How do you deal with procrastination and focusing on the wrong things?
Procrastination is inevitable; it's a mechanism baked into us from caveman times, and you can't fully eliminate it. I procrastinate often, but I tend to procrastinate on work by doing lower-value tasks instead. This isn't ideal because I'm avoiding important work, but I still make progress by completing less important tasks. For example, I delayed making a hiring post for weeks, but when I finally did it—creating the post, form, and CRM integration—it only took 45 minutes. Even though I procrastinated, I still moved the needle forward.
When I feel overwhelmed, I take a minute to list every single task I actually have to do on paper. The overwhelm comes not from the total volume but from my perception of the volume bouncing around in my head. My simple steps: take a deep breath, identify the first thing bouncing around that I need to do and write it out, then identify the next thing and write it out, and keep rinsing and repeating for 10‑20‑30 minutes to get a big list of actionable steps. To push further, write out the first subtask needed to move that forward—for example, after moving provinces I needed to figure out car insurance; the first actionable step was to call a phone number. Knowing the exact step reduces friction and makes it much easier to get done; this is about eliminating akrasia (weakness of will). Reduce the friction and you’ll win.
time managementoverwhelmproductivityactionable steps
I think the problem you describe is common. The key for me is not seeing work and breaks as opposites. The most important thing is momentum—making sure I always put in some small daily effort toward an actionable goal, regardless of what I’m doing. Starting small and gradually increasing effort works like progressive overload at the gym: your ability and resiliency grow over time. Most people view work as always on or always off, but I fluctuate—some days I work many hours, other days just a few, while avoiding extreme swings from top to bottom. I always do some amount of work toward my goals because momentum matters; when you get a ball rolling, lead generation, outreach, or content production will eventually yield results if you don’t stop. I avoid all‑or‑nothing thinking—I might work at 40% one day, 100% another, then drop to 30%, 80%, 60%, etc.—and that’s my typical workday. This approach helps reframe work so it doesn’t have to be all on or all off. Books like Atomic Habits and The Compound Effect reinforce this: start with a tiny habit (e.g., run for one minute) and build up gradually; by the end of a month you’ll have a solid habit. This method is far more effective and economically sensible than the all‑or‑nothing approach.
I’ve been a recovering perfectionist for years. The trick is to deliberately create unfinished products or services and launch them anyway. I started publishing videos that weren’t perfect, accepting mistakes, and just kept pushing. The overarching strategy is nonstop action: lower the threshold for perfection, accept uncertainty, and keep moving forward. In practice, that means spamming action daily, reducing the need for certainty, and just doing it.
The simplest hack is to institute a rule: you cannot build or improve a process unless you're already doing that process. For example, many people in Maker School want to create automated systems for sending job applications but have sent zero applications—they're just preparing. I tell them to only optimize a process when they're actually executing it; otherwise they're just masturbating, putting things off, and making it a future issue. You can absolutely optimize processes, but only while you're doing them. In most cases, what feels like optimization is just preparation, not actual execution.