Fighting Procrastination, Overcoming Distraction, and Wrestling Alligators

Question: How do you tell professional Alligator Wrestlers from amateurs?
Answer: The professionals don’t have scars.

I have a lot of scars. I feel them every time I take an hour to get started on a project or start browsing Facebook when I’m distracted. I’m distracted. I procrastinate.

I think everyone has scars. The people who are good at this — living, loving, making, doing — have just gotten good enough at what they do that you don’t see the scars any more.

I’m working on being a little less broken every day. I want to get to the point where I don’t feel distracted or angry or afraid when I sit down to make something new.

Fighting Procrastination

Don't Think; Just Start

There is no trick to getting over procrastination. There are only two options:

  1. Do the work.
  2. Don’t do the work.

The only way I’ve found to stop procrastinating is to start doing the work.

I ask myself ‘What the hell am I doing?’

I’m terrible. I start big projects like ‘Clean the house!’ or ‘Launch a website’ and then procrastinate for a week because I don’t know where to get started.

When I start procrastinating it’s because I don’t know what the first thing I need to do is. When I get stuck, it’s easier to open up Facebook than figure out what I need to do next.

Last week I started to rewrite marketing materials for a sales call. I had the project as 1-line on my to-do list:

Rewrite marketing materials for meeting.

It sat there for 5 days. I didn’t do a god-damn thing. I looked at that every morning and night and didn’t know how to get started. Finally I broke the project down into smaller pieces. Three hours later, I was done.

What changed? Everything.

I made it easy for me to stop thinking about the work and start doing the work.

I gave myself a clear path. I said ‘I need to do these 8 things.’ I knew how to start. I knew what being done would look like. I eliminated the opportunity for distraction because I knew what the next small task was. I knew where to look when I was done with piece.

Saying No

Where’s the line between something you want to see in the world and something you want to create?

I never considered the distinction. I’d fill up my to-do list with ideas I loved, but not ideas I wanted to make.

I’m trying to be ruthless at saying no to opportunities that don’t fit with my goals. I have 86,400 seconds to live every day. I want to spend those seconds on things I care about:

  • Cooking
  • Writing
  • Making new things
  • Traveling

Every time I work on something I don’t care about, I’m giving up the opportunity to work on something that would have filled me with joy.

I’m practicing saying no to opportunities now so I can say yes later.

Overcoming Distraction

When I want to procrastinate, it’s easy for me to thing of 10 excuses to stop working.

My Notepad

I keep a yellow legal notepad next to me wherever I’m working. When I think of something I want to do instead of the task I’m working on, I capture it on the notepad. I get it out of my head and write it down so I don’t have to remember it.

When I finish the task, I look at the list of things I wrote down. Then I go do them.

Concentrate

Concentrate helps me eliminate distractions so I can work more productively. I use Concentrate to block the websites I like distracting myself on.

Whenever I get distracted, I end up opening Chrome and typing FAC. I do this 5+ times every day. Whenever I’m distracted, my fingers take over and let my energy and concentration spill out all over the keyboard.

Concentrate lets me block websites — like Facebook - that help my attention leak out. I interrupt the negative habit (unintentionally browsing Facebook) and form a new habit (setting an intent when I surf the web).

Wrestling Alligators

I use these basic steps to fight procrastination, overcome distraction, and wrestle my alligators. Maybe you can use these too to help in your specific situation.

Thanks for reading. Love you.