How to Beat Procrastination like a Pro Athlete

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Learning how to overcome procrastination will be the biggest gift you can give your future self.

You probably think based on everything I preach and talk about that I don't procrastinate. But, I do on many things I utterly dread doing.

For example, folding laundry. Don't get me started on it. It's my chore in our family and I despise it. Someone once asked me why my nanny doesn't do it. Well, Susan, I don't have a nanny anymore. And even when I did, that wasn't one of her tasks, because I would redo it all anyway.

Now that you know where I stand on laundry. Let's talk about why that matters.

At the heart of it, you procrastinate the things that are boring, not important to you, or simply difficult to do. I was reading a productivity book recently by Laura Mae Martin where she broke down reasons we procrastinate into seven categories. Boring. Frustrating. Difficult. Ambiguous. Unstructured. Lacking intrinsic reward. Not meaningful.

Once you know why you're avoiding something, you can actually do something about it.

Here are three things that work for me:

Chunk it down into bite-sized parts.

Big tasks sit untouched because your brain can't find a starting point. It's overwhelming. Even writing this newsletter feels overwhelming for me sometimes. So, I start by writing down a few topics that are on my mind that I could riff about.

Then, I take an embarrassingly small first step. Not "write the newsletter", but write one paragraph. Not "clean out your inbox of 465 emails", only reply to ten. Once you start, your brain shifts into completion mode. Starting is everything.

Research backs this up. Psychologists call it the Zeigarnik Effect, which is the brain's tendency to keep pulling your attention back to unfinished tasks. Once you start something, your mind wants to complete it. The hardest part is always starting.

Give yourself permission to stop.

This one sounds counterintuitive, but it works wonders for me.

Most people avoid starting because they're dreading climbing the entire mountain. When you give yourself permission to stop, you remove the open-ended dread of toiling away at something you don't enjoy doing.

There is actually science behind this. Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Deci and Ryan, found that autonomy is one of our three core psychological needs. When we feel in control of how and when we work, motivation goes up and resistance to starting drops. When we feel trapped by a task with no exit in sight, we avoid it. Giving yourself permission to stop hands the control back to you.

I use this tactic for every major project that’s on my plate and it allows me to get into a flow state much quicker. I start and then stop when I want to or have lost my energy, with zero guilt. I come back to it when I’m in a better head space and mentally ready to tackle it efficiently. Unlike the Pomodoro Technique, I don't wait for an alarm to tell me when to stop. I decide based on what my energy level is telling me.

Get an accountability partner.

This is the one people underestimate the most.

A study published by the American Society of Training and Development found that having a specific accountability appointment with someone increases your likelihood of completing a goal by 95%. Not 50. Not 70. 95%!

This is why it's far more effective to work out with a trainer. You are less likely to let someone else down.

We will let ourselves down before we let someone else down. That's just human nature. So use it. Find one person, a friend, a peer, or a coach, and commit to a specific deliverable by a specific time.

The social contract does the work your willpower can't.

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