So, you're ambitious; you’ve got big dreams, you want to be successful, and ultimately, you want to live the life you've always imagined. But there's a problem: you're lazy. You know exactly what you should be doing, yet you don't do it, leading to feelings of guilt because deep down, you know you're capable of more.
This guilt builds up over days, weeks, and months until it turns into acceptance. Then, the New Year arrives, and with it, the same goals from last year. You start off strong, fueled by motivation and a bit of delusion, but before you know it, procrastination creeps in like that one relative who always shows up uninvited.
Your lingering procrastination turns into a daily cycle of laziness, and before you know it, you've labeled yourself as a lazy person. So, how do we break this cycle and break free from procrastination? Well, there are many videos on the internet, but the majority of them only address the symptoms, like deleting social media or removing distractions.
While these may help in the short term, they fail to address the real issue: the root cause behind procrastination, which can be summed up in one word: inertia. In physics, inertia is the tendency for objects at rest to stay at rest and objects in motion to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force. This also happens to be Newton's first law of motion, and it applies just as much to tasks as it does to objects.
Getting started on any task, no matter how small, requires an initial push and some amount of energy to overcome the resting state of inertia, and this precisely is the issue. We make this initial push so big and difficult in our minds that instead, we just avoid the task entirely and distract ourselves with cheap dopamine-inducing activities. So, to break procrastination, we need to break inertia, and there are two ways to do this.
Getting started is the most difficult part, so make this as easy as possible by reducing the stakes and taking the smallest step forward. For example, if you tell yourself, "I need to sit down and complete my 5,000-word essay," the inertia is too strong as the stakes are so high. But instead, if you tell yourself, "I'm only going to write 50 words," the feeling of inertia is much lower, as now it's pretty easy to get started without needing to rely on willpower or discipline.
Another popular technique is the two-minute rule. If you don't feel like doing the work, just tell yourself you’ll do it for 2 minutes and then stop, should you want to. For example, if you don't feel like cleaning your room, put on a song, clean your room, and stop when the music stops.
The best part is, usually, you'll continue longer than 2 minutes, or you'll end up writing more than 50 words. This is because objects in motion stay in motion, meaning once we get started, we start gaining momentum, and this momentum keeps us going for longer. Initially, it's like pushing a ball uphill, but once we pass the point of inertia, it's downhill from there.
That's why it's important that the initial push is small and easy. In other words, reduce the stakes and start with just 2 minutes. You can apply these two methods to any area of your life to overcome procrastination, whether that's getting to the gym, working on your side hustle, maintaining your relationships, or pretty much anything you can think of.
As Martin Luther King once said, "You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
