I could never stick with my promises to stop procrastinating... until I decided to "Shift the Line" no matter what.
Today, I'm not perfect, but man, I’m doing way better.
Tl;dr: get the jist by scanning the bold parts.
You have a school or work project due tomorrow. It involves tedious work so naturally you’ve procrastinated on it hard.
But not anymore. Tonight is the night. This thing just has to get done. Now.
You check the clock. 8:34pm. That’s not too-too bad. If I start now and grind it out, I could finish by like midnight.
You open the work document, but soon you saunter over to Wikipedia to check something that’s bugging you for some stupid reason (what’s the name of George Clooney’s wife again?). You then google something else (how much does he make for those Nespresso ads?), then, just to scratch another itch nagging you, you head to YouTube for 5 quick minutes to get it out of your system.
You end up wasting an hour.
Fine. You shake it off and will yourself back to work. But then, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, your hand drifts over to your phone as if operating on its own. Your eyes reluctantly follow and just like that, you’re tumbling down the endless pit of TikTok.
This is procrastination in its purest form. You have something important to do, but technically you can push it ahead—I’ll just sleep at 1am instead of 12, no big deal—so you rationalize a bit of time wasting.
But then this triggers a slight pang of guilt for breaking the promise you just made to yourself earlier. So, you reach for a vice to relieve such a bad feeling.
But then the consequences of more time-wasting hits you, leading to stress and anxiety. So more vice for relief of those bad feelings and the cycle (or what I call the vice-feedback-loop) continues.
The question is, of course, how can I stop this from happening?
The answer is… well, the answer comes as a hard-to-swallow pill. Up to you whether you want to take it back now; but believe me, once you do, everything changes. Things will get better, much better, even if it the initial outlook is grim.
The answer is you can’t. It's all utterly inevitable.
You had some physical wiring in your brain which caused you to do what you did through an uncontrollable and inevitable compulsion.
To be more precise, it’s not that you can’t decide to override your cravings—you can, you have what’s known as willpower—it’s that you won’t.
Your rational mind—the part that plans, weights out pros and cons, and seems to come to logical decisions—it gets manipulated from the inside out. The deeper, emotional parts of your brain that elicits the craving, its wiry tentacles extend outwards to your newer, rational parts, manipulating how you think and reason. It tricks you, making you think that it’s “you” calling the shots, when really it’s your core biological drives.
If you ever thought to yourself, in the aftermath of a reckless amount of procrastination, why the eff did I think that was a good idea?? Well, it’s because a deeper, impetuous, pleasure-stalking part of your brain infected your rational thoughts.
It was all inevitable.
You’ve already accepted this as reality for some of your actions. For example, if you buy a bag of chips (or crisps for you weird UK folks) and you end up eating much more in the first sitting than you intended, you don’t act surprised.
You say, ok, that’s enough… these things are freaking addictive, then you roll up the top, put a giant clip, then you jam it in the back of the cupboard.
You know you don’t stand a chance. It’s not about willpower or self-control, nor about "who you are" as a person. It’s about your predictable and automatic actions.
It's cause and effect. Trigger and reflex. Cue and compulsions.
If you find yourself, an hour later, stuffing a bunch in your mouth, you again roll your eyes at yourself. You might get frustrated, but the frustration is not really directed at yourself—at your thinking process; your morals, character or values. It’s directed at your biological wiring that just won’t let you not saunter over to the bag like a mindless zombie, all while you wish you could just ration it for the week.
It’s like we all have in our mind a big line.
For you, eating chips on impulse is left of that line. So is mindlessly scratching a mosquito bite despite telling yourself you need to stop. Same for when you find yourself slouching 10 minutes after adjusting your posture.
When you do things that are left of the line…
You don’t act surprised.
You don’t ruminate on failures, nor do you get harsh with self-criticisms—you shrug it off and move on.
You don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ll have the willpower to resist next time—you put a giant band-aid over the mosquito bite. You tell your roommate to hide the chip bag from you.
You accept reality without much protest—well, this goes to show again that I just can’t bring home a big back of chips. That’s life.
And you don’t try to be perfect; you don’t measure “days without” streaks. Again, this isn’t about willpower and some noble ability to overcome temptations with strength and resolve. It’s about automatic compulsions. The inevitabilities of life.
So the best thing you can do—and what you do naturally for actions left of your line—is to learn about yourself and be proactive when you can do something about it, and forgiving and move on when you can’t.
Meanwhile, when you commit actions right of the line… it’s a whole different story.
You come down hard on yourself. You judge and berate yourself, further fueling your self-hatred. You take it as further proof that you’re indeed broken, damage, flawed… a “less-than” compared to everyone else that has their shit together.
You put extra pressure on yourself. You do all of this with the assumption that more negativity, more judgement, more self-punishment, more severe force will lead to discipline and self-control. But it never does.
Negativity, expectations and pressure don’t lead to motivation and productivity. They lead to vices.
So my suggest to you here is to shift your damn line.
Shift it all the way to the right so that everything you do, no matter how abhorrent, shameful or consequential, is an inevitability and thus no big deal.
It's all shruggable. Also annoying, sure, like when you find yourself scratch a mosquito bite raw, but not the end of the world. Certainly not deserving of harsh self-flagellation.
y shifting your life, anything "bad" you do—from p—are thus shruggable. They’re annoying, sure, lik
When you do this, when you acknowledge and accept the inevitability all of your pleasure and relief seeking actions, a funny thing starts to happen.
You get a little disciplined.
Or you get what looks like discipline, because it comes not from brute-force self-control, but through the elimination of what prevents discipline and what causes procrastination: self-hate.
I know this might sounds ridiculous. But it fricking works.
The day I decided to shift my line, to forgive myself instantly no matter what, was the day that everything changed.
This is how I live my life now:
Get side-tracked for a few minutes while writing an essay (this literally just happened). Bah, inevitable, move on!
Binge a Netflix show when I planned to watch it over the week? Bah, inevitable, move on!
Fap to porn when I know it leads to a drop in energy and focus? Bah, inevitable, move on!
Have a grumpy or lethargic day where you get next to nothing done? Bah, inevitable, move on!
It’s not that I've let go of being disciplined and productive; it’s that I just understand and accept what the heck is going on for real. I know what works (self-compassion and my productivity systems) and what doesn't (self-hate). Then I adapt as best I can.
I’ve learned to iterate and build my systems without self-judgement: I try something, fail, learn from the failure, get up quick, adjust my approach and try again (this, btw, is the basis for the Habit Reframe Method).
Reaching your idealized self-discipline ambition won’t happen overnight—heck I’m not there yet, not even close. But I’m inching my way over; which is more to say than a decade plus of trying with willpower and self-control based methods.
Self-understanding followed by self-compassion, self-acceptance and self-love form the essential foundation to a solid and happy life. It's only on them can you begin to stack good lifestyle habits and a sustainable work-ethic.
It took me a long time (and lots of suffering) to learn this. But once I did, my life started to incrementally improve.
I wish the same for you.
- Simon ㋛
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