This season on Planet Money Summer School, we have drilled for oil and Norway.
We've smuggled products in the North Korea. And now we make it to our seventh continent, Antarctica. That's right, big for me. Mr. Penguins, big for me. I have another sound of Antarctica.
That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can say, I'm going to quest, or I'm battling the dragon of procrastination, or you can visualize it as a journey.
“But the really important thing is to figure out what is going to move to HU.”
When I was a kid, my dad took us to the park. And he just wanted us to learn that it's important to clean up, you know, your public spaces, and people would leave their trash in the park. And so we picked up the trash, but we were pretending that we were like pirates. So we picked up clothes hangers and be fighting with them.
Like there were swords, and we would have the plastic bags or whatever. And tie them as bandanas. This is what I remember. That then grew into a whole scene in my mind and made the task much more fun.
Exactly. And ultimately, you're doing the same thing,
but you're getting yourself to feel much more excited about it. You're reframing it in a way that makes it feel much more fun. You're listening to LifeKit. I'm Mary Elsa Gartman. And you just heard from E. tomorrow's Shats. He's a social science lecture at Cambridge University
and author of the book, "Solving Procrastination." Which it would be great to solve.
“Although, if you do procrastinate and who doesn't it, right?”
Give yourself a break. There's an evolutionary reason you do it. Procrastination at its core is ultimately driven by our mind pushing us to pursue immediate pleasure and avoid immediate pain. Let's say we have to do something like right and email. If we feel scared for some reason, maybe we're worried that we'll go wrong.
We'll be criticized for it. Our brain says, you know what? It would be better if instead of doing this, maybe you could just, I know, we're out social media right now. Or watch one more video or do whatever it else that will help you, avoid doing this.
The problem is that in the modern world, this kind of response doesn't work for us,
because we're not dealing with the problem that we should have been dealing with. On this episode of LifeKit, battling the dragon of procrastination. Starting here, Eatamar says one big reason we procrastinate is that the task itself seems unpleasant. So what we need to do is make it more pleasant and thus more appealing to take action.
I think of this as the Mary Poppins Principle. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way. One thing you can do to make a task more pleasant is something called temptation bundling. And that's when we take something that we really want to do, like listen to an audiobook or listen to energizing music or something else that we find enticing,
and pairing that up with a task we don't want to do. So the way we might do this is say, you know, I really don't want to go running, but I really want to listen to my favorite audiobook. So I'm only going to let myself listen to this audiobook when I'm going running. Another thing you can do is trying to make tasks that we dislike, less of or so.
An example of this is let's say you decide you want to go exercising after you get home from work. And you notice that even though you're really motivated to do it in practice, once you get home, you kind of end up sitting there and maybe wasting a bit of time and your motivation ends up fizzling out. And in that case, what might be the issue is that before you go to the gym,
“you have to get your back ready and pack everything up, and that's kind of a bummer.”
And in that case, what you can do is say, you know what? I'm going to separate these two tasks. I'm going to deal with this bad thing the day before when I motivated it, and when I know that I don't have to take it with me yet. And then the day after when you're back home from work and you're feeling maybe with more tired,
it's already there. Take away one, make it more appealing to take action. You can try temptation bundling where you basically give yourself a little treat, like watching your favorite show when you do the task. You can do some of the work ahead of time, pack for the trip,
or wash those fruits and vegetables so the task doesn't seem so involved when you have to do it later. And you can gamify, try sprinting through the task, doing it as quickly as possible and seeing how much progress you could make. Or, you know, pretend you're a pirate, or that you can make your clothes, levitate themselves back into your wardrobe.
Coming up, we talk about perfectionism and how it can lead to procrastination. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. As we mourn the loss of the great Dolly Parton, it feels good to listen back to her reflecting on her life, and to hear some of her dollyisms.
I always say that it's a good thing I was a woman
'cause about a bit of man, I would've been a drag queen, just because I'm so damn guilty. We've dropped the Dolly Fresh Air interview on the NPR app, and wherever you listen to podcasts.
This week on Chartwave, you are what you eat,
may not be afraid you associate with your mental health.
“But one in three people have insulin resistance in our country.”
And if you have insulin resistance, you are double the likelihood of developing major depression. We explore the link between your body and your brain. Listen on Chartwave, the science podcast from NPR. How will a historically unpopular president
navigate a midterm election season that may leave him with a lot less power? Stay caught up on the latest news with Trump's terms, the podcast where we curate NPR's coverage of President Trump and short episodes focused on a single story.
Follow Trump's terms on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. One reason I procrastinate is that I want to do a good job, and that seems like it's going to take too much energy, so I do nothing instead.
Maybe the problem is not that I'm trying to do a good job,
but that I'm trying to do a perfect job, and I don't want to fall short of that goal. Eat 'em or I says if this is true for you, if perfectionism is driving your procrastination. What I would recommend is figure out what specifically good enough
means for you, get yourself to be okay with it, and then focus on achieving it. So let's say you want to share a book that you're writing with people. Perfectionism in this case can be sort of a defense mechanism, where you're saying, I just gotta keep revising it.
I gotta keep revising it, I gotta revise it again and again. And there it's protecting you from criticism, because it's giving you a reason not to share it. And what you can do in that case and say, you know what?
My good enough point is when I go over it, not actually finding any changes to implement. And once you find that particular position, you can say when I get here, I'm going to send it out, because that is when it is good enough.
“Yeah, I think about that too with speaking Spanish.”
I'm Puerto Rican on my dad's side, but I'm not a native speaker. So I can get in my own head a lot about it
and think I'm never gonna be perfect at this.
I'm an outsider. And it gets to that point though of aiming for good enough. What is good enough? It's being able to speak Spanish to my family and understand them.
You know, it's being able to do ancestry research and maybe read some books in Spanish like that's my goal. I would even say for today you can say, my goal today is to learn a word that they did not do yesterday. My goal for tomorrow is to add one more word to that.
And just tackle it one step at a time, instead of looking at the very end goal, finding those steps that we can focus on along the way. You know, there weren't any mistakes and you knew everything perfectly. It wouldn't be really language learning.
It would be just downloading the language. Take away two, get comfortable with good enough, and let yourself make mistakes. Okay, so we've been talking about ways
“that we can make it more appealing to take action.”
What about if the reason you're procrastinating is that you think the task is meaningless? So when we evolved, most of the task were very visceral. It was get shelter or freeze to death. Find food or starve, run from this line or get eaten.
And now a lot of the tasks feel much more meaningless or nebulous, and there could be things like, gather all these receipts, send them to your accountant so that you don't get a letter from IRS in, I don't know, year or whatever it is.
And that's much harder for our brain to feel connected to and to feel excited about. And there are a few things you can do there. What is to find the meaning? That could be okay.
That's true that this whole task is a bit nebulous in meaningless, but let's think about the bad outcome here. That might be that I go to jail. That might be that I get fired. That might be that I feel bad.
And basically trying to get yourself to think about the actual outcomes
and make them feel much more concrete. And the other thing you can do in this kind of situation is to reframe the task. So sometimes we get tasks that just feel meaningless. There's not much we can do about them.
And those kind of situations, what you can do is reframe it a bit by thinking, this task is meaningless. On that excited about it fair enough, but I'm a person who gets things done.
I'm a reliable individual. I'm a productive person. So Michael, for finishing this as quickly as possible, isn't to show that I care about this task, but to show that I care about getting things done.
Take away three. When a task feels unimportant, see if you can find the meaning. Like, okay, I don't want to do this paperwork. It's a lot of bureaucracy.
But I do want to grow my business, and so this is necessary. Or if you can't find meaning in the task itself, find identity. I am a reliable, productive person who gets things done.
After the break, we get acquainted with our future selves. Billionaire Mark Cuban has stared
Into the belly of the beast of America's health care system.
It's going to be so bad. You can go through a long list of really quality hospitals, and they don't know their costs. So, can Medicare for all be a solution? We take a hard look at the cost of the program
along with US health care itself. Find this and hear more stories from the indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app. I wonder, are there scenarios where we might decide that a task is something you actually don't need to do?
“In my eyes, the best thing is to connect to your future self,”
and think about whether they will regret your decision. So, when you say, I really want to speak Spanish, but I'm kind of worried it will come off awkward, or maybe almost pronounce words.
Let's think about my future self. How will my future self feel? If I do give this a shot, even if I make mistakes, or if I decide not to do it?
And basically trying to visualize
how much regret will your future self feel, and empathize with them? There are certain things too that are like, it feels like you could do them at any time. Like, the stakes are not that high
if I don't speak Spanish today. But then, at the same time, if I don't speak Spanish any day, then I don't speak Spanish. You know?
And you could use that test and say,
“"How would my future self feel about this?"”
But my future self wouldn't care too much if I spoke Spanish today, but I don't want me to be practicing so that they had that tool available to them. Absolutely.
Then you can decide to do it on two levels. One is, "Okay, what will tomorrow me think? And what will me and month from now think?" And try to think what both of them will care about. It occurs to me that this step also requires
some imagination, picturing your future self and empathizing with your future self. Yes. I've read one example of this is if you are not currently saving for retirement
that it can help to think about you at retirement age. Yes. And you know, you probably look a little different then and think about the freedom that you'll have if you set aside that nesting now,
the gift that you're giving to yourself. Exactly. And basically, the issue that can happen is that there is something called temporal disjunction or self discontinuity,
where we feel that our future self is separate from us. And that makes us care about them less, which impregnest means caring about our self less. And empathizing with our future self is a way to overcome that. Yeah, it's almost this idea that you're like,
"Well, I'm never going to get old."
Or, "I'm never going to die." We know that these things happen, but we don't really believe that they're going to happen to us. Imagine what retirement will look like in decades is not something our brains were designed for.
We were meant to focus on the immediate much more, but because that's no longer really an option for us today, it's important to get our brains to think about not just the immediate, but also about what will be the better for us in the longer term. Take away four empathize with future you.
If you delay this task, will you regret it later? If you do it today, how does future you benefit? Remember, future you is you. Now, so far, in this episode, we've been talking about procrastination, which Edemars says is unhealthy delay.
Pushing off a task, even though that's going to harm you, or make things more difficult. But sometimes it makes sense to delay. And sometimes, yes, we're putting off one task, but we're doing a different one that also needs to get done.
That is called productive procrastination. When I was writing the book, I actually did this a lot, so I structured the way I wanted to write the book, and it was very sequentially. And then, sometimes, I notice that when I'm writing,
I just feel this inner resistance to writing a certain part. And initially, I tried to force myself to write it, and then I realized, you know what?
“What matters ultimately is that I make progress every single day.”
It doesn't matter that if I write this particular part right now, or if I skip to a different part that I feel like writing today.
And basically, I gave myself permission to say,
"Right now, I should be working on chapter 15, but for some reason, I woke up today, and I feel like working on chapter 22." And then just gave myself permission to do that. And ultimately, that was much more productive than trying to stick to a strict schedule, because, you know, the book still gets done at the same time,
but it actually makes the whole process much easier, and just feel much better as well. Yeah, I get that, because I also think, like, sometimes, you're in the mood for, or equipped in the moment for a certain kind of work,
and not for a different kind of work. And that's why two of my biggest tips. One is around right the waves of your productivity rhythms. So, figure out when you're ready to head a certain tasks, and then schedule them tasks for those times.
So, maybe in theory, you should open your day with emails, but actually, you realize that in the morning before you've started,
That's when you're concentrating best.
You're going to schedule the deep work for that time when you're fresh, and then do emails after.
“Or maybe technically, dishes are the first thing you should do when you get home,”
but realistically, you're so tired for the first half an hour
that you might as well do something my list. Give yourself some time to online and just do it then. What is the most surprising thing you learned about procrastination in studying and writing this? I think when I set out, the focus was really an overcoming procrastination.
And the more I read and the more I learned, the more I realize it's important to sometimes know when to cut herself slack. And I think that's one of the things I've really shifted on. In terms of how important it is to give ourselves compassion, how important it is to realize not only when we should stop procrastinating,
but also when it just doesn't matter. And we can say, "You know what? I'm procrastinating. It's been eye procrastination. That's fine." Or, "I'm procrastinating, but I'm being productive. I'm still going to get to whatever it is I need to do at the end.
But right now I'm going to do something else because otherwise I'm going to just waste time."
And this basically revolves around kind of planning for the very imperfect humans that we are
as opposed to the perfect machines we sometimes wish we were. Eat tomorrow. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Okay. Time for recap. Take away one. Make it more appealing to take action.
You can try temptation bundling or do some of the work ahead of time or gamify. Take away two. Get comfortable with good enough and let yourself make mistakes. Take away three. When a task feels unimportant, see if you can find the meaning. Or if you can't find meaning in the task itself, find identity.
I am a reliable, productive person who gets things done.
Take away four. Empathize with future you. If you delay this task, will you regret it? If you do it now, how to spute your new benefit.
“Remember, future you and his you and they appreciate all you do for them.”
All right. That's our show. If you love life kit and you want even more, follow us on Instagram at NPR Life Kit. There you'll find videos featuring our favorite tips and musings, and you'll get to see our faces. Again, that's at NPR Life Kit. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas.
It was edited by Rebecca Ormira's. Our digital editor is Malika Greb and our visuals editor is CJ Reklaug. Meghan Kane is our senior supervising editor, and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagel, Clear Marrace Knighter, and Margaret Serena. Engineering support comes from Travis Haken.
Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Cousado. I'm Mary Elcegata. Thanks for listening. How do products end up on big box shells? Well, we have plenty of money, pitch deep on it money, board game.
We're trying not to think how much of a big deal it is and how much work has gone into it.
“It's really big. Is it helpful if I remind you how big it is?”
It's sort of the whole thing. We go inside the minds of the people who decide what goes on store shows. Listen to planet money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, I'm Brittany loose and not to brag, but I host a really fabulous podcast. It's called "It's been a minute."
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