- Today we're gonna talk
about a bunch of methods that I use to stop procrastinating. These are methods that I've developed over the past couple of years, and also methods that
I've heavily borrowed from other people,
completely ripping them off, and now I'm making money
off of their ideas. Okay, so number one, eat the frog. Mark Twain said, "If it's
your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first
thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first." Knowing that you have to eat a frog is unpleasant to think about,
(frog croaking) but if it's something that you
have to do every single day, the day starts, the sun rises, and you're presented with a frog that you have to eat every single morning, then why put it off? (ethereal choir music)
(frog sloshing) Because if you put it off, the whole day you're gonna be thinking about this dreadful thing you have to do. You'll be haunted by this idea. You'll try to have a normal
conversation with other people, you're gonna try to relax
and unwind in the bathtub, and all you're gonna be
thinking about is the fact that you have to shove a
slimy toad down your throat. And in this thankfully
hypothetical scenario, if you were to put off eating
that frog until tomorrow, you would have two frogs to eat. And if you were to follow
this pattern, day after day, postponing eating the frog, then at the end of the month, you'll have like 30 frogs to eat. You're gonna have to have
this giant 30 frog mukbang. That's extremely unpleasant. Why would you do that to yourself? But if it's inevitable
and you have to do it, why not do it first thing in the morning so that you can live the
rest of your day in peace? So do yourself a favor and eat that frog first
thing in the morning. (electronic beeping) (man crunching) Number two, the 3-2-1 rule. Now the 3-2-1 rule is pretty stupid, but it's too stupid to ignore. So the way it works is, say,
you've got to write an essay for university or for high school, or whatever the hell you do, I don't know. You hold this thing that
you have to do in your head and you reflect on it. And you say, "I've got
to go and do this thing." And then you count from three to one. You say, "Damn, I gotta write my essay. Three, two, one." And then you just go and do
the thing that you're avoiding. Now that sounds stupid and
overly simple because it is, but it also works. And I think what's going on here is that by using this strategy, we are utilizing psychological momentum. Writing an essay seems super
scary so we put it off. But counting is easy. Anyone can count. So we're way less likely
to procrastinate counting. But once we start counting,
we develop momentum towards doing the thing
that we're avoiding. It's like a psychological bridge. So next time you're having
a very difficult time just diving in and starting
a task you need to do, say, "Three, two, one," then just go do it. I don't know why it works, but it works. Speaking of psychological momentum, number three is the do-something
principle by Mark Manson. So most people think that
in order to take action on something, we need to
be motivated to do it. And motivation comes from some sort of emotional inspiration. First, we're inspired to take action. We have the strong reason to do it, and that generates the motivation we need to take action on the thing. But action isn't just
the effect of motivation. It's also the cause of it. Inspiration, motivation, action
is not a linear sequence. It's an endless loop and you can start
wherever you wanna start. And since inspiration and motivation seem to be hard to come by
and completely unpredictable, it's way more efficient
to start with action and let that action serve
as the inspirational and motivational fuel
to power further action. And you might be saying, "Well, how am I supposed
to take action on something without inspiration and motivation? That's the entire problem here. The problem is that I can't take action. I need some sort of
inspiration and motivation." But that's not entirely true because all of us take action on things with seemingly little or
no inspiration whatsoever. And if we didn't, we'd be dead. We do certain things every
day that are habitual. We brush our teeth, we take a shower, we put on nice clothes. These seemingly insignificant actions are the very actions we
should harness the reaction of to generate inspiration and motivation towards doing further action. It's like a snowball effect. So next time you're
avoiding doing your taxes because it's super boring, tell yourself, "Just do
something, anything," and harness the reaction from that action to generate the motivation
to take further action. And that, in essence, is
the do-something principle. Number four is purge your
physical surroundings. So a lot of the reason why
so many of us procrastinate so often is because the
physical environment in which we live in
practically begs us to. And as we've discussed
on the channel before, there's an intimate link between our psychology and our physiology. If we exist in a chaotic,
disastrous physical environment, our brain often follows suit. A chaotic and distracted
mental state very often creates a chaotic and disastrous physical state, which further perpetuates
the distracted mental state. It's a paradox, but it's
often so much easier to correct and improve upon
your physical environment than it is to suddenly feel good and clear-headed all of a sudden. So if you're more distracted than ever and you're finding it
increasingly difficult to get any work done, pay attention to your
physical surroundings. Improve upon your physical surroundings. Make sure that the space that you take up is conducive to productivity. It's not just a nothing tip. It's a powerful psychological phenomenon that we need to take advantage of if we want to stay focused. Number five, purge your
digital surroundings. Probably even more important
in today's day and age is making sure that your
digital surroundings and your digital environment
that you're a part of aren't begging you to
procrastinate every five seconds. And this can often be
more subtle and insidious than it might look or seem on the surface. When you get a random email from Old Navy that they're having a 40% off sale even though you haven't
shopped there in six years, or when you get a little
Facebook Messenger blip on your phone from some group
chat that you're a part of saying, "Hey, who wants
to hop on Apex right now? Did you see the new
Halo Infinite trailer?" These things might seem like nothing, a little bit of a one-second distraction and you can check it really quick and then you can get back to work. But the problem with
that is that quite often, the most important work that
we have to do in our lives requires deep, unbreaking
focus for several hours. And it is almost impossible
to reach that deep work state when we're constantly
being pulled out of it. Our attention is constantly
being grabbed by notifications from phone calls, from
text message sounds. And if you have kind of an
ADHD-esque brain like mine, that's a big deal. You will follow that notification, you will see what someone
said on the group chat, and you'll probably engage
with it for 10 to 15 seconds, or even worse, you'll
go down a rabbit trail and you'll spend 20 to
30 minutes on YouTube even though you had absolutely
no plan on doing that. So one of the most
important things you can do to cure your procrastination is to eliminate gateways
to procrastination. And it even boils down to the amount of desktop clutter you have, or what's on your toolbar, because every time your
phone buzzes in your pocket, it's like Mark Zuckerberg
himself is tugging on your shirt, telling you to pay attention to what he wants you to pay attention to, because whatever that notification is is more important than
whatever you're doing. But you have to ask yourself, are you the master of
your own life, or is Zuck? Number six, stare at one
thing for 60 seconds. So judging by the title of this tip, you might be thinking that, "Wow, Joey is running out of content. He's just trying to fluff up this video and increase the watch time." And you're totally right. I need more tips and this
video isn't long enough, but also this tip seems
really interesting. I tried it one time and it
instantly worked for me. And I got this from Andrew
Huberman's Instagram. If you guys don't know,
Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at
Stanford, I believe, and he talked about how one way to dramatically increase
focus in 60 seconds, especially if you're already in a distracted, chaotic mental state, is to focus all of your attention
onto one specific target, this could be one letter in one word, at the distance that you
would be doing that work in for 60 seconds. Do not break that eye contact and breathe deeply as you do it. And at the end of that 60 seconds, your focus collects itself. I think this is another
really good example of how intimately linked our
psychology is to our physiology and how our actual eye
movement, not being chaotic, collects our mental focus as well. When we focus with our eyes, we also focus with our brain. And what we do with our eyes also matters. That's sort of the entire
concept of EMDR therapy. You should look it up, super cool stuff. So give that a shot. Focus on one specific
target for 60 seconds while taking deep and relaxing breaths. And you'll notice that
your brain focuses too and you can penetrate through the resistance in the way of doing the
thing you need to do. Okay, so tip number seven is
confront your distractions before working. Now, this is sort of
a direct contradiction to rule number one, which is why I saved it to near the end. And I would kind of use this
technique as a last resort, although it has been very
effective for me recently, especially later in the day when I've already eaten the frog but I kind of have more frogs
to eat due to procrastination and things piling up, et cetera. The way this works is that
you set a timer for 15 minutes or 10 minutes, or however long you need, to actually engage with the
distractions and the escapes that you want to engage with. Because so often what happens is we don't wanna do this super hard thing that we know we need to do, so we escape, kind of impulsively. We open the Word doc that
we're supposed to be on, and then we click away and
then we just browse Instagram and Facebook or whatever. And you're sort of in this constant battle of just dipping your toes
into the distraction, dipping your toes into the work, and it's just this seesaw that never ends. And you actually never
have an intentional break or an intentional work sesh. So what I've been doing is setting a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and intentionally diving
into each distraction that I want to do. I say, "Okay, I'm checking Facebook now. Right now, I'm intentionally seeing if I have any notifications or if I have any messages." And I'm allowing myself
to mentally check that box and clear it. Then I move on to Instagram and I say, "Okay, now I'm on Instagram. I'm gonna have my way with Instagram. Do I have any message requests? Who posted on their Stories? Cool, I've done that now. Now I can put it on the back burner." And this might seem weird, but I think the intentionality
is the difference here. When you intentionally
check the mental box that you've done everything
that you need to do on each of these websites, Sony Alpha rumors, YouTube, whatever, then you can gain some
mental clarity to say, "Okay, I actually have no
excuse not to do this thing now. I have no excuse not to file my taxes and I would feel very
good about doing so." So try giving your primal
brain what it wants. Let it feast itself for a
dedicated amount of time so that your higher judgment
can also get what it wants. It's like a negotiation with yourself. So that's pretty much it. If you've been struggling
with procrastination, I can pretty much guarantee you that if you follow these tips, at least one of these is
probably gonna work for you. And if none of them do, I honestly don't really
know what to do for ya. That's pretty much everything
I could come up with, so yeah, let me know. All right, a big thank you to Anker for sponsoring this video. If you guys have spent any time on Amazon and you buy things from
there, especially electronics, if you're anything like me, then you've almost certainly
run into the brand Anker. And if you've ever
actually pulled the trigger on an Anker product, you've probably noticed that their stuff is usually higher quality,
it gets to you faster, and it's more cost-effective than the big name tech giant companies that have been around forever. And they recently sent me
this magnetic battery charger for my phone. It's called the MagGo. It's super slim, super compact. It comes in a variety of colors. What it does is it snaps
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for this kind of thing, absolutely check it out. They just launched it, it's brand new. So hit up my link in the description below to check that out. Thanks again, Anker, for
sponsoring this video. And if you liked this video
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