Motivation vs Procrastination

To-Do List as a Menu

📝 If you feel overwhelmed by your to-do list, try a new perspective:

• 🍔 Treat your to-do list like a menu. Instead of a list of chores you must complete, see it as a menu of options you get to choose from.


• 🤔 Acknowledge that you won't finish everything. This is a key part of shifting your mindset from overwhelmed to empowered.

As fellow teacher Stephanie Nash is fond of saying, “A good meditation is one you did—the only bad meditation is one you didn’t do.” Take her wise advice to heart.

The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d lik

Projects that don't have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.

By setting challenging deadlines you will actually get better results. It's all about manipulating the Iron Triangle of scope, resources, and time.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by

Try writing about why the work is important, or spend some time reflecting on times in the past where you’ve felt most connected to it.

This gives us a roadmap to doing more creative work. What we need to do is, in the exploration phase, raise the perceived value of doing the work, raise the perceived costs of not doing the work, and lower the perceived value of doing other things.