-do items
- It reduces your stress associated with the to-do item. You just need to refer to your next actions list whenever you feel yourself worrying about it.
- It helps you identify and isolate pain related action items that may be causing you to procrastinate. This then allows you to deal with the main issues that are holding you back from taking action.
Summary
Using these 4 simple ideas, I have been able to overcome procrastination and manage problems that I have struggled with my entire life.
Going through Anthony Robbin’s Personal Power course helped me understand in a fundamental way how my body and nervous system are hardwired so that I can better understand how to achieve results that are both physically and emotionally pleasurable and fulfilling.
This has since allowed me to focus my actions primarily on doing activities that will lead to fulfillment.
Using the 80/20 rule, I’ve managed to trim my daily activities to the most mission critical activities.
By reducing the number of to-do’s and keeping the action items short for each to-do item short, I reduce my chances of procrastinating.
Having the action list’s in themselves also gives me a reliable reference that allows me to track my to-do items and their associated actions so I don’t have to constantly worry about what I need to do.
There will be occasions when creating a short list of action items will be impossible. There will also be occasions when having a list of action items that don’t lead to some form of pain will be impossible to avoid as well (for example, cleaning up vomit and poop with your bare hands).
During moments like these, you will need to reassess the pain and pleasure you associate with that particular situation and try to come up with enough pleasurable reasons to get yourself to take action.
If you’ve ever done something like catching a cockroach with your bare hands to impress a girl when you’d normally scream like a girl if you were alone, you understand what I mean.
In the context of escaping the office, you need to understand that its more about mentality than methodology.
There are plenty of ways to escape the office.
You just need to find a way to either overcome the mental barriers that are holding you back (learn to associate more pleasure with escaping the 9-to-5 or learn to associate more pain with staying in the 9-to-5) or to find a way to work around them (telecommute to reduce fear of income uncertainty while you develop other income streams).
I found that ultimately, the belief that helped me escape the office was the belief that if I didn’t do it, I would be throwing my life away.
Everyones reason will be different, however that was the reason that was strong enough to drive me to take action because I associate alot of pain with regret.
I didn’t want to look back on my life and realize that I had spent the best years of my youth in an office stuck in a job I didn’t find fulfilling when I knew for sure that there was a better way to live that would allow me to pursue and ultimately find my true passions in life.
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