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Who doesn’t struggle with procrastination nowadays?

It has become so common, in fact that people consider it to be normal. You put off a task for some time, ‘rest’ a bit, and you do it later, everybody gets lazy at times, nothing terrible happens from procrastinating a bit…

But underneath it’s harmless seeming surface, procrastination is a very serious problem. One that causes stress, overwhelm, anxiety, low self-esteem — a fucking laundry list of needless suffering.

Don’t believe me?

Imagine this:

It’s 5 PM, you have an important task to finish by tomorrow, maybe a project from work or a university assignement. Since you still have time before you go to bed, you tell yourself “I’ll do it later” and procrastinate on your task. And in the meantime, of course, you scroll on IG, maybe play a round of Fortnite or watch self-improvement videos on YouTube.

What happens after that? Once your favorite procrastination activity is over, are you now fully ready and motivated to do the task you put off before?

Of course no.

It’s now 7 PM, you have less time, you are tired, you have less energy, and your brain’s overstimulated with cheap dopamine and now you have far less motivation to do the task.

Essentially, you’ve fucked up.

When you realize this, shame comes up, so what do you do?

You procrastinate some more. You distract yourselves from feeling like a loser, from having wasted 2 hours of our day… by wasting another 2 hours.

Usually, this cycle of procrastinating continues until what Tim Urban playfully calls the “Panic Monster” arrives. You have to finish the task or else something scary will happen. There’s usually a social element to this, you’ll have to face your boss, you’ll have to face your teacher, everyone will think of you incompetent. So you rush to complete the task, working frantically like a lazy student the night before the exam.

This kind of work causes poor performance and stress. If you have put off multiple tasks, now overwhelm is also on the menu.

Some of you will disagree, “That’s how I work best. I used to study only the night before exam and had better grades than those who studied all day”

If you only knew how much more you could achieve and how many sleepless nights of stress you could spare yourself…

But the real scary part is that for most tasks, for most tasks that really matter, there’s no Panic Monster.

No one will come to scare you into working on your business, building a strong physique, journaling to deal with your difficult emotions, reading more to improve your worldview or become a better person.

And it is no exaggeration that if you do not take any action, you will procrastinate on them until the day you die.

They will never get done, and you will kill your self-esteem. You will become the kind of person who has dreams but can never achieve them, and you will accept it, because that’s how it’s always been in the past: you set a goal, you procrastinate on everything it takes to achieve it, and you never reach your goal.

If that’s not reason enough, read the name of this newsletter.

We are on our path to freedom. We want to live a life with our own rules, one we find fulfilling and purposeful. At the root of procrastination is fear, and it’s this fear that is stopping us from achieving such a life. To be free we need courage, and thus procrastination is not for those who want to live a free life.

So, what do we do to stop procrastinating?

The answer is: we don’t.

More precisely, we can’t.

Life is no longer as simple as it was in the past.

A 19th century countryman could wake up with the sun, chat with his neighbor, read his morning newspaper over breakfast, casually stroll to work, do the same work he’ll be doing until retirement, and return back home to sit on the front porch, smoke his pipe and go to bed when he starts feeling sleepy.

But today…

We have meetings, conferences, projects, assignements, endless emails, phone calls, clients and tasks. We are expected to always be online, always reachable, up to date with the entire world’s news and all of our friends’ updates on social media. You also need to make time for exercise, reading, meditation, and socializing (or else you are a loser), and you also want to learn new things, music, languages, travel the world, and here you are, also trying to make time to work on your side hustle to build a business that will (hopefully) allow you to get some of your time back.

The amount of things we want to do and need to do has increased, but we still have 24 hours per day. We can’t do all of that, and this will not stop. There will always be too much to do.

This is why we must procrastinate.

We can’t do all of it, there’s just too much to do, too much expected of us, too much we expect from ourselves.

To get out of our comfort zones and do the hard work, we need to procrastinate harder—but on the right things.

This is the Art of Creative Procrastination, and that’s what I’ll teach you in this week’s letter.

How to Procrastinate the Right Way — 3 Steps to Get There

Step #1 - Find Your High Value Tasks

As I said above, there’s just too much to do in the modern age.

That’s why we need to prioritize.

This prioritization starts at the top: you need to choose what your priority goals are.

For example, I noticed that I don’t have the time to work on my business and learn Chinese at the same time. Sure… yOu CAn dO AnYThIng, but if you try to do them at the same time, you will not be able to give your all and progress fast on either of them. That’s why I procrastinated on learning Chinese. I will learn it later, though, maybe when I have a profitable business and don’t have to study at the university.

This letter is focused on procrastination, so we will not delve into the goal setting (this is the topic for another letter)

Instead, we want to focus on our tasks for the day and prioritize them. We need to find our high-value tasks.

High-value tasks are tasks that actually move you closer to your goals. We aren’t talking about tangential improvements or “would-be-good-to-do” tasks. We are atalking about tasks you MUST do in order to achieve your goals. Tasks that are either important, urgent, or both.

A tip to spot them: for a high-value task, doing it well will bring on great results and/or failing to do so will have big negative consequences.

As a writer, my job is to not just present problems, but to present it in such a way that it pushes you guys to take action.

That’s why above I highlighted procrastination with braindead activities like scrolling on IG. But more realistically, most of us, most of the time, we will procrastinate on our high-value tasks by doing low-value tasks: replying to emails, engaging on social media, doing yoga out of nowhere.

Low value tasks seem productive at the moment, but don’t actually move you closer to your goals in a significant way. But doing them when you have high-value tasks to complete is far from productive, it is procrastination in disguise. These small tasks take our attention away from what’s really productive: getting the high-value tasks done, and not just done, but done well.

Step #2 - Learn to “Pause”

This might be my biggest learning from mindfulness meditation.

A pause is what it is.

You notice that you are caught up in an activity, your mind’s jumbled up and thinking non-stop, and you… stop for a second. For a brief moment, you take your attention away from what your mind is focused on, you just let your senses take information, you let your mind think in the background, and you almost observe being the observer that is observing life.

I know it might sound weird right now, but you will understand what this is if you try it now:

The concept is really simple—it’s basically meditation with eyes open. But it is really powerful shit, because you can use it to…

Step #3 - Say “Later” to Small Tasks

If you want to stop procrastinating you need to pause.

Here’s an important realization:

Procrastinating on a high-value task by doing nothing is not easy.

Just try it and you’ll see what I mean. Sitting for 30 minutes just looking at a wall when you know you have to finish an assignement by tomorrow takes more mental energy than just finishing the assignement.

But… with the 6 inch devil’s box always in our hands, distracting ourselves is easier than it has ever been in human history.

Most of the time, we procrastinate and we shut off our mind, we aren’t even aware of what we are doing until it’s too late and an hour has been thrown down the garbage bin.

You can counteract this with a pause.

The pause gets your mind into a mindful state. And in that state of mind, you have no option but to choose.

I am telling you, this will be uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.

So I will tell you where this discomfort comes from so that you can deal with it more easily:

You feel uncomfortable because you know what you need to be doing, but your brain doesn’t want to do it because it is afraid. It tells you to do something else, like continue scrolling on IG, but you don’t really want to do it either, because you know it is not the right thing to do.

That’s the small but uncomfortable dilemma you will need to go through in order to beat procrastination.

I am asking you to be a warrior. Embrace the discomfort and refuse to do anything else apart from the high value task you need to do.

When anything else comes to your mind, procrastinate. I should check Whatsa… I’ll do it later. I should look at my ph… I’ll do it later. As a rule of thumb, don’t even touch that shit you carry in your pocket.

You can do this while you are procrastinating before a task, or when you get distracted during your work sessions. Why not try it now:

Recap of Action Steps:

You read this letter, thank you. But don’t be like the average guy who consumes self-improvement content but doesn’t take any action on it.

Here’s a recap of the action steps. Do the action steps, if you haven’t already:

Action Step #1: Look at your to do list for the day. (start writing daily to-do lists if you aren’t already doing it). Pick 3 high value tasks and order them by importance.

Action Step #2: Try doing a pause. Stop reading this letter and just observe the screen you are looking at. Move your head, look around, look at your hands, hear the sounds around you, and observe the thoughts floating in your head without following any of them.

Action Step #3: You are reading this letter. I bet you have something better to do, a big task you’ve been putting off. So, do a pause now, and refuse to do anything else but to the high value task you need to do.

Stay disciplined, stay free. See you next week,

— Nihad