👻 30-Day Productivity Challenge-Day 11-ENEMY OF PRODUCTIVITY
👋 Hey Friends,
Welcome back to the 30-Day Productivity Challenge by the famous YouTuber, former doctor and now writer Ali Abdaal.
Today I show you what the enemy of productivity is, but I will also show you how to defeat the enemy and win the fight. Ultimately, it all comes down to how you approach the world and how you approach the problems you have in life.
‼️The ENEMY OF PRODUCTIVITY
We know it all. We have an essay due next Friday, have to finish a paper within the next month or put off talking to our friend who we have split up in a fight.
What do these all have together? They all present a form of procrastination. Procrastination, which comes from the Latin verb procrastinare, means to put something off until tomorrow. We do this nearly every day in life. But why do we do so?
The simple answer is that we have anxiety, and we are afraid of not doing the thing right, so we tend to completely avoid it in the first place.
Let’s say I have to write an essay for school and my deadline is within a week. Instead of starting right away, I say that I will think about it tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes I will still not work on it but do it the day after tomorrow. This goes on and on and on until the day before the due date, when I finally realise that I have to finish my essay. Then I pull an all-nighter and don’t do my best work.
Procrastination kills everything. It eliminates your motivation, keeps you from doing the things you want to be doing, and it also leaves you with a lot of stress.
We all know that it doesn’t feel great to have hundreds of things in the back of our minds that we need to finish.
The best way I personally beat procrastination is the 5-minute rule, which was also perfectly portrayed in today’s episode by Ali Abdaal.
🕰️ The 5-Minute Rule
“If it won’t matter in 5 years, don't think about it for more than 5 minutes.”
Travis Chappell
The 5-minute rule is incredibly simple: Instead of putting off the task which you currently procrastinate, set a timer for five minutes and start the thing you want to do. There is no six-hour commitment, just five minutes.
Let the magic work. What do you feel after the five minutes?
The timer ends, you hear it ring, and the anxiety disappears. You now feel energised because you see that working on the seemingly impossible task is doable and that you can stop procrastinating.
What do we learn from this experience?
- 🧠Your mind overcomplicates nearly everything. After you have started to realise, you see that your imagination of the task was far more terrifying than it turned out to be. This strongly suggests that you need to have clearance about your thoughts and feelings.
- 🏎️ It builds momentum. After the five minutes, you feel energised and you want to continue working. In short, this comes close to Newton’s first law: An object in motion stays in motion.
- 💡You get clearance. From learning that the task you procrastinated on is manageable, you get clearance that this applies to nearly everything in life.
Keep the five-minute run close to you and I promise you It’ll change your life!
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Thanks again and I'll see you soon.
Victor (@observethecosmos)
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