Sticky Learning Lunches

#34: Keep Putting Off Your To-Do List?

Today's topic, Annoyed That You Keep Putting Off Tasks Part 1. Find out why you procrastinate, how to avoid it, and simple tips to start doing the tasks that you are putting off.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Good afternoon, sticky learning lunches. Just gonna give it 30 seconds. Everyone has just suddenly compiling in at the, just a few seconds beforehand, which is great. It's fantastic to see you all. Colin, thank you Darren. Great to see you. Fabian, lovely to see you again. Gina. Always a pleasure. Howard, John. John, thank you for being here. Karen, good to see you again, Lynn. Alia sorry. Yeah, ela, Stuart, Tim, Vicki. There's some wonderful, there's some new faces here, which is always great to see.

Nathan Simmonds:

There's some I want, I don't wanna say old faces, 'cause in that would be wrong. You know, just some regulars. We've got some regulars in. And it's lovely to see you all. Thank you for being here. Just gonna give it 10 more seconds. Just wait for the last handful of full of people to arrive. Jane, good to see you again. Diane. Welcome Andrea. Thank you very much for being here. Just before we get in, on a scale of one's 10, one terrible, 10, phenomenal, how are we feeling today? How are we feeling?

Work on your procrastination and get your to-do list done

 

Nathan Simmonds:

Oh, and also just writing the comments. How are we feeling about learning some stuff about procrastination and how we overcome that state, one to 10, how are you feeling? And also, let me know how you're feeling about getting some tips around procrastination. We've got a seven. Can't wait. Good. Thank you very much, Karen. Nine, six. Tired. 10 up for it. That's a good trade.

Nathan Simmonds:

Seven. I wanted to put this off to be fair or to be honest. Thanks Howard for the joke. Good bit harassed. Ready for a break. Dunno. Can't make up my mind. Ha, funny people, funny, funny people, right? So let's dive into this. If anyone's coming in late, that's absolutely fine. Like I said, they might have been putting it off. They didn't wanna face the hard truth of what's actually gonna be talked about today. Let's get into this. Welcome to today's Sticky learning lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter.

Nathan Simmonds:

The home of sticky learning idea of these sessions is to give you skills to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do right now at home. And also preparing you for return, returning back to the office if that's the case. These sessions, we've got three sessions now all around procrastination. And I know from the previous trainings that I've delivered and the previous conversations that we've had, I've been drip feeding some elements around procrastination, some elements around mindset, and some ideas that are gonna help shift that.

Nathan Simmonds:

And what we wanted to do with these sessions is bring 'em together in a package of three learnings so that you can really understand at a deep level what is procrastination, how you are doing it, and also have a mechanism to overcome that in the best possible way and keep you moving forward. And that's what we wanna do. We wanna bring this to life for you to keep you, give you that momentum.

Nathan Simmonds:

First things first. Who here is a procrastinator yes or no in the comments? Who here is a procrastinator? We've got a yes, I've got an everyone tell you later. Maybe I can be sometimes last minute Charlie. A-K-A-A-K, a big time, sometimes good. And it's the same with Alcoholics Anonymous. Now the first thing about when you are, when you are an addict or you are an alcoholic, is to admit it. You have to take ownership of where you are with what's going on.

Nathan Simmonds:

Now, if you are not able to do that, you won't be able to put the actions in place or the steps in that are gonna help you move beyond that. We are all procrastinators. So that's the first thing I want to get you, you know, get really clear in your head that we all have a tendency to do it. How we work through it and how we use it to its advantage is different for different people

Nathan Simmonds:

And with the level of experience. So I wanted to cover that first, but quite here, we, I'll dive straight, I'll dive straight in too quickly. First things first, we've gotta set you up for success for this session, for the ongoing mobile phones. Let's make sure we're just zeroing out of distraction phones on flight mode, a hundred percent attention clean sheet for today.

Nathan Simmonds:

Write your procrastination at the top of it. Write keepers up there. And these, this, this sheet is gonna be the ideas that you want to go back and remind yourself about and reignite the thinking and remember what we talked about to kind of get the thinking going even further and embed the learning even deeper. Really important that we do this. So procrastination, we're all procrastinators.

Nathan Simmonds:

You have to take ownership of it. Why? I've got key elements here because it's inbuilt. So the first part I'm gonna cover today is it's a little bit of science. And then how you learn to dress it up. The science is that we all procrastinate. We have a central nervous system that is designed for comfort, yet we have a a spirit and a soul that is designed for growth. So what happens is, though, this central nervous system, this, this physical body that we have it, the idea is it's, is the brain is trying to keep us alive so that we can procreate and keep the species moving forward.

Nathan Simmonds:

And that's all any species is trying to do, is to adapt, to evolve and keep moving forward. So 200,000 years ago, what would happen is the amygdala that primordial part of your brain, the reptilian brain, the moment that you would go outside of the cave where you would go into something that or into an alien environment, that part of your brain would fire up and start to make you feel anxious or nervous or scared in order for you to go out there as quickly as possible and return back to the comfort, the creature comforts of your cave where you are safe so that you could continue to survive and your family would survive.

Nathan Simmonds:

But the problem is now, as we've got into 2020, regardless of what's going on, is your brain can't differentiate between a saber-tooth tiger or a job interview. It rates them at the same level of, of, of threat because that's the only thing your brain has has is a very binary kind of equation. Is it gonna eat me? Is it going to, you know, steal my food? Is it a threat or does it feel good? Can I move towards it?

Nathan Simmonds:

So the moment we start getting some of the, the, these brain signals and, and these frustrations and these anxieties coming up, the moment this happens, our brain starts to go into shut down. The, the logical part of our brain up here at the front closes down, and we go into fight, flight, flock, or freeze. And you've heard me mention this a couple of times in the training sessions, and this is what's hard starting to happen when we get into that and when we start getting, you know, that feeling, we then start to make excuses about why we don't want to do things or why we do want to do things.

Nathan Simmonds:

And this then comes out as procrastination. So what happens is we, we find ways to use our words that then justify why we are not doing things and we start to make excuses or we use socially acceptable mechanisms that distract us from actually doing what we need to be doing. 'cause It doesn't feel comfortable 'cause it's not normal because it's outside of our comfort zone.

Nathan Simmonds:

Hope this is useful so far high levels neuroscience, I'm not gonna go too in depth with that, but you just need to understand that this is actually your brain working and it's been doing it for 200,000 years or so and it's been doing it very effectively because we're still alive as a species just about right now in 2020. Bill Mollison, who's an interesting gentleman now sadly passed away. His phrase or quote that I learned from him is, you know, work with nature not against it. So if you understand that this is part of how your brain works, it's brain chemistry and it's your brain playing tricks on you to keep you alive. When you want to stop procrastinating, you just have to learn to play tricks on it back so you can keep yourself moving forward.

Nathan Simmonds:

Hope that's useful. Quick mouthful of tea. And then I'm gonna get into some common excuses that we use on a regular basis and to use as excuses to validate why we're not moving. So today what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you the seven common ones we use and then depending on time today within, I'm gonna boil that down even further tomorrow and get, start to give you that real clear insight as to why you're doing what you're doing and how to create that real deep focus and insight and alertness to help you move beyond it. So the first one, we've got the first excuse, excuse number one. It's easy.

Nathan Simmonds:

So what we have is actually modern technology and the way we work it is just making it easy to send a message, write an email, play Facebook Scrabble, do this, do that, you know, it's easy to avoid it now. Or it might be that the job's too easy to do. So because it's not physically challenging or mentally stimulating, we don't go towards it. So we put it off, nah, not important enough. And because then the distractions are easy, it's easy to flick onto social media and find yourself scrolling for 20 minutes rather than doing what you're meant to be doing.

Nathan Simmonds:

Why? Because social media isn't actually social, it's antisocial. So what they're using is these clever algorithms. But they are, again, mechanisms to fire up certain parts of your brain chemistry to make it feel good.