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by
Patrick King
Read between
January 6 - January 16, 2025
How this law applies to procrastination is glaringly evident: an object at rest tends to remain at rest, which means a person in a state of rest tends to remain at rest—unless some sort of force moves him or her into action.
remember that Newton’s first law of motion works the other way, too: an object in motion continues to be in motion, which means a person in a state of action tends to continue moving as well.
The most critical element of beating procrastination is to find a way to start. Find a way to get moving. Once you get the ball rolling, it gets infinitely easier to keep going until the task is done.
With Newton’s first law of motion, you’ll find that once you start, you will tend to keep going on your task. So rather than wait for an enormous amount of motivation before starting, just go ahead and start small. You’ll find that your motivation will snowball into ever-larger amounts after you’ve started.
Second law of motion. Newton’s second law of motion explains how a particular force affects the rate at which an object is moving.
In other words, the second law of motion dictates how much force is needed in order to accelerate an object of a particular mass in a certain direction.
Applied to productivity, this means that you’ll need to pay attention not only to the amount of work you’re doing (magnitude), but also to where you’re applying that work (direction).
Temptations, distractions, and lack of task prioritization all serve to scatter your energy and effort in different directions, so avoiding them is key to optimizing your productivity. Keep your energy focused.
Applying Newton’s second law, you need to recognize that how fast you’ll be able to accomplish a particular task depends largely on your ability to focus the effort you exert on that task and that task only. If you insist on scattering the “force” you exert by frequently switching tabs from email to research to letter-writing all throughout the morning, you’ll be less likely to accomplish any one of them before the lunch hour. You may even just be switching back and forth on those tasks as a way to procrastinate on all of them.
apply the principle of Newton’s second law: exert your force in a single direction for its maximum acceleration.
Third law of motion. This law of motion states that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
As an alternative, Clear suggests dealing with unproductive forces directly through the second option, which is to subtract, if not totally eliminate, unproductive forces. This strategy involves such actions as reducing the number of tasks you commit to, learning how to say no, and changing your environment in order to simplify your life.
Eliminate the Paradox of Choice
While most people tend to think that having choices is good—and the more choices there are, the better—current research on human behavior actually suggests otherwise.
In a phenomenon that psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice, people tend to be worse off when they have more options to choose from as opposed to when they have a single course of action available to them.
Learning to deal with the paradox of choice is thus a necessary technique to beat procrastination. If you’ve established a mindset that’s able to promptly make sound decisions in the face of multiple options, then you’ll less likely fall into the paralysis or stress that causes most people to procrastinate.
To beat the paradox of choice, the key is to set rules and restraints upon yourself. You’ll need to find a way to see things in black and white, because gray areas are fertile grounds that breed overthinking and procrastination.
To avoid falling into that trap, use the following strategies. Focus on one factor and willfully ignore everything else.
So instead of having to deal with countless criteria that can overwhelm you from making a choice, focus only on one or two vital factors and ignore the rest.
Set a time limit on making a decision. Commit to making a decision within, say, two minutes tops.
Whatever decision you arrive at by the end of two minutes, stick with it no matter what. This defeats the paradox of choice by putting a cap on the amount of time you spend agonizing over which decision to make.
Immediately choose a default option and stick with it if no better alternative comes up. Once you’ve selected one option as the default, you can set a short amount of time to try to find alternatives and weigh them against your default choice.
Training your mind to select a default option preps it to be more inclined toward active decision-making rather than toward the passivity and paralysis that breeds procrastination habits.
Finally, strive to satisfice your desires more often than not. The word satisfice is a combination of the words satisfy and suffice.
Generally, people can be split into those two categories: those who seek to satisfice a decision and those who seek to maximize a decision.
By contrast, the satisficer is just shooting to be satisfied and is looking for an option that suffices for their purposes. They want something that works well enough to make them satisfied and pleased but not overjoyed or ecstatic. They aim for good enough and stop once they find that.
These are very different scales, and for this reason, studies have shown that satisficers tend to be happier with their decisions while maximizers tend to keep agonizing and thinking about greener pastures after their decisions.
Most of the time, you simply want something that is reliable and works.
Whatever your goals, motivation plays an important role and can spell the difference between success and failure.
The truth is, you should plan for life without a motivating kick-start. Seeking that motivation creates a prerequisite and additional barrier to action. Get into the habit of proceeding without
Action leads to motivation, more motivation, and eventually momentum.
For repetition’s sake, forget motivation; get started, and you’ll become motivated.
The most important takeaway here is to not wait until you are 100% ready before you take the first step or that motivation is a necessary part of your process.
Takeaways: Procrastination may be a reflection of battling biological forces, and we can swing the battle in our favor if we use some of the mindset tactics in this chapter. Fear is an understated underlying cause of procrastination. The first such tactic is to understand how Newton’s three laws of motion can apply to procrastination. Viewing your productivity (or lack thereof) as an equation is helpful because it allows you to think through the variables present in your life and learn how to manipulate them. First, an object at rest tends to stay at rest, while an object in motion tends to
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“Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried.” —Anonymous
three psychological tactics that’ll have you push just the right buttons in your own psyche so you can get yourself up and running as you set about accomplishing your tasks. Here are these four tactics: (1) don’t rely on your mood, (2) deal with omission bias, (3) visualize your future self, and (4) use the if-then technique.
No One Simply “Feels Like it”
Instead of waiting for your mood to spark you into action, act first in order to spark your mood into a motivated, all-systems-go mode.
No matter what mood you’re in—happy or cranky, excited or bored, calm or edgy—just start.
Suppose you need to create a PowerPoint presentation of your company profile. To set a low threshold, decide to only work on just the titles of each slide, or even just pick a background design. Leave the actual details and content for later; it’s not pertinent to your current threshold and goal of just getting started. Score an easy win and start to gain momentum that leads you away from the couch. A low threshold doesn’t only have to be with regard to the time commitment. It can also be in regard to the quality of what you’re producing. Instead of trying to write 500 words a day, try to
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This pressure is usually enough for people to opt for procrastination instead of taking on that task. To avoid this, try to focus on the process of doing that task. What do you need to do in order to get the job done? Break things down into smaller tasks, then schedule these tasks to be done within chunks of time spread out over days or weeks.
So instead of focusing on the product (i.e., the entire handbook), focus on the process of creating that product section by section. Assign yourself only one section for a particular chunk of time—say, piecing together the organizational chart for this hour. Do the next section at another scheduled time, and so on, until you complete the entire thing. Keep your eyes focused on what’s in front of you and just complete your tasks.
Second, forgive yourself for procrastinating.
One way that you get overpowered by procrastination is by letting yourself think that your past procrastination slip-ups are irredeemable and that they have done such irreparable damage that you might as well give up on trying to remedy the situation altogether.
Someone with the problem-oriented mindset obsesses on the problem itself. They wonder what went wrong. They get upset that it keeps happening. They seek blame and responsibility for the problem, and the only answer they have for the problem is to “avoid it.” They are unable to move past their negative feelings regarding a problem or obstacle.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
This chapter will teach you four strategic planning tactics to preempt procrastination before it even begins: (1) use the STING method, (2) manipulate variables in the “procrastination equation,” (3) use temptation bundling, and (4) use the Eisenhower matrix. Think STING The STING method represents an acronym for five strategies you can implement in order to prevent procrastination. It stands for select one task (S), time yourself (T), ignore everything else (I), no breaks (N), and give yourself a reward (G).
S - Select one task. In order to avert procrastination, focus is the name of the game.
T - Time yourself. One notion that often breeds procrastination is the thought of having to work on a task for endless, punishing hours.
