[00:00:00] Mirela Petalli: The quote we chose was funny. The time I kill. It's killing me.

Yeah, right. 

[00:00:08] Daniel Greening: that's not that funny.

[00:00:10] Mirela Petalli: No, it's not. It's, yeah, it's fun in a dark way.

[00:00:14] Daniel Greening: Okay.

[00:00:16] Daniel Greening: Welcome to the Mindful Agility podcast. If you're just joining us, this podcast helps you develop two uncommon skills, mindfulness, and agile. These skills have delivered social and corporate success to those who understand them. But neither mindfulness nor agile are intuitive. Otherwise, everyone would be a lot more successful. If you develop those skills, and we are here to help, you'll have a leg up.

[00:00:45] Mirela Petalli: I'm Mirela Petalli.

[00:00:46] Daniel Greening: I'm Dan Greening.

[00:00:47] Mirela Petalli: Today we are going to talk about procrastination. Most of us have experienced it at least once in their life, right? Yeah, Dan and I have definitely do experience it a lot still. So we actually have been procrastinating during this episode. We have postponing it a few times, right.

[00:01:08] Daniel Greening: Yeah, I think I, I don't know. My excuse is that we had to retake it a few times to get it right, but we also were doing other things.

[00:01:19] Mirela Petalli: All right. And that's one of the things about procrastination that we find excuses, especially in the moment when we are doing it. And then after that, we panic.

[00:01:29] Daniel Greening: It's the panic part that I really love.

[00:01:33] Mirela Petalli: Mm. Nobody likes that.

[00:01:35] Daniel Greening: All right. Procrastination delays achievement, and that in turn delays the pleasure of having achieved. And those achievement delays actually accumulate to cause us to be less successful. When we achieve something or when we fail, even , we learn something and then we use that learning to learn more. 

If we have a succession of little achievements and perhaps little failures. We become more and more successful. But when we delay our achievement, It actually affects our entire life in terms of our success.

[00:02:14] Mirela Petalli: Right. Of course, that creates lots of anxiety

[00:02:17] Daniel Greening: Because we're late or because we're going, like, I'm not very successful. I'm so stressed out.

[00:02:24] Mirela Petalli: Yeah. And what happens is that when we procrastinate, we think we're doing something pleasant. We're postponing writing a paper because, our friends invited us to go out or something. Or we're just watching tv. But the truth is that we're delaying achievement. We're contributing to less success in our lives, and that is also making us feel more anxiety. Uh, researchers have for a long time tried to figure out the causation between procrastination and mental health difficulties, like the anxiety, the depression that comes with procrastination and it is not easy from a scientific point of view to find that causation. Does procrastination cause those problems or do these problems exist and then make us procrastinate? Such a great question.

[00:03:19] Daniel Greening: Yeah. What'd they find out?

[00:03:22] Mirela Petalli: Well, , researchers , just published an article early in January this year. They studied many students in Sweden, and they followed them through nine months to see correlation between procrastination and mental health. And they found that the students who procrastinate have a higher risk of poor mental health as well as physical health.

 Higher symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. They also are more likely to report disabling pain in the shoulders or arms. It's very interesting that it has actually a big impact not only on mental health, but on physical health as well, on their sleep quality. And like you mentioned before, because it delays achievement and success, of course, these students had more financial difficulties and they also felt more lonely.

[00:04:14] Daniel Greening: Rough. You know, I've had that experience where stress caused physical problems for me in undergraduate school. I was very stressed out and I was procrastinating like crazy. I ended up with bursitis, which is a very painful experience in my shoulders in this case. Uh, and I didn't know what to do. At the time, I don't think people knew that it was correlated with stress. 

[00:04:43] Mirela Petalli: Oh, interesting. You could have been a student in this study.

You're getting a great subject. 

[00:04:53] Daniel Greening: So procrastination isn't good. I think the implications are it doesn't relieve our stress. We often think, " oh my God, I have all this stuff to do. I need to blow off some steam." Right? And then we procrastinate some more because we're so stressed, but in fact, we're just making things worse.

[00:05:17] Mirela Petalli: right. We postpone things that we dread, we have so many reasons why we procrastinate and, It is interesting to actually delve into that and that's why we're gonna talk about today. One of the important things is to understand the causes and conditions and the circumstances around our personal reasons and personal way, how we procrastinate.

The quote we chose was funny, but the time I kill. It's killing me.

Yeah, right. 

[00:05:53] Daniel Greening: that's not that funny.

[00:05:54] Mirela Petalli: no, it's not. It's, yeah, it's fun in a dark way.

[00:05:58] Daniel Greening: Okay.

[00:05:59] Mirela Petalli: So this quote is by an aphorist, Mason Cooley. 

You can take that two ways. So in a literal sense, "the time I kill is killing me." We all know that time passes. We are here temporarily, so it's literally killing us. The time is passing and that's our life that's passing. So that is the literal interpretation of it. The other interpretation of it is based on the study that we just talked about, it is that because I am killing time and maybe it is causing all of those physical and mental health issues that we just talked about, increasing our anxiety, our depression, making us feel worse and worse the more we postpone doing things.

So yeah, it is causing us physical and mental health problems.

[00:06:51] Daniel Greening: So one of the things that we've talked about before is that there are cues for bad habits or good habits, it doesn't matter. For all of our habits, there are cues. And procrastination is a habit . And so there's usually something that cues up our procrastination, we might get bored with what we're studying or friends might come over or who knows what it might be. So that's an interesting thing to look at. 

Another thing to look at is why do we do it? So many of our procrastination activities have some reward. It might distract us from all of the stress that we have to deal with when we're thinking about all the things we need to do. And that's a reward that makes us feel good. Of course, in the long run, it isn't that rewarding, right?

[00:07:54] Mirela Petalli: Right. Yeah. It's the reward sometime is just being distracted. We distract ourselves, we numb ourselves, and we avoid not only the task that we are postponing, but also we are avoiding to see what's underneath it. What is making us procrastinate in the first place.

And, the case study we chose for this podcast episode was Tim Ferriss. 

[00:08:24] Daniel Greening: Tim Ferriss is a famous author, perhaps most famous for winning the gold medal at the Chinese kickboxing national championships by bending the rules. He actually wasn't good at punching or kicking. He's a best-selling author who sometimes writes about his bouts with depression and procrastination.

[00:08:46] Mirela Petalli: Tim Ferriss discovered that underneath his procrastination pattern that he was noticing in himself was the fear, the fear of failure.

[00:08:57] Daniel Greening: Tim Ferriss developed this thing he calls "the fear setting reflection exercise." for each task that was on his list of things to do, he would document what would be the worst case. Like he would do it and he would fail. And what would the impact of that failure be? 

He could be humiliated or embarrassed or maybe nothing, but he would document the worst case failure and its cost, and then he would also document the long-term procrastination cost. He would then create a choice for himself. Procrastination was a choice, and if the procrastination cost was higher than the worst case failure cost, he would do the task.

But if the procrastination cost was lower, maybe he would just ditch the whole idea of the task. But he made decisions, right? And that's something that we often don't do. 

[00:10:09] Mirela Petalli: right. No, it sounds very similar to doing like a pros and cons list, right?

Some of us do that, especially when we are faced with important life changing decisions like, um, Choosing what to study or choosing what profession we're gonna have, or getting married or not, or having a child or not.

Those important decisions we do, but we never think to use the same technique, the same reflection technique with the smaller tasks, and Tim Ferriss was consistent with it. He used the fear setting technique every time that he was embarking in a new project.

[00:10:51] Daniel Greening: Hmm, interesting. So we have a technique that we recommend here. First, every day reflect to discover the causes and conditions for procrastination. Think about why and when you procrastinate. Write down the times you realized you were procrastinating, and try to remember and document as many details as possible. How did it start? How did you procrastinate? How long did you procrastinate for, and how long did it take you to realize you were procrastinating? What are the recurring patterns here? 

Each time you practice this skill you get better at noticing, analyzing causes, finding insight. And with all of that better awareness, you can plan experiments for change.

[00:11:48] Mirela Petalli: Right there, your our last sentence there was why I think it is important to make this a regular practice because we have talked about habits before. And we're going to continue to talk about habits because even why we are doing what we are doing at Mindful Agility is very closely related to habits.

Because if we want to be successful, you wanna be happier. If we wanna achieve more in our lives, both professionally and personally, we have to look at our habits and transform our not skillful, not helpful habits into more skillful and healthy habits. So it is important to practice. Practice makes perfect, right? So if you know that you procrastinate. Maybe you have tried before other techniques, and you did well for a little bit, but then you fell back off the horse and just started procrastinating again. If you have something big coming up in your life that you wanna tackle, Or if you're just sick of procrastinating and feeling horrible about yourself and then trying again.

That cycle of negativity that we get ourselves in at times and we cause so much suffering and we don't know how to get out of. Well, this is a way to start to get out of that negative cycle of procrastinating, and then being hard on ourselves, and then doing it all over again.

So, because when we reflect regularly, then we are able to see those patterns. The more regular we are with a practice more clearly we are going to be able to see what's going on and find what's underneath our procrastination patterns. What is driving it? What is making us procrastinate in the first place?

What are we so scared of?

[00:13:44] Daniel Greening: I have a habit, a procrastination habit, where I read the news. Most people don't put news in that category, I suppose. But my experience is that news consumption dramatically decreases my productivity. I get riled up by something in the news. I commiserate with friends and argue with others. I will be trying to get something done, and somehow I'll just slide into reading or watching news and hours can go by. So I noticed that, at some point, and now every morning I have to check off a box that says " I commit to not reading mainstream news." As I've done that, my procrastination level has dropped.

[00:14:34] Mirela Petalli: So what is the reward for you there, in checking that box? There is a reward there that is making you feel good about checking that box and feel better in this case than actually reading the news.

[00:14:49] Daniel Greening: Yeah, so I have a to-do list that I do every morning, and in order to get through the morning to-do lists, I actually have to check that box. But that gives me a feeling of accomplishment. A little tiny accomplishment that I thought about the news and I agreed that I would not read mainstream news, and I, I clicked that box.

[00:15:14] Mirela Petalli: Yeah. It feels good to win, you know?

[00:15:19] Daniel Greening: But, of course sometimes I do read the news in the middle of the day, but then I go like, Hmm. And then the next day when I have to check off the box, I also think about the previous day when I didn't do that and what could I do differently. I don't think I've thought very much about the cues for reading the news, though.

[00:15:37] Mirela Petalli: Hmm. The whole process of dealing with procrastination requires lots of compassion and forgiveness, self-compassion. So we are probably going to talk about that in a future episode. For me, procrastination, after doing that reflection on myself, one important hard part that I had with procrastination was during grad school.

[00:15:59] Daniel Greening: mm.

[00:15:59] Mirela Petalli: There was lots of writing involved. Everything was online, so it was very self-paced and by the time, you know, the paper was due the next day and I had not even collected the necessary research that I needed and I panicked and I would work in a frenzy and finish a paper and not sleep and all of that, like many other people do.

And so when I reflected on what was causing me to procrastinate, I realized that, like Tim Ferris similarly, I realized that there was a fear underneath that. And now, I procrastinate mostly when it comes to writing.

[00:16:39] Daniel Greening: Hmm.

[00:16:40] Mirela Petalli: And I think for me it has to do with my perfectionism and my fear that it's not going to be perfect and I'm going to fail because of lots of conditioning from childhood and teenage years in school and family and all of that. Somewhere along the line I learned very early that I had to be perfect.

[00:17:03] Daniel Greening: Hmm.

[00:17:04] Mirela Petalli: Everything I did needed to be perfect because that was the measure of love and acceptance and all of those things that are not healthy.

[00:17:12] Try It Introduction

[00:17:12] Daniel Greening: Mirela, you and I came up with an exercise that used daily reflection to think back about moments where we procrastinated. 

[00:17:22] Mirela Petalli: We, suggested this exercise of a daily reflection that you can find in the Mindful Sprint on Substack. We suggested this because although there are so many tools out there, a simple Google search will overwhelm you with all the different ways you can deal with procrastination. And sometimes when we don't know where to start and we're like, okay, there's too much in here. I don't know what to do. Do I do the Pomodoro technique? Do I start meditating every day? Do I go up in the mountain? I. I don't know what to do. Do I get rid of all, the distractions if my apartment, cancel Netflix?

So we don't know what to do

[00:18:00] Daniel Greening: The great thing is that we can avoid writing or doing all the other tasks we need to do, by studying more about how to avoid procrastination.

[00:18:10] Mirela Petalli: a great way to procrastinate. Yep. Mm-hmm. That's, yeah. Quite close to cleaning. That's a common one. We all do that. Cleaning is good. We're gonna clean the apartment because we don't wanna do what we have to do.

[00:18:23] Daniel Greening: Because we have a paper due.

[00:18:25] Mirela Petalli: Yeah, I think that's a good reward. The apartments need cleaning sometimes, so that's good. Yeah, so this is a technique that we can start with. It's doesn't require lots of effort. It requires us just to take a few minutes at the end of the day and to reflect, to go back on our day and look with curiosity. What is there? What happened today? How did that go for us and how do we feel about it? And the more we do that, we're gonna notice those patterns and we're gonna know ourselves better. We're gonna know what our cues are, what our rewards are, why do we procrastinate, and we can become surprised, maybe we'll surprise ourselves, and that's where we can start and make a change when we know better. When we know more about the situation. 

[00:19:14] Try It

[00:19:14] Daniel Greening: So I'm gonna be a little more specific. Here's our suggestion. It's 10 minutes max, so it's not gonna take much time out of your day. Schedule 10 minutes this evening to reflect. Write down how you procrastinated. Did you notice cues or rewards or emotions now that you didn't notice before this exercise? 

and then choose some insight from that to investigate further and schedule another reflection tomorrow. And that's it. You're 10 minutes of exercise for the day. 

Have you ever done this? Mirela.

[00:19:59] Mirela Petalli: yes. I have done it for a few days, not for an extended period of time. I do not consistently because I'm a procrastinator here, but I find journaling is a great way to reflect and gain insight and also develop some great skills like reflecting on procrastination and how we do it. 

[00:20:24] Daniel Greening: Thank you, Mirela for writing this up.

[00:20:27] Mirela Petalli: Thank you.

[00:20:30] Daniel Greening: For more information on this topic, references and other useful data are in the show notes.

 If you have friends who might benefit from this episode, consider forwarding it to them. 

Thanks to beta reviewers, Ron Lussier, Colleen Zimmerman, Heather Schenck, and Eve Rubell. Many thanks to paid subscribers to our Substack. They are Ron Lussier, Stefan Braham, Colleen Zimmerman and Stephen Tryon. Their contributions are earmarked for a community server where we'll host interactions and courses. We are 30% there as of this episode. 

If you'd like to read about this topic or any episode topic, they also appear in our weekly brief called The Mindful Sprint. That brief is super short. A two minute read. You'll get it in your inbox if you subscribe at mindfulagility.substack.com. You can comment on those briefs right on our Substack page. 

We also have a website at mindfulagility.com.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a great week. 

I'm Dan Greening.