We can do busywork for the rest of our lives.
We often know what’s really important to us, but we procrastinate.
Why?
We, humans, are extraordinary people. We seek pleasure and avoid pain. We álso have a unique feature to imagine the future.
So we might discover that something is really important to us.
But at the same time, when we are about to perform the important task, we freeze.
The specific task will cause a certain level of discomfort. Performing it will cause ‘pain’.
Now there’s this imaginary future discomfort we start magnifying. Shame, frustration, awkwardness, stress, guilt, worthlessness, physical pain…
With our self-talk, we start talking ourselves out of even performing the task. Downplaying the importance of the task. Consuming even more time to talk ourselves out of it, than it would cost to just do it.
We procrastinate.
Because we unknowingly have magnified the discomfort to an unrealistic level.
We mistake easy and important for each other.
We are unique in this potential to make worthless tasks important and valuable tasks fall off of our radar.
Until, of course, we ultimately crash because we have procrastinated for too long.
Reversing this is what could solve this behavior: Important first. There are many books written about it, like ‘Eat that frog’, ’the 5 AM club’, ‘miracle mornings’ and more. What they all have in common is this: Important first.
Knowing what’s important isn’t something that’s deep down or some holy grail. It’s letting go of the fear of what might happen and change it up for what you want to happen.
So next time when you procrastinate, choose to do something about it.
Plan your important task for the first thing tomorrow morning, and then don’t think, just do it. Repeat this every day. It’s as easy as that.
It’s not that you need more time, you just need to decide.