This week, on the Working With… Podcast, we are digging deep into the world of procrastination. 

 

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Script

Episode 122

Hello and welcome to episode 122 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Right. So it happens to us all. We find it almost impossible to motivate ourselves to begin a project or to sit down and prepare that presentation, write that email or call that difficult client. Instead, we will suddenly realise that the most important task right now is to clean our desk of the five files we left there this morning and our socks drawer has to be re-organised now!

Yes, this week we return to the wonderful subject of procrastination and more specifically how to turn procrastination to your advantage. 

Now, before we begin, are you ready to move beyond the to-do list? I ask because I see a lot of people getting stuck and not getting what they want done because they are spending far too much time inside their to-do list and not enough time doing the work. For me, that’s a weakness in the whole Getting Things Done methodology—too much time processing, organising and reviewing—and it’s a weakness in a lot of people’s system and if you think about it, it is just another form of procrastination. 

In my latest course, Productivity Masterclass | Build Your Own Workflow, I take everything I’ve learned about doing the work so I have more time to do the things I want to do and built it into a course that will show you how to get focused on your important tasks, how to make sure you goals are being acted on every day and how to finally get away from living inside your to-do list so you can focus on the things you want to focus on. Basically, how you can stop procrastinating.

I’d love for you to join me in this course, so please take a look. The link to the course details is in the show notes. 

Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Janet. Janet asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your COD course and loved it. The problem I have though is I never seem to be able to get started on my work. I follow the Golden ten, yet when I wake up in the morning I will do everything except the things I had planned to do. Do you have any tips that could help me?

Hi Janet, thank you for sending in your question. 

Now, we all procrastinate, it’s part of being human and it is perfectly normal. What we rarely hear about is there are two types of procrastination. The famous negative type—the one where you don’t do what you had planned to do and the positive type—the one where your brain engages your subconscious mind and develops great ideas and solves problems you thought were impossible to solve. 

Now when people talk about procrastination they are inevitably talking about the negative kind. The one that finds you watching puppy videos on YouTube instead of writing that urgent email to your most important customer. 

Why do we do that? Well, it’s more often than not linked to a fear of failure. That’s the number one reason we procrastinate. We fear we will screw up, we fear we will be embarrassed by what we do. This is why when we are not clear about something, rather than ask the question about what something means, we procrastinate and not do anything about it. That appears a safer option than risking looking stupid by asking what might be an obvious question. 

Procrastination is built into our human psyche as a safety mechanism and if you procrastinate a lot it doe