A Short Essay To Just Start Doing And End Procrastination
I didn't feel like it today
I woke up today and went to the gym. Afterward, on my way to the office, I felt this urge in me to not start working. My internal voice kept wanting to talk me into watching some videos first or just doing some other things.
I had a task that I didn't really know how to tackle, but was incredibly important to me and to other people as well. I had a feeling that the complexity of the task made my brain do anything to find workarounds.
After I reached my office and after spending about 5 minutes with this internal dialogue, I decided to just start doing something. I just started.
Five hours later, with some small breaks, it's been one of my most productive days in the last couple of months, and real progress has been made. Like, real progress!
So here's my short analysis of what happened today and why I believe this to be incredibly important.
How does procrastination work (a bottom-up thought-process)
When we delay (procrastinate) doing something, technically that’s because our brain wants to help us save the mental energy, which is an evolutionary developed mechanism.
It seems though, that procrastination has a force, and the higher that force is, the harder you need to push from the other side (willpower/else) in order to do something.
It also seems that the force of procrastination is increasing in some type of relationship with the complexity of the task (how many variables are involved) and the amount of clarity that’s involved. The less clear what we need to do is and the more complex is the task, the more “procrastination” we will feel.
So then maybe a solution is to just start, whenever you feel you’d like to procrastinate. To just start the task and allow your working memory to “get used” to the task at hand, to start “eating” at the perceived complexity of the task until you have enough information/variables in your working memory and then decision-making becomes easy/easier. So it’s just a matter of starting and allowing yourself some time to “digest”
Also, almost by definition, if you’re procrastinating on something, it means that it’s at the edge of your current capacity, or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as Flow (the right balance between challenge and your skill).
So by us procrastinating rather than doing that thing, we are facing some unknown (infinite) opportunity cost. For example, we might start and 2hrs later, end up with a breakthrough that can change the world.
But if we don’t, what do we have? Nothing.
So you might as well just start.
This is increasingly more important as we have more and more ways to “procrastinate” or seek short-term rewards and gratification. It’s becoming almost too easy to open up Instagram and scroll your feed (I sometimes do it without even consciously being aware of it — it’s that easy).
So let’s just start things! And let’s face that discomfort with great enthusiasm. The alternative is just impossible to calculate but I hope no cancer cure wasn’t discovered because of an Instagram story.
Let me know your thoughts on my draft argument here, would love to improve it.
I’m Catalin Matei, an entrepreneur and founder of Increase Media, a hybrid social media agency for personal branding while working stealth-mode on a new agency model as well as Dancesport Life, which is the biggest media publication for ballroom dancers (ex pro-dancer myself), and other activities.
You can find/follow me at catalin@increasemedia.com, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. You can tune into my podcast as well which is for the problem-solvers of tomorrow.
