How to beat procrastination

You don’t.

Procrastination is a feature, not a bug.

Procrastination is ingrained in our DNA. We conserve energy and avoid unnecessary tasks. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t be here writing, and you reading. Homo sapiens wouldn’t have survived.

The first step to fix procrastination is realizing it is a natural and desired phenomenon. No, you are not broken. You don’t have to fix this bug; you have to use this feature.

Think of it as a circuit breaker. When an electrical installation goes bananas, the breaker freezes the system to prevent further damage.

Humans have survived for tens of thousands of years. Would a hunter-gatherer expend energy on a treadmill while hunting for precious calories all day? When hunter-gatherers weren’t hunting, they found shelter, rested, slept in caves, told stories around a campfire, and maybe built little toys for their kids in their free time.

We can learn a lot from this. We are built to survive, and food is a fundamental necessity. After securing food, we build shelter. With shelter secured, we socialize and kill time. Once we have all of the above taken care of and bored out of our minds, we may endeavor for adventures.

This cycle is a universal truth, repeating on both micro and macro levels. It’s true for humans and nations alike. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs illustrates a similar concept.

If a hunt doesn’t promise an immediate reward, we won’t pursue it because it’s a potential waste of calories. If you don’t see an immediate reward, your mind will do all it can to stop you. It was essential to our survival and still is, though the stakes are very different. The first commercial gym was invented 500 years ago. That’s less than 0.5% of the time we’ve been on this planet. It makes no sense for our brains to prioritize going to the gym. The solution is to do things that offer immediate rewards. For things without immediate reward, either make the reward immediate or you must find a way to hack around it.

Make the reward more immediate. If you are trying to start a business, start one where you can earn money the same day. Once you have that nailed, you’ll build confidence, then start something that has a chance of earning money the next day. Then next week, months, and so forth.

If you can’t make the reward more immediate, reduce the effort required to negligible. Like a hunter-gatherer assessing whether the chase is worth it. Immediate is a function of risk appetite. A 150kg deadlift might be effortless for someone but not for you. This is true for all actions. If you can't do either of the above, you must hack your way through it.

Your brain keeps you in your comfort zone until you get bored. Bored by having all fundamentals taken care of and nothing to do.

Boredom is a blessing.

The irony of modern times is that our comfort zones also entertain us and we always have a quick fix to boredom. Never in history have these two things been combined as they are now. Previously, entertaining yourself meant dueling with wooden swords, building things, hunting game, playing hide and seek. All of it was done within limits due to limited physical energy and daylight. Telling stories was an important pastime, but it required doing something interesting before you could share entertaining stories.

Doomscrolling is the most destructive form of entertainment. It’s infinite entertainment and dopamine combined with comfort. It’s like your brain on sugar all the time. It's devastating. A better way exists to stay in your comfort zone and still achieve goals. That is by forming habits. Read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it will teach you all you need to know about the subject.

I will summarize a few important points. Make what you want to do easy and omnipresent. Make what you don't want to do hard and out of sight. For new habits, stack them with an already built habit, i.e. go to the gym first thing after work.

Given the above, if you delete all social media and games from your phone and computer, log out of Netflix from TV, and put books on the coffee table, immediately you will be bored and craving dopamine. At that point you have two options, find a source of dopamine, like reinstall Youtube, or read the book or dwell in the boredom for a bit. When you let yourself be bored, your mind that was fried by dopamine will start to think for itself. If you let that persist and deny dopamine for a day or two, you will find yourself doing something better. Boredom becomes painful and by Skinner's law, you have two ways to solve procrastination: Make the pain of inaction greater than the pain of action or make the pleasure of action greater than the pleasure of inaction. When inaction becomes painful, it paves the way for action.

Some habits that align with our DNA are easy to form, like doomscrolling (comfort & dopamine). Some habits are hard to form, and you need hacks to develop them.

Denying yourself dopamine is hard. Hacks and tricks, don't last. They only work for some people some of the time. There’s another perspective to consider. Something more fundamental. Without the fundamentals in place, fighting procrastination becomes an uphill battle. Since we’ve established that procrastination is in our DNA and a feature, good luck going uphill against it.

You might wonder about people doing high-effort distant-reward things. Are all of them hacking it? No.

Let’s discuss the basics. They are simple but not easy. Simple is rarely easy. If I put it in two words: know yourself. If you know yourself, you won’t procrastinate ever. The statement is too simplistic to be useful though.

Habits are overrated; knowing yourself is underrated.

To know yourself, you need solitude, reflection, inspiration, and repeated action. A few cycles of depression can expedite this process.

Adults know when they are sleepy, they will sleep instead of trying to do hard work. Kids don't get it that they are sleepy so they will make a fuss about everything but not sleep. You can't get them to do anything important like eat, stop crying, or even sleep. They will cry because they are sleepy but won't sleep. Interestingly many adults are also kids.

This phenomenon is prevalent on many levels. Your deficiency of something important makes it hard to do what you want. Sometimes it's obvious but very often it is not. You will know when you need food or sleep but what if you lack health, mental energy, relationship, air conditioning, oxygen level in the room, boredom, inspiration, financial security, mental space, focused time, mental clarity, vision, ambition, and a long list of things.

We procrastinate when our gut tells us we shouldn’t waste energy on a task because we need it for something else. Our gut knows, we don't. Our subconscious knows, we don't.

Your best bet is to pause and focus on that “something else.” Often, that “something else” is hard to identify. We must make our conscious aware of our subconscious desires. This is why knowing yourself is the solution.

For example, if you have a day job that pays adequately, your expenses are comfortably covered, and you are procrastinating on starting a side hustle. It's quite natural. I will discuss reasons why you may procrastinate on it.

You may procrastinate because you are uncertain about the benefits of the side hustle. Focus on making those benefits more apparent and certain. Unless you do that, you will be dragging yourself. If the reward seems distant and uncertain, make it immediate and certain.

You may procrastinate because you are worried your side hustle can cost you a lot of money and returns are not certain. That means you should start a side hustle according to your risk appetite. Once you have a risk appetite big enough for what you are trying to do, procrastination won’t bug you.

You may procrastinate because you are out of energy after your day job. It usually means you need to take care of energy. If you feel physically drained, take care of your body. I would go as far as saying that if you don’t exercise, don’t think about starting anything extra like a side hustle. A side hustle is “unnecessary.” Regular physical exertion is necessary. Your DNA knows it. If you feel mentally drained, you have other issues. Maybe you need to hit the gym or need a good relationship. Having a solid, healthy relationship is necessary. A side hustle is not. Your DNA knows that.

We think we don’t have enough time, but what we lack is energy.

You may procrastinate because you have better things to do. Now, anything that gives dopamine is perceived as better by humans. It’s a happiness chemical that was as scarce as sugar, historically speaking. Since you have your social media, movies, TV, games, etc., as an easy source of dopamine, your brain perceives it as something better to do. That is why it’s hard to work when you could play games, scroll TikTok, or eat ice cream.

Identify what’s plaguing you and fix the problem first. Secure food, health, shelter, relationships, money, and excess dopamine to go out of your way and then do something “unnecessary.” (read: extra).

You might think about all the people with toxic relationships or poor health doing extraordinary work. Think about the nature of their work. Is that work a side hustle for them? Is their living dependent on that side hustle? Do they bury themselves in work to avoid a toxic relationship? Are they really doing extraordinary work considering their resources and risk appetite?

There are two ways to be passionate about work: as a coping mechanism or as a delusion. Any attempt in any other way would fail.

Unless you are mentally ill, upset, or delusional, it’s hard to push boundaries unnecessarily.

Humans morph. If you practice deadlifts regularly, you become good at deadlifts. At a certain point, you become so good at it that doing deadlifts gives you joy, fulfillment, satisfaction, and a comfort zone. To a deadlift noob observer, you are obsessive or an overachiever or try-hard while you are just having fun.

When work becomes play is when people become dangerously overachieving. Each person has a different path to get to a stage where work becomes play. Some get into it as a way to cope with some relationship and eventually make it a play for themselves. Some were forced into circumstances where their livelihood was dependent, and they made it.

This is the path of coping, and many geniuses and achievements have been made this way. The other way is knowing yourself. If you weren't fortunate enough to be bullied or beaten as a kid, or see death of your parents, or have bad breakups, knowing yourself is the only way.

Without investing time and energy in knowing yourself, you might achieve extraordinary results through sheer genius or luck or both but still not find fulfillment. Knowing yourself fixes that. A mix of both at some points in life is what makes well-rounded overachievers who get stuff done, do not procrastinate, and live a happy life.

You don’t want to be miserable and a high achiever. You want to be content and a high achiever. You can be content and not aim high. Some people don't have that ambition. If you know yourself and have your basics taken care of, you will be shooting for the stars. Many people believe they are content but are merely avoidant. They shrink and reduce their surface area as a defense mechanism. They are not free. You can see it in their eyes when they talk about people out there making things happen.

Take small steps. If you are thinking of starting a startup that will change the world, try making $100 on Upwork first. Try making $5 by selling some information in a PDF. A small idea, a small initial cliff, and quick feedback will teach you a lot about running a business and yourself. You’ll know yourself better. If something like that fails, you won’t take forever to recover. You will have a small win or a mini failure. A small win will teach you a lot and motivate you for the next small bet. Here’s the thing: a small bet for Elon Musk is an extremely ambitious idea for you. So, always be placing small bets as per your risk appetite, and naturally, you will find yourself achieving big.

Think big, act small.

You might be ambitious and have goals to shoot for the stars, and that is perfectly fine. But you don’t shoot for the stars on your first attempt. Break big tasks into small ones. It always helps. Our monkey brain avoids uncertainty. Have you found yourself working in a flow on something, and at the first obstacle whose fix you are uncertain about, you will lean back in your chair and check your phone and end up spending way too much time on it? This happens because the feedback and sense of progress you were getting stopped, and our mind knows that we can get instant gratification from phones, so we check them.

Breaking big tasks into small ones gives us a sense of certainty and also shortens the feedback loop. “Let’s push through this for 10 minutes and see how it goes” is better than “Let’s push through this for a month and see how it goes.”

Worse, some people push through for years, and if and when they fail, they take years to recover. Such is the psychological cost of failure. Protect yourself from that.

When your life or livelihood is on the line, you will not procrastinate. This problem only kicks in when you want to push a little extra, do something on the side, or get out of your comfort zone. Make it as easy as possible on yourself. Do not start a side hustle in a domain you have no idea about. Start with something similar to a day job. Something you know a lot about already and have a high chance of creating value. Creating value equates to making money. Doing something completely different might sound lucrative and interesting. Remember that Top Gun movie where a bartender sails as a hobby on a private sailboat and owns a 911. It looks amazing but possible in movies only. If you want to try something very different, start it as a hobby and see how it goes. Not with an expectation to make money out of it.

Expectations drive motivation. If you go to the gym thinking that you will look like Arnold in 2 months, you will procrastinate when you find out that you can't look like Arnold in a lifetime. You may skip gym for a bit(years) after that. Start again with a relatively reasonable expectation. It's better to start with reasonable expectations. Not too low, not too high.

When working, seek a balance of challenge and comfort. If something is too challenging, you will give up. If something is too comfortable, you will get bored. Push yourself, but not too hard. That’s a good way to grow and avoid the procrastination trap.

People procrastinate because of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a symptom of many underlying problems. Those need to be identified and fixed. I’ve written about the topic in detail here.

Surround yourself with inspiration. If you want to build products, immerse yourself in a community of people and content focused on product creation. However, beware of consuming content without taking action. This is an avoidance mechanism that makes us choose easy tasks over difficult ones. Many people fall into the cycle of endless learning, watching tutorials, and taking courses without actually building anything. Don’t let this happen. Balance learning with doing.

"Start, then learn." - Sahil

There are hundreds if not thousands of examples to explain what I wrote in this post. It will make this post long but still not complete. There is no manual for knowing yourself. Read this post, reflect, and train your conscious to recognize when you are procrastinating so you can reflect on the reasons behind it. Just as a child needs to sit down and realize they need to sleep, we, quite often, need to sit down and reflect on what is plaguing us. Keep asking why until you get to the bottom of it and discover yourself. Procrastination is not the problem, something else is.