Quit Procrastinating, Manage Your TIME, and Take ACTION on Your Life TODAY! | Tom Bilyeu

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. Today, we're going to be talking all about time management, procrastination, a little bit about value system, how we take all these amazing things that we're trying to accomplish in our lives, deal with the stresses, sticking points, the things that hold us back, and figure out how to optimize and really make the most of our time and our energies. I'm going to be answering your questions. We're going to get to some really tactical things on exactly how to move forward. All right, without further ado, here's the first question. Is procrastination simply a habit, or is it a mild symptom of anxiety? Are there signs that point towards procrastination that I should recognize so I can pattern interrupt more quickly? Okay, so first of all, procrastination certainly can be a habit, but it's probably more than likely it is just the natural friction that exists when you take a species and you give them two competing impulses. Impulse number one, be active, work hard, go dominate your environment, right? Go hunt, gather, protect, all of that good stuff. And then the other one is the brain is so calorically demanding and the odds of you being without food at some point are so high that we have to make sure that as a species, you don't just constantly want to spend energy. That you find yourself in a position of like, I don't know when I'm going to get my next meal, so I'm I'm constantly wanting to go do my thing, but also at the same time I want to relax. So, when that's in a natural environment and we're on the plains of Africa and we've got hunger pushing us and there really are, you know, lions coming into the camp, there's no time to procrastinate. It's like, that stuff is here, it's got to be dealt with. I'm hungry and so procrastinating doesn't even occur to me. And so, the like chill, lay back thing is when I have all the things that I need. Problem is in a modern context, we often have all of those basic needs already met. And on top of that, so not only do I, you know, I have shelter, uh I've got food, um I am not worried about where my next meal is going to come from. I don't have to worry about a tiger coming into my house. And on top of that, you add the friction of anxiety or stress or fear of failure, all of that, that's where this then really becomes problematic. But I think it first starts with just understanding that you have this impulse as a human having a, you know, human experience, you've got the dual impulses to go out and do something and to hang back. So, once I understood, oh, okay. Evolution has given me this imperative to relax, to chill. Now I know. It's also given me the imperative to go work hard, to do things meaning and purpose. And so, what I need to do is given in a modern context that I won't have literal hunger to propel me forward, then the thing that's going to propel me forward is a focus on meaning and purpose or a goal that I'm just super excited about achieving or bright lines, where we just tell ourselves we're going to do this. And we don't violate our bright lines. Okay, so putting it in that context, now we understand how do you pattern interrupt that more quickly? One, I think instead of worrying about the pattern interrupt and waiting until it's actually already a problem, you use these bright lines to say, like for instance, what I say to myself, Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. Now I know, if I'm chilling on a Monday at 1:00 p.m., I know I have a problem. I'm outside of the bright lines that I have drawn for myself, which is Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. So, now it is very easy to know if I'm acting in accordance with what I said I was going to do or not. And since congruence is this huge driver, we want to be congruent with the things we said we were going to do and what we do. So, for me, I have a goal. I'm obsessed with that goal. I want it. I'm really excited about it. Chasing it is like the great joy of my life outside of my marriage. And so, I actually want that thing. Like, I actually want to not only have the end state, but I want to pursue it. I want the act of going for it. And so, because I want both the end state and the act of pursuing it, it becomes very easy to then put those bright lines in place and then actually go after it. So, I don't need the pattern interrupt, I need the rules in my life that make sure that I conform to the behaviors that will be necessary for me to go after what I want. Now, since you're asking specifically about anxiety, I will assume that you have that extra layer of friction. And so, making sure that you're getting past that extra layer of friction is going to be incredibly important, and the way that you're going to get past it is by having those bright lines, is by understanding that you should only be pursuing things you're really excited about, that get you really amped about the future, and so that you want them badly enough to push through that extra pushback that you're getting on that. And because you know that you're prone to procrastinating, you'll put those rules in place, you'll focus on how much you want the thing, and then that's going to allow you to move forward. And then, of course, there's just actually dealing with the anxiety, what that's caused by, whether it's you worrying about what other people think or whatever the case may be. So, address that, and that will take more of that pressure off. Hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at BetterHelp. Go to betterhelp.com/impact to get 10% off your first month. Enjoy the episode. All right, next. What steps can I take to bring my focus to the one thing I'm working on while blocking out all else? All right. So, the real key is you've got to learn to compartmentalize. So, what I do to begin my compartmentalization is I create a list of all the important things that I should be working on. I put that list in order. This is very important. Getting good at prioritizing is an art form. It is critically important that you get good at that art form. And as you begin to break things down and put them in order, now you can tell yourself, "Hey, this is what I should be working on right now." So, rather than trying to digest all the different things that have to be done, it's I'm focused on this one thing right now. And my only job right now is to focus on that thing. And so, by not letting your mind wander, and this meditation is very good at bringing your focus back to the breath, which teaches you to bring your focus back to whatever. So, I've got a lot of things, many things competing for my attention, but I know what my important things are. I'm working on the number one thing right now, let's say, and so, up, this is my entire world. And if I find myself wandering, I bring myself back. Now, part of the reason that I can invest so heavily in that is because I have the belief that that's the most effective way to work. So, since behaviors follow beliefs, you want to make sure that you put that belief in place, which is true, by the way, that you can do everything that you want to do, just not all of it at once. So, everything has to be done sequentially. You can't do everything at the same time. And this is why you have to prioritize things out. So, if we know that multitasking is actually a myth, and that you can put people in brain scanners, and what you're seeing, people who seem like they can multitask, what they're doing is called rapid switching. So, they don't have what I have, which is high switching costs. When I get in a flow, man, I can go and go and go. But, if I try to bounce back and forth between things, then I pay this high price in inefficiency between the switching costs of moving from switching from that task to this task. So, I focus, I stay on one thing, I have them in order, I know what I'm working on. I remind myself that I only have one job in that moment. That is to work on that thing. I know that that's the most efficient way to work and I know that I'm good at prioritizing things. So, it becomes very easy. Boom. Boom. Boom. And then you just hold yourself accountable to actually doing that. Practice makes perfect. You might have a difficult time in the beginning. Start meditating if you need to to train yourself to come back to the breath over and over and over and then you can just apply that to whatever you're working on. Come back to the project. All right. I'm currently working on three awesome projects. Right now, I'm struggling with shifting from one to the next. My urge is to work until I drop and then crash. My world and health start to fall apart when I do that. Any suggestions on steps that I can take to manage my hectic workload? Okay. So, first of all, you're going to need some rules. So, we don't want to work until we crash. That doesn't make sense. So, we're going to take that off the table because that's like um running a marathon and saying, "I'm going to run the first mile at a 4-minute mile pace and then whatever, the rest will take care of itself." That doesn't make any sense. You're going to end up burning out and odds are that you're not going to end up finishing. So, you want to be very thoughtful about, "Okay. I've got this big project. It's going to take I mean most projects take a very long time. The shorter projects merely are feeding into a bigger project. So, assuming that this is going to take weeks, months, or years, it doesn't make sense for us to just go go go go go ignore all the signs that we're reaching a tipping point. Go, "Oh god." Crash and burn, right? So, we need to understand what are the signs? Is it that you stop having fun? Is it that you start losing sleep? Is it that you no longer want to eat? What are the signs of the early um over stressed where we're now going into a point where it's not stress that like keeps us in the fight and going. It's beginning to deteriorate us. Okay. When we get that signal and maybe we measure it in hours per week, Um in fact, that might be a very easy way for you to tackle it. Like I know that for me, 93 hours a week is a rate that I can sustain for the rest of my productive life. I don't know if that's 40 years, 50 years, whatever. But I've been doing it now for 20 years. It's very easy for me to hit that pace when I'm doing it towards something that I love and care about. Okay, so if I know, "Hey, I'm working 100 hours, 110 hours." I know I have a problem. I know I'm now in sprint territory and I know that I need to be consciously working to dial that back because working that much is going to be deleterious to my health, which means it will be deleterious to my cognition, which means now, instead of working 93 hours and getting 93 hours of productivity, I'm working 110 hours and I might be getting 70 hours of productivity. That is a very bad trade. So, you want to be super thoughtful about just the realities of your cognition and what's happening on a biological level when you make those kind of choices to just push yourself beyond reason. So, I would start making, you know, rules. It's like Lisa has rules about what time she stops during the day. So, unlike me, who if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out Monday through Friday, Lisa has earlier times that she's going to quit. Now, she still works an obscene amount, but she knows if she doesn't quit a few hours before going to bed, she's going to have trouble sleeping. So then, remember, doing less is always an option. Now, I'm the go, hardcore, the push, push, push guy. I love hustle porn, all of that. But I'm telling you, nothing matters more than fulfillment and joy. And if you're burning yourself out and you're stressed and you're crashing, that's not joyful. There's no fun to be had. Way better to back off, remember that doing less is always an option. Meaning, you shouldn't feel bad if you're doing a less. You shouldn't be beating yourself up or kicking yourself. Just be honest. I'm doing less and I'm doing it for this reason. And as long as you're being honest with yourself, hey, I'm doing less because I don't want to crash and burn, which wouldn't make any sense because the punchline of life is not success, it's joy and fulfillment. That really is success. So, once you really wrap your head around that, then it should become very easy to feel good about yourself when you're sincerely moving towards your goal, but being respectful of enjoying the ride since getting there cannot be guaranteed, but the struggle is guaranteed. What we're trying to optimize for is struggling well. And part of struggling well is knowing when to back off. So, check yourself if you think that you might be not pushing hard because you're just being a little lazy, you want to procrastinate, you have to be honest with yourself about that. But, once you recognize the difference between, you know what, I just need the day off. I'm feeling burned out and uh I'm just lazy and I don't want to work any days. Like as you begin to figure that out within yourself, then you'll get to a point where you'll completely trust yourself. When you know, you know what, today I need to go easy because you leave it all out on the field on all the other days, it's very easy to let yourself off the hook. So, earn your credibility with yourself, do what you say you're going to do, prioritize for fulfillment and joy, not for hours worked, not for hustle porn, none of that. Optimize for fulfillment and joy. Mental health is a huge priority in my life and I encourage everyone to prioritize it. And one of the best ways to follow through on healthy mental health habits is by working with a licensed therapist. Better Help is available for clients worldwide. You can log in to your account anytime and send a message to your therapist. Better Help is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches, so they make it easy and free to change therapists if needed. It's more affordable than traditional offline therapy and financial aid is available. Better help wants you to start living a happier life today. Visit betterhelp.com/impact. That's better h e l p and join the over 1 million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional. And with a special offer for our Impact Theory audience, you can get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/impact. Again, that's betterhelp.com/impact. Take care and be legendary. Okay. I can never find a way to stay disciplined and commit to my plans of action for the day or week or month. So, I'm always playing catch up rather than staying ahead and being proactive. How can someone who has spent their whole life with poor time management and discipline develop and commit to developing time management skills? Okay, so one, self-awareness, that's huge. Looks like you already have that. You understand that the way that you're doing things is delivering a sub optimal result. Once you understand that you're getting a sub optimal result, then we should be looking, according to the physics of progress, for a new thing to try. That new thing that we're going to try is discipline. Now, we're not doing discipline because our parents tell us to. We're doing discipline as a test to see if it work to get us towards our goal. Now, if you have historically struggled with putting discipline in place in your life, right now you're going to say, "But Tom, I can't stick to discipline. So, why would this work this time?" That's when we realize one fundamental truth. This is a desire problem masquerading as a discipline problem. Once you want your goal the way that a drowning man wants his next breath, you will find discipline very easy to stick to. And so, learning to build your desire for the goal that you have set for yourself, that becomes the incredibly important part. And the way to dial that desire up is to do a loop. And it goes like this. You're going to tell yourself that you're very excited about this goal. You're going to tell other people that you're very excited about this goal. And then, you're going to embody the feeling, the amplitude that you want to feel when you think about that goal. Now, there's a mechanism in the human mind where it will justify the way that you act, no matter what. I won't waste time explaining some of the studies, but they are utterly fascinating about how even people with damaged areas of the brain will end up making up random ass stories because the brain abhors a a lack of reason. So, the the brain will always and forever make up some story about why you're doing what you're doing. And so, if you're responding hugely to something, "Oh my god, I'm so excited about doing this thing. Like, I'm really amped up about it." And you're saying that to yourself, and you're saying it to other people, and you're saying it just like that, then the brain goes, "There must really be something here. We've got this elevated level of emotion. Amazing. Let's leverage that." And the brain doesn't say, "Let's leverage that." But the brain will say, "Okay, we've got this elevated level. You're going to leverage the fact that the brain says that." To repeat it, to reinforce, and over time, you actually just will feel that heightened level of emotion. It's the way the brain works. What you repeat, you become. Neurons that fire together wire together. Things that you do frequently, including embodying that amplitude of emotion, right? Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made, talks about how it starts with the body and then the brain applies meaning to it. So, if you're getting amped up, you're excited, the body is saying to the brain, "Yo, like, we're amped. We're excited. We're doing these things." And the brain goes, "Oh, amazing. It must be because this really matters." And once you get the brain saying, "Hey, we're this excited because it matters." You're firing those neurons together, the excitement around this thing. So, the excitement and the pursuit of that thing begin to mesh. And now, we just over time have a an actual desire to pull this off. Once we have the actual desire to pull this off, then all of the sudden, putting that discipline in place becomes very easy. And that's the name of the game. You want to make it such that you want it badly enough that the discipline becomes easy to stick to because it's going to move you towards that thing that you really want. But you've got to learn you've got to learn to want that thing. Now, I'll give my typical disclaimer. This trick works incredibly well. Now, it only works on things you actually have a legitimate interest in. You couldn't um get yourself excited about something that you truly just find stupid. But something where you actually do get a natural response. You actually are naturally into that thing. All we're doing is dialing it up, right? So, if it's already a dial tone, there's nothing you can do to change the amplitude. But if the amplitude is already there and you get this reaction, we can really exaggerate that reaction and build that desire to get where we're going. Now, since that is the case, you need to be very careful what you apply this to because you can end up really wanting some stupid I know from experience. I dialed the dial on my desire for money. I cranked that to a 20. And then spent 8 and 1/2 years pursuing money only to come out completely miserable. So, don't waste your time dialing that up on something that isn't exciting and honorable. Meaning, again, honorable, it elevates you and other people, not just you. All right. Be careful what you decide to want, but know that it's very powerful. All right. How do you structure the conversation about scheduled time with your partner so that they understand that what you're doing is important and that you need to manage your time. Woo wee, this is a hot button issue. So, this is we could spend a whole episode of Relationship Theory on this, which by the way, if you guys aren't yet watching Relationship Theory, make sure you head over, check it out. We've got a whole YouTube show called Relationship Theory where we cover topics like this. Lisa and I do it together. Okay. So, first, you're going to have to come up with a value system that the two of you share. That's critically important. Once you have the value system that you guys share, then in the conversation about scheduled time, we're either going to know that the scheduled time is a shared value or it's not. Because part of the discrepancy I could see is that if you guys disagree on how time should be allocated. If one of you feels like, "Hey, the marriage is just so much more important or the relationship is so much more important than whatever you're scheduling your time for." That, "Hey, when these two collide, don't bring me something about you need to schedule more time for this other stuff. It's like this is isn't a little more important, it's a hundred times more important. So, if they even slightly collide, then scheduled time goes away." Because that's how people end up talking past each other. They have not established what their value system is. You must establish your value system. There's no right or wrong answer to your values, there's only things that either move you towards your goal or move you away from your goal. So, get that established well. So, in Lisa and I's marriage, while I feel very strongly about my ambition and all the things that I'm trying to do, meaning and purpose, all of that, my marriage is my number one priority. Now, we've talked through it and so there's Excuse me, there's a lot of leeway to where I can work and schedule time and all of that, but there's also Lisa's carte blanche to be able to say, "Hey, this is now damaging the marriage or is in danger of damaging the marriage. We need time and attention to connect and we have just learned that by personality, she's the right canary in the coal mine. She will feel it sooner than I. And so if we wait until I feel it, we might really be in trouble. So she'll speak up and I will universally say, "Cool. I will now set aside whatever it is that I was going to do within the business." And she's very respectful about if there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or something like that. She's going to create a little bit of extra space, but at the same time, you could have a string of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. At some point, one or more of them are going to have to go away if your relationship really is your highest priority, like it is for us. Lisa has that card. She's very thoughtful about when she plays it. She makes sure to play it soon enough that we don't damage the relationship, but she makes sure that she doesn't play it so often that I can't do the things that I want to do from pursuing my ambitions and and quite frankly, her as well. So, that became this really important thing for us to define what those values are, to rank order the values, marriage first, ambition second, for example. And the reason that they're in that order, by the way, is I'm optimizing for fulfillment and joy. And nothing has brought me more of those two things than my marriage. Business is amazing, but nothing has brought me that level of just like deep meaning, purpose, connection that I'm working hard for something that serves something bigger than myself, you know, my relationship, my marriage, my family. It's incredibly potent in a way that nothing else is. And so, really putting that first and prioritizing that is critically important for us. And so we've got those value systems laid out in order and our roles in terms of navigating that. So, come to an agreement on what scheduled time means. Make sure that the other person feels super empowered to play a card if they think that it's now getting out of hand and beginning to uh damage the relationship or get to a point where it's untenable for them. You need to be incredibly respectful of that, right? Cuz you want this relationship to work. You don't want the ambition to just steamroll over that human connection, which is so important for all of us in our lives. All right, that's the key. Get to the real issue. Get to the base assumptions. Get to the values. What do each of you believe? Say it out loud how things should be. Come to an agreement on that, and everything else will get easy. All right, guys. That is it. Getting your time management right, understanding how to overcome the stresses, the procrastination, all of that is critically important. So, making sure that you're navigating things well by understanding what it is exactly that you want out of your life, making sure that you build that desire, and then making sure that you lay out your values so that you can prioritize things well. All right, everybody. I hope that this helps you actually implement things in your life. And speaking of things that you should be implementing in your life, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.