--- ## Highlights The answer is that he has incredibly low confidence when it comes to this part of his life, allowing himself to become enslaved by a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy. For the Have-To-Dos in my life, I’ll end up waiting until the last minute, panicking, and then either doing less than my best work or shutting down and not doing anything at all. For the Want-To-Dos in my life, let’s be honest—I’ll either start one and quit or more likely, I just won’t ever get around to it. the root of the problem is embedded in his Storyline, and his Storyline is what must change. A big list of vague and daunting things makes the Instant Gratification Monkey laugh. When you make a list like that, the monkey says, “Oh perfect, this is easy.” planning must end with rigorous prioritizing and one item that emerges as the winner—the item you’re going to make your first priority. And the item that wins should be the one that means the most to you—the item that’s most important for your happiness We all know what an icky item is. An icky item is vague and murky, and you’re not really sure where you’d start, how you’d go about doing it, or where you’d get answers to your questions about it. and every time you decide it’s time to get started, you will coincidentally also decide your inbox needs to be cleaned out and your kitchen floor needs to be mopped, ASAP. It’ll never end up happening. To un-icky the item, you need to read, research, and ask questions to find out exactly how one learns how to code, the specific means necessary for each step along the way, and how long each one should take. Un-ickying a list item turns it from this: So the final step in planning is to make a Brick Timeline, which slots bricks into the calendar. Doing There will also be times when you bump into a tree—maybe the jog is taking you on an uphill street, maybe you need to use an Excel formula you don’t know, maybe that song you’re writing just isn’t coming together the way you thought it would—and this is when the monkey will make his boldest attempt at an escape. They both suck to be in, but the big difference is the Dark Woods leads to happiness and the Dark Playground leads only to more misery. The good news is, if you can power through a bit of the Dark Woods, something funny happens. Making progress on a task produces positive feelings of accomplishment and raises your self-esteem. The monkey gains his strength off of low self-esteem, and when you feel a jolt of self-satisfaction, the monkey finds a High Self-Esteem Banana in his path. It doesn’t quell his resistance entirely, but it goes a long way to distracting him for a while, and you’ll find that the urge to procrastinate has diminished. Once you hit the Tipping Point, the monkey becomes more interested in getting to the Happy Playground than the Dark Playground. When this happens, you lose all impulse to procrastinate and now both you and the monkey are speeding toward the finish. depending on the type of task and how well it’s going, is that you might start feeling fantastic about what you’re working on, so fantastic that continuing to work sounds like much more fun than stopping to do leisure activities. You’ve become obsessed with the task and you lose interest in basically everything else, including food and time—this is called Flow. Flow is not only a blissful feeling, it’s usually when you do great things. The monkey is just as addicted to the bliss as you are, and you two are again a team. what makes procrastination so hard to beat is that the Instant Gratification Monkey has a terribly short-term memory—even if you wildly succeed on Monday, when you begin a task on Tuesday, the monkey has forgotten everything and will again resist entering the Dark Woods or working through them. You need to prove to yourself that you can do it. 1. Try to internalize the fact that everything you do is a choice. 2. Create methods to help you defeat the monkey. Some possible methods: Solicit external support by telling one or more friends or family members about a goal you’re trying to accomplish and asking them to hold you to it. If that’s hard for whatever reason, email it to me—I’m a stranger ([email protected])—and just typing out a goal and sending it to a real person can help make it more real. (Some experts argue that telling people in your life about a goal can be counterproductive, so this depends on your particular situation.) Create a Panic Monster if there’s not already one in place—if you’re trying to finish an album, schedule a performance for a few months from now, book a space, and send out an invitation to a group of people. If you really want to start a business, quitting your job makes the Panic Monster your new roommate. If you’re trying to write a consistent blog, put “new post every Tuesday” at the top of the page… Leave post-it notes for yourself, reminding you to make good choices. Set an alarm to remind yourself to start a task, or to remind you of the stakes. Minimize distractions by all means necessary. If TV’s a huge problem, sell your TV. If the internet’s a huge problem, get a second computer for work that has Wifi disabled, and turn your phone on Airplane Mode during work sessions. Lock yourself into something—put down a non-refundable deposit for lessons or a membership. And if the methods you set up aren’t working, change them. Set a reminder for a month from now that says, “Have things improved? If not, change my methods.” 3. Aim for slow, steady progress—Storylines are rewritten one page at a time. So don’t think about going from A to Z—just start with A to B. Why do I think about this topic so much, and why did I just write a 3,500-word blog post on it? Because defeating procrastination is the same thing as gaining control over your own life. So much of what makes people happy or unhappy—their level of fulfillment and satisfaction, their self-esteem, the regrets they carry with them, the amount of free time they have to dedicate to their relationships—is severely affected by procrastination. So it’s worthy of being taken dead seriously, and the time to start improving is now.