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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Patrick King
Read between
January 26 - February 2, 2021
One of the biggest weapons you have against procrastination is its natural enemy: making tasks almost impossible to skip over in the present moment.
consider how many things you currently avoid even though they are relatively fun and comfortable.
Like me avoiding my writing...
What are your assumptions based on? Are they legitimate? Are they realistic or far-fetched? Are they simply your anxieties and fears taking hold? Are you marginalizing the positives and amplifying the downsides?
Do you really want to engage in them, or are they aimed at making you feel better about yourself?
Hesiod, a Greek poet who lived around 800 B.C., cautioned not to “put your work off till tomorrow and the day after.”
Now, add those four characteristics together—urgency, lack of premeditation, lack of perseverance, and sensation-seeking—and what you get is a person who’s quickly derailed from working on their intended task and instead follows their spur-of-the-moment desires. The stronger these four tendencies are in you, the more likely you’ll set aside what you need to do in order to go for what feels good at the moment.
It will feel like you can see a long, winding road stretching out before you, but you just can’t lift your foot to take the first step and walk along it.
Avoider. Avoiders put off tasks until a later time in order to avoid being judged based on their output.
Perfectionist. Perfectionists delay tasks for fear that they’re going to do things wrong.
Perfectionists have set such high standards that the thought of attempting to measure up to those yardsticks fills them with paralyzing dread.
The most critical element of beating procrastination is to find a way to start.
If you work a lot but don’t focus all that work in a single direction, then you’ll tend to accomplish less than when you direct the same amount of work to only one direction.
Whenever our energy is faltering, we could just press the button again, and we’d be injected with another dose of that good stuff and be correspondingly productive. The closest legal thing we have to this is coffee, but even that has waning effects.
a writer who feels they are unable to write without some form of motivation or inspiration is going to stare at a blank page for hours. End of story.
to not wait until you are 100% ready before you take the first step
The question still remains: how do we get to that point? We can logically know that we are acting against our own interests but still remain stuck to the couch.
Instead of trying to write 500 words a day, try to write 500 words of crap—lowering your standards will help you stop overthinking and simply get into action.
Our minds reason, “How can we be doing anything wrong if we’re literally not doing anything?”
if-then plans are far less taxing and require less willpower than mere resolutions.
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). For those of us who need to be reined in, a strict guideline can be helpful.
Aim for No More “Zero Days” A zero day is a day that you’ve let slip by without doing anything to achieve your goal.
Another example is setting a “no zero before lunch” policy for yourself. This means that you should accomplish at least a little something toward your goal before every lunch hour.
If you spend too much time in any one place, it’s likely you’re spending time on those activities because they’re an automatic thing for you to do, not because you’re really enjoying them. Cutting back in those areas can leave more time for the good things in life.
He says that any time you face a hard choice, you should have no less than 40% and no more than 70% of the information you need to make that decision.
The blank page or the blank screen is the writer’s nightmare. It does not matter if the writer is a middle schooler with a book report due or Stephen King. The blank page is terrifying. And yet, all who eventually produced something to fill that paper or screen had to stop reading the book, stop researching the topic, stop planning out the flow, and just start writing.
Personal drive only happens when our actions are aligned with our core values.
