Sticky Learning Lunches

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

Today's topic, Putting Off Tasks Part 2. 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:

Welcome to today's Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons. Just the last couple of people coming into the room now, and we're just gonna get them in. And then we are gonna crack on because we've got some core content to cover. We're gonna carry on the theme of yesterday around procrastination. We're gonna dive even deeper into those seven excuses that, you know, these words that we use to validate why we don't do things, and then boil those down to the core values and core fears that we display that often come up and trigger these excuses.

Nathan Simmonds:

And when you understand this and get it right down to its root cause, it's gonna enable you to take better actions, more considered approaches to things and help to eliminate those things off your to-do list. So let's get everyone in the room. He says, where's my mouse on? There it is. Welcome to today's Sticky Learning. Hello, Andrea. Good to see you again. Colin. Darren, Fabian. Thank you Gareth. Good to see you again. Gina Howard. Karen Lynn. Nice. See you Petra. Thank you for being here. Ramah and Tim, handful of more people, handful more coming in.

Figure out your procrastination and be more productive

 

Nathan Simmonds:

First things first, as always, let's get the phones on flight mode. Zero the distraction, a hundred percent attention on where you're going today and what you are doing. And this is about investing your time in you to make you more incredible than yesterday. That's what we came here for. So, phones off. Fresh sheet, fresh sheet, fresh thinking at the top of that page. In your notepad, you're gonna write keepers, as I always say now, it's about things that you hear, things that you learned today that you want to keep hold of, that you want to remember, reignite and help to kind of reimagine and reinvigorate the thinking.

Nathan Simmonds:

As you know, as you reread those notes, new ideas percolate to the surface so you can come up with new ideas, new actions and and new thoughts that are gonna help you deliver even better result. Also, making sure you've got a drink, it's getting warmer over here, wherever you are, on, in, on the planet, on the globe at this point in time, making sure you've got a drink and you are ready for this.

Nathan Simmonds:

We are in Welcome to today's Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, making Business Matter, the home of sticky learning. And these sessions all about helping you be the best version of you in the work that you are doing right now. And if you are returning back to the office for that return as well, we are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry.

Nathan Simmonds:

And I want to give you some of the skills up here that I've learned in 23 years of leadership and the last nine, maybe 10 years now, of coaching leaders and developing leaders. And share some of this content with you just to help push that thinking further. Where are we today? Someone's already told me how they're feeling On a scale of of 10, obviously a 7.5 is pretty good. How are we feeling today? First question is, how are we feeling today? One being terrible, 10 being phenomenal. How are we feeling on a sliding scale? What's going on for us? How are we feeling right now? Got nines. We've got a six. Okay, we're gonna work on that today. You've got nines, nines, nines up for it. Good. Seven.

Nathan Simmonds:

We've got a couple of sixes. Weather has brought the score down. Oh, well let's, let's lift this score up. Yesterday when we talked about it, it, I also said, you know, what's the one small action you can take today that's gonna create impact on something that needs to be on your to-do list or that you haven't ticked off of your to-do list. What's that one? Small action. Let me know in the questions. What's again, what was that one small action you said you would do yesterday to take action on that thing that you've been procrastinating on about? What was the one small action?

Nathan Simmonds:

I'll wait for those coming. 'cause That's gonna require a little bit more typing than just a number called a tax man. Nice. What did you call him? Admit I'm a procrastinator, paid up member of pa I need to ask myself though, why behind my lack of action on the same topic. Good. Called him a gi delivered bad news. If it was necessary, it was necessary. Focus on the one thing at a time. Absolutely.

Nathan Simmonds:

Your brain cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. And there are optical illusions that you know, that can show you this. Just even in the physical scientifically proven that multitasking doesn't exist. Just do the one thing. Focus on that. Get it done phenomenally. Well move on. Good. We've got some stuff up there. So what are we covering now then? Yesterday we looked at the seven excuses.

Nathan Simmonds:

I've got 'em listed down here. I'm not gonna go through those in too much depth. The first one, it's easy. So we don't bother doing it. You know, we find it's, it's maybe beneath us or it's just too easy to go and do something else. Now we fear failure and we're gonna talk a bit more about fears today. So rather than actually taking action on it, we procrastinate and leave it for as late as possible in case we know. 'cause We think we might produce a substandard quality of product at the end. But then what we do is we cut ourself off at the very last minute and produce a substandard product anyway because we didn't give ourselves enough time to do it.

Nathan Simmonds:

It's boring, quite frankly. We'd rather do something else 'cause it's less, it's, that's less interesting. Need for certainty. We've got down here as well. Now we, we can guarantee certain actions and certain outcomes. So we do them instead of doing the thing that might be a bit more difficult. We've also got here enjoy pressure. So sometimes some of us lead it to the last minute just 'cause we enjoy the thrill of being under pressure. But actually that has a detrimental impact on our health mentally and physically doing all nighters, drinking too much coffee using, doing these sorts of things. We don't

Nathan Simmonds:

Don't wanna take the responsibility. So we'd rather leave it for as long as possible and get someone else to make a decision so we don't have to take that responsibility. And if we don't like it, we can blame somebody else. And then finally, we think tomorrow it's gonna be easier. We think the future version of us will do it easier. So we're gonna leave it to tomorrow rather than doing it today. But then we go back to the top of the loop where it, well, maybe it's just too easy so I won't bother doing it. And we go back into a cycle of the seven excuses, right?

Nathan Simmonds:

That was the headlines from yesterday. If you didn't see it, that was the kind of the catchall there. What are we gonna be covering today? Right now we're gonna be looking at the four human needs and looking at the two fears that go alongside this. So we've got about 15 minutes to do this. The first need is the need for certainty. So the need for certainty is, is creating stability, creating security. I need to know where my house is. I need to know where money's coming from to pay the bills. I need to know where food is. I need to know where my family are. I need to know that they're supported. So these are your core certainties. Your core securities. Well, on the other side of this, we also have the need

Nathan Simmonds:

For uncertainty. And what that means is, you know, we want certain amount of novelty. We want a certain amount of different things to be happening in our lives. We want, you know, we want stimulus. We want things to be exciting occasionally. Why? Because if we go too much this way, life becomes boring. Now we, we look for security. We want everything to be just so, and we spend all our time trying to put things into compartments to make sure that we mitigate all the risks and everything. That there is no gamble. And we know, we know full well that if I do this, I get this as a result.

Nathan Simmonds:

But the challenge is that if we go too far this way, the moment that we have a curve ball come in, all the toys come out of the pram. We know that we have no flexibility. 'cause We spend all our time over here trying to balance it or make sure everything's gonna work exactly how it's meant to work. And the moment that something blows in from a different direction, everything goes into crisis. How many people have got people in their lives right now that absolutely have to know a hundred percent exactly what's going on all of the time?

Nathan Simmonds:

And the moment you give them, you know, and this kind, this happens at varying times when pressure's really high. You know, we talk about this in mental health, you know, having your stress pot, your stress tank. And when your stress tank gets full, you know, my wife can ask me for a, for a cup of tea and I will erupt, but it's just a cup of tea.

Nathan Simmonds:

It was the same cup of tea as it was yesterday, only fresher. But because of all the other stuff going on, you know, it causes me to, to explode. But as a human need, we all need a certain amount of security if we go too far the other way. And we are living in constant uncertainty. This is where they talk about the, the, the VUCA in in, in military terms, volatile, uncertain I forget the other part of it, you know, challenging or whatever critic. Crisis situations. If we are constantly living right in this space over here, what happens is, while brains tend to go into overload again,