Reading the key paragraph in pjeby’s article The Hidden Meaning of “Just Do It” has helped me to break through a 2-month-long round of procrastination.
Also, the 80⁄20 elimination techniques in Timothy Ferris’ “4-Hour Workweek” seem to work surprisingly well for me—especially in combination with pjeby’s secret meaning of “just do it”. I’m about halfway through Ferris’ book, and I haven’t read other pjeby’s articles, but so far, this combo does wonders.
Btw, that article is embarrassingly out-of-date relative to my current methods. This video is a much better introduction to a more current method of “just doing it”. In particular, it gives step-by-step instruction and is ridiculously easy to test.
I watched that video and did what it told me to. Since I happen to have a rather messy desk, I could just apply that example directly.
For the last three or four minutes of the video, I couldn’t wait that it’d finish so I could get around to cleaning my desk. Then I did, and it’s clean now. For the record: even when I clean the rest of my room, I never get around cleaning my desk. When I did it now, I found an old receipt, dated December 2006. I hadn’t really cleaned my desk after that.
And now I’d done it, after watching a ten-minute video and done some simple exercises for about five minutes. Because it had made me feel I wanted to.
I don’t know how much of it was me just wanting the technique to work, and if the effectiveness of the technique will wear off with time (as has often been the fate with my previous anti-procrastination techniques), but if it does work consistently… this will so change my life. I will be eternally in your debt if it will.
If anybody here has any kinds of problems with procrastination, go watch that video right now. I mean that.
I don’t know how much of it was me just wanting the technique to work, and if the effectiveness of the technique will wear off with time (as has often been the fate with my previous anti-procrastination techniques), but if it does work consistently… this will so change my life. I will be eternally in your debt if it will.
If anybody here has any kinds of problems with procrastination, go watch that video right now. I mean that.
A note of caution: that technique will only work if you aren’t under any pressure to perform the task. If you try to use it on something like doing your taxes because you’re freaking out at how little time you have left, it’s probably not going to work, because you’ll have conflicting somatic markers activated. In other words, you won’t be able to pass the “mmmm” test in the steps.
Most chronic procrastination takes the form of pressuring yourself to do something and thereby engaging somatic markers for “life-threatening situation”—making it damn near impossible to do anything useful in a systematic, sustainable, or rational way. So, you’ll need to use other techniques to switch off those markers if you’re going to use this technique for something like that.
In other words, the technique in that video is NOT an anti-procrastination technique per se, and it’s better that you don’t try to use it as one. It’s a demonstration of the link between somatic markers and motivation, and I specifically chose desk-cleaning as the target activity because most people are not under an urgent deadline or major pressure to clean their desk.
Now, as long as you pass the “mmmm” test for an activity, the method will work and it will work every time. The only way it will stop working is if you stop checking for the somatic marker and try to just push through without passing the “mmm” test. It’s just that for “under pressure” activities this may be difficult or impossible unless you first disengage the threat response. (It’s hard to do a relaxed “mmmm” or “ahhh” when you’re freaking out.)
Alright, thanks for the warning. Actually, I just finished reading “Why Can’t I Change”, and I see what you’re talking about. You’re sure you want everybody to sign up with their e-mail addy before downloading it? It made me feel like everybody should read it and made me want to share the link as widely as possible, but the sign-up requirement will considerably reduce the amount of people who’ll bother giving it a look...
Thanks Pjeby. That video is brilliant. I noticed that it closely matched one of the most useful techniques that I’ve found in the NLP subculture (hidden amongst the nonsense). I’ll be sure to take a look at anything your upcoming book has to say about eliminating irrational beliefs that interfere with the motivation process.
The book is still being worked on, but in the meantime, there are two excellent books that might be considered CBT for the layman: “Loving What Is” by Byron Katie, and “Re-create Your Life”, by Morty Lefkoe.
Both are about identifying inconsistencies between your (emotional) beliefs and reality, and work well as long as you ask the questions from a state of genuine curiosity and wondering—that is, if you don’t treat the questions as rote or things you already know the answers to.
The trick is, the purpose of the questions isn’t for you to answer them, it’s to draw out the memories that form the evidence for your belief, and connect them to counterexamples or alternative interpretations at the sensory/emotional “near thinking” level, rather than merely at the logical “far thinking” level. (Otherwise you can end up “not believing in ghosts” but still being afraid of them.)
Btw, that article is embarrassingly out-of-date relative to my current methods
I guess I was right to just skim the article through—I admit, I fully read only the “meaning” section, then interpreted it with my own twist and went with that interpretation. BTW, one of the side effects was a clean desk—actually two clean desks :)
This video is a much better introduction
I spent a good chunk of my career in Photoshop, so I visualized your step 3 as having two ‘reality layers’, “Current State” and “Goal State”, where the latter has 50% transparency :)
The approach you’ve shown seems to be in sync with the concept of steering the reality into a specified region—it involves visualizing the starting point (the current state of reality) and the target region to steer the future to.
However, I’m still not sure whether this way of visualizing target states and letting our built-in planner to do it will work on tasks involving more creativity than cleaning a messy desk, or on goal states that are hard to imagine visually.
In any case, very interesting video—tricking my motivation/planning/execution system into doing things for me definitely looks like something I should explore.
(Also, I’d be cool to have a text version of the video, for quick reference and re-reading.)
However, I’m still not sure whether this way of visualizing target states and letting our built-in planner to do it will work on tasks involving more creativity than cleaning a messy desk, or on goal states that are hard to imagine visually.
Creativity, oddly enough, is precisely what your built-in planner is good at. It’s not that you have to be able to imagine the end result in perfect detail, but that you be able to know whether or not the current state matches the desired end-state. In fact, Robert Fritz calls this “the creative process”. If you read any of his books, it’s all about end state vs. current state comparison—whether you’re creating a painting, music, or a business.
The only thing I’ve added to his work in this method is the somatic marker check (aka the “mmm” test), as it’s the thing that engages the planner. Without the check, people find it a lot more hit-or-miss of an affair.
Also, remember that this technique will not work if you don’t engage the correct somatic marker; so don’t be disappointed if you find it doesn’t work on something you’re stressed about, and you don’t succeed in relaxing enough to pass the somatic marker check.
A note of caution: that technique will only work if you aren’t under any pressure to perform the task.
don’t be disappointed if you find it doesn’t work on something you’re stressed about
The technique I build for myself based on the article you consider outdated, “the meaning of just do it”, works for me under stress perfectly well. (“Stress” here means a final release, with a clear deadline, of a software product that has been 2 years in development.)
By stress I mean that you have a “my life (or status) is in danger if I do not succeed” somatic response. Some people would have that response to the conditions you mention, others would not. I work a lot with people who are in chronic procrastination about things that will result in serious loss of money, status, or both, if they don’t complete them… and they’re not always able to even do the steps of “just doing it” until I teach them to disengage the negative markers.
However, if you’re saying you have a significant negative somatic marker and you have a procedure that works repeatably in that context, I’d definitely be interested in hearing about it. Sometimes, people’s enthusiasm for a new idea distracts them sufficiently to avoid engaging the negative marker… but then the effect goes away once the technique is no longer novel. (This used to drive me nuts when I was starting out, before I got the idea of making sure I could reliably reproduce the stress condition before testing a technique to alleviate it.)
Anyway, if you find that your method works consistently under stress conditions—as defined by active somatic markers of life- or status-endangering threat—then I would be very interested in finding out what, specifically, you’re doing, as it would be a real improvement.
To be clear, that means you would need to have identified a thought about the project that induces an observable somatic marker of (di)stress… and then show that your method replaces it with a marker of motivation. If you can do that, I’ll definitely want to see if I can reproduce the effect myself and on my clients.
Presently, I’m not aware of any such technique that does not involve first deactivating the stress marker in some fashion… which is why I suspect that either you are deactivating it in some way, not experiencing it in the first place… or else have developed a new technique that I should learn. ;-) (Or are distracted by novelty that will wear off, have a weak enough stress marker that it can be overwhelmed, etc. etc.)
By stress I mean that you have a “my life (or status) is in danger if I do not succeed” somatic response.
under stress conditions—as defined by active somatic markers of life- or status-endangering threat
I’m not sure if this applies to my situation. Was the situation life-threatening? Definitely not—and I don’t think that my mind unconsciously deemed it to be so. Was my status threatened? Perhaps yes, but I’m not sure, and I don’t think that status is particularly valuable to me at this point.
The key factor was that the failure to complete that task would result in a monetary loss (or, more precisely, my company would lose several possible revenue streams.) The economic climate is not exactly warm these days, the revenues are declining despite growing website traffic (not just my case, other software firms I know experience this decline as well) -- so yes, I think money was the primary issue.
As I said, it’s the physical response that counts. Did you feel stuck, paralyzed, frozen? A desire to run away? Terror? Shame? Guilt? Embarrassment? (Those last three are what I mean by “loss of status”.)
I think money was the primary issue.
If you’re not actually afraid of losing money then you’re not going to have a somatic marker for life- or status-threatening stress. If you were afraid of losing your job, not being able to support your family, and that you’d be an utter failure as a spouse and parent, yet you felt paralyzed and unable to move forward, then that would count.
That’s the kind of stress responses I mostly work with, not inconveniences or mere preference for a different state of affairs. People who are under that kind of (self-generated, but usually unaware) stress don’t respond well to being told to “just do it”. ;-) (Aside from not helping, it tends to enhance the shame or guilt of not being able to.)
However, for the most part, your comment sounds like analytical “far” thinking, and most often our actual motivations are unrelated to our “far” analyses of them, when you check the “near” thinking that goes on under the hood.
A minor and more common form of stress response to a situation like you describe might be an internal prediction like, “the boss is gonna be livid if we don’t get this done”—associated with apprehension and discomfort at that prospect. And if the associated somatic marker is mild, you might be able to overcome it or just ignore it… especially if you also have novelty/excitement linked to the technique you’re trying.
Note that human beings always act for concrete reasons, not abstract ones… we can take our abstract rules and apply them to situations to create concrete reasons, but if we don’t, then we don’t actually act!
Conversely, the real reasons we avoid doing things are also concrete, not abstract. We don’t get stressed about a project because “the company will lose money”, but because of what that means in real-world events like, “I get yelled at” or “I get fired” or “I’ll look like an idiot”. Those outcomes are stored with somatic markers and linked to the abstract concept. People then confuse the abstract with the somatic, by thinking that “company loses money” equals “bad”, even though that label exists only in the map, not the territory. Removing the less-helpful markers (roughly equivalent to “not looking down” in principle/effect) then restores relative rationality in that area.
We don’t get stressed about a project because “the company will lose money”, but because of what that means in real-world events like, “I get yelled at” or “I get fired” or “I’ll look like an idiot”.
Bingo. My case was “my application will get rejected, and I will not pass the approval”. The stress level wasn’t that high—it was an inconvenience. I didn’t feel “stuck, paralyzed or frozen”—I just felt like a dumb moron who for some stupid reason is unable to follow his own plans.
Also, the 80⁄20 elimination techniques in Timothy Ferris’ “4-Hour Workweek” seem to work surprisingly well for me—especially in combination with pjeby’s secret meaning of “just do it”. I’m about halfway through Ferris’ book, and I haven’t read other pjeby’s articles, but so far, this combo does wonders.
Reading the key paragraph in pjeby’s article The Hidden Meaning of “Just Do It” has helped me to break through a 2-month-long round of procrastination.
Also, the 80⁄20 elimination techniques in Timothy Ferris’ “4-Hour Workweek” seem to work surprisingly well for me—especially in combination with pjeby’s secret meaning of “just do it”. I’m about halfway through Ferris’ book, and I haven’t read other pjeby’s articles, but so far, this combo does wonders.
Btw, that article is embarrassingly out-of-date relative to my current methods. This video is a much better introduction to a more current method of “just doing it”. In particular, it gives step-by-step instruction and is ridiculously easy to test.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
I watched that video and did what it told me to. Since I happen to have a rather messy desk, I could just apply that example directly.
For the last three or four minutes of the video, I couldn’t wait that it’d finish so I could get around to cleaning my desk. Then I did, and it’s clean now. For the record: even when I clean the rest of my room, I never get around cleaning my desk. When I did it now, I found an old receipt, dated December 2006. I hadn’t really cleaned my desk after that.
And now I’d done it, after watching a ten-minute video and done some simple exercises for about five minutes. Because it had made me feel I wanted to.
I don’t know how much of it was me just wanting the technique to work, and if the effectiveness of the technique will wear off with time (as has often been the fate with my previous anti-procrastination techniques), but if it does work consistently… this will so change my life. I will be eternally in your debt if it will.
If anybody here has any kinds of problems with procrastination, go watch that video right now. I mean that.
A note of caution: that technique will only work if you aren’t under any pressure to perform the task. If you try to use it on something like doing your taxes because you’re freaking out at how little time you have left, it’s probably not going to work, because you’ll have conflicting somatic markers activated. In other words, you won’t be able to pass the “mmmm” test in the steps.
Most chronic procrastination takes the form of pressuring yourself to do something and thereby engaging somatic markers for “life-threatening situation”—making it damn near impossible to do anything useful in a systematic, sustainable, or rational way. So, you’ll need to use other techniques to switch off those markers if you’re going to use this technique for something like that.
In other words, the technique in that video is NOT an anti-procrastination technique per se, and it’s better that you don’t try to use it as one. It’s a demonstration of the link between somatic markers and motivation, and I specifically chose desk-cleaning as the target activity because most people are not under an urgent deadline or major pressure to clean their desk.
Now, as long as you pass the “mmmm” test for an activity, the method will work and it will work every time. The only way it will stop working is if you stop checking for the somatic marker and try to just push through without passing the “mmm” test. It’s just that for “under pressure” activities this may be difficult or impossible unless you first disengage the threat response. (It’s hard to do a relaxed “mmmm” or “ahhh” when you’re freaking out.)
Alright, thanks for the warning. Actually, I just finished reading “Why Can’t I Change”, and I see what you’re talking about. You’re sure you want everybody to sign up with their e-mail addy before downloading it? It made me feel like everybody should read it and made me want to share the link as widely as possible, but the sign-up requirement will considerably reduce the amount of people who’ll bother giving it a look...
Thanks Pjeby. That video is brilliant. I noticed that it closely matched one of the most useful techniques that I’ve found in the NLP subculture (hidden amongst the nonsense). I’ll be sure to take a look at anything your upcoming book has to say about eliminating irrational beliefs that interfere with the motivation process.
The book is still being worked on, but in the meantime, there are two excellent books that might be considered CBT for the layman: “Loving What Is” by Byron Katie, and “Re-create Your Life”, by Morty Lefkoe.
Both are about identifying inconsistencies between your (emotional) beliefs and reality, and work well as long as you ask the questions from a state of genuine curiosity and wondering—that is, if you don’t treat the questions as rote or things you already know the answers to.
The trick is, the purpose of the questions isn’t for you to answer them, it’s to draw out the memories that form the evidence for your belief, and connect them to counterexamples or alternative interpretations at the sensory/emotional “near thinking” level, rather than merely at the logical “far thinking” level. (Otherwise you can end up “not believing in ghosts” but still being afraid of them.)
I guess I was right to just skim the article through—I admit, I fully read only the “meaning” section, then interpreted it with my own twist and went with that interpretation. BTW, one of the side effects was a clean desk—actually two clean desks :)
I spent a good chunk of my career in Photoshop, so I visualized your step 3 as having two ‘reality layers’, “Current State” and “Goal State”, where the latter has 50% transparency :)
The approach you’ve shown seems to be in sync with the concept of steering the reality into a specified region—it involves visualizing the starting point (the current state of reality) and the target region to steer the future to.
However, I’m still not sure whether this way of visualizing target states and letting our built-in planner to do it will work on tasks involving more creativity than cleaning a messy desk, or on goal states that are hard to imagine visually.
In any case, very interesting video—tricking my motivation/planning/execution system into doing things for me definitely looks like something I should explore.
(Also, I’d be cool to have a text version of the video, for quick reference and re-reading.)
Creativity, oddly enough, is precisely what your built-in planner is good at. It’s not that you have to be able to imagine the end result in perfect detail, but that you be able to know whether or not the current state matches the desired end-state. In fact, Robert Fritz calls this “the creative process”. If you read any of his books, it’s all about end state vs. current state comparison—whether you’re creating a painting, music, or a business.
The only thing I’ve added to his work in this method is the somatic marker check (aka the “mmm” test), as it’s the thing that engages the planner. Without the check, people find it a lot more hit-or-miss of an affair.
Also, remember that this technique will not work if you don’t engage the correct somatic marker; so don’t be disappointed if you find it doesn’t work on something you’re stressed about, and you don’t succeed in relaxing enough to pass the somatic marker check.
The technique I build for myself based on the article you consider outdated, “the meaning of just do it”, works for me under stress perfectly well. (“Stress” here means a final release, with a clear deadline, of a software product that has been 2 years in development.)
By stress I mean that you have a “my life (or status) is in danger if I do not succeed” somatic response. Some people would have that response to the conditions you mention, others would not. I work a lot with people who are in chronic procrastination about things that will result in serious loss of money, status, or both, if they don’t complete them… and they’re not always able to even do the steps of “just doing it” until I teach them to disengage the negative markers.
However, if you’re saying you have a significant negative somatic marker and you have a procedure that works repeatably in that context, I’d definitely be interested in hearing about it. Sometimes, people’s enthusiasm for a new idea distracts them sufficiently to avoid engaging the negative marker… but then the effect goes away once the technique is no longer novel. (This used to drive me nuts when I was starting out, before I got the idea of making sure I could reliably reproduce the stress condition before testing a technique to alleviate it.)
Anyway, if you find that your method works consistently under stress conditions—as defined by active somatic markers of life- or status-endangering threat—then I would be very interested in finding out what, specifically, you’re doing, as it would be a real improvement.
To be clear, that means you would need to have identified a thought about the project that induces an observable somatic marker of (di)stress… and then show that your method replaces it with a marker of motivation. If you can do that, I’ll definitely want to see if I can reproduce the effect myself and on my clients.
Presently, I’m not aware of any such technique that does not involve first deactivating the stress marker in some fashion… which is why I suspect that either you are deactivating it in some way, not experiencing it in the first place… or else have developed a new technique that I should learn. ;-) (Or are distracted by novelty that will wear off, have a weak enough stress marker that it can be overwhelmed, etc. etc.)
I’m not sure if this applies to my situation. Was the situation life-threatening? Definitely not—and I don’t think that my mind unconsciously deemed it to be so. Was my status threatened? Perhaps yes, but I’m not sure, and I don’t think that status is particularly valuable to me at this point.
The key factor was that the failure to complete that task would result in a monetary loss (or, more precisely, my company would lose several possible revenue streams.) The economic climate is not exactly warm these days, the revenues are declining despite growing website traffic (not just my case, other software firms I know experience this decline as well) -- so yes, I think money was the primary issue.
Does this count as a stress marker?
As I said, it’s the physical response that counts. Did you feel stuck, paralyzed, frozen? A desire to run away? Terror? Shame? Guilt? Embarrassment? (Those last three are what I mean by “loss of status”.)
If you’re not actually afraid of losing money then you’re not going to have a somatic marker for life- or status-threatening stress. If you were afraid of losing your job, not being able to support your family, and that you’d be an utter failure as a spouse and parent, yet you felt paralyzed and unable to move forward, then that would count.
That’s the kind of stress responses I mostly work with, not inconveniences or mere preference for a different state of affairs. People who are under that kind of (self-generated, but usually unaware) stress don’t respond well to being told to “just do it”. ;-) (Aside from not helping, it tends to enhance the shame or guilt of not being able to.)
However, for the most part, your comment sounds like analytical “far” thinking, and most often our actual motivations are unrelated to our “far” analyses of them, when you check the “near” thinking that goes on under the hood.
A minor and more common form of stress response to a situation like you describe might be an internal prediction like, “the boss is gonna be livid if we don’t get this done”—associated with apprehension and discomfort at that prospect. And if the associated somatic marker is mild, you might be able to overcome it or just ignore it… especially if you also have novelty/excitement linked to the technique you’re trying.
Note that human beings always act for concrete reasons, not abstract ones… we can take our abstract rules and apply them to situations to create concrete reasons, but if we don’t, then we don’t actually act!
Conversely, the real reasons we avoid doing things are also concrete, not abstract. We don’t get stressed about a project because “the company will lose money”, but because of what that means in real-world events like, “I get yelled at” or “I get fired” or “I’ll look like an idiot”. Those outcomes are stored with somatic markers and linked to the abstract concept. People then confuse the abstract with the somatic, by thinking that “company loses money” equals “bad”, even though that label exists only in the map, not the territory. Removing the less-helpful markers (roughly equivalent to “not looking down” in principle/effect) then restores relative rationality in that area.
Bingo. My case was “my application will get rejected, and I will not pass the approval”. The stress level wasn’t that high—it was an inconvenience. I didn’t feel “stuck, paralyzed or frozen”—I just felt like a dumb moron who for some stupid reason is unable to follow his own plans.
Tim writes the best productivity porn out there!