Procrastination is one of the greatest enemies of productivity. Here’s how to stop procrastinating, once and for all. This is the only guide you’ll ever need to get rid of your procrastination and start doing what you’re supposed to.
Episode Transcription
Den Lennie (1s):
G’day guys! It’s Den here and thankfully my cough has finally shifted. So today I’m gonna share with you how to stop procrastinating. This is gonna be the only guide you’ll ever need. I know that filmmakers procrastinate an awful lot when it comes to matters of business. So hold tight, let’s get back to it.
(21s):
Welcome to the video business accelerator podcast. Each week, we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business with your host, Den Lennie. Discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. Enjoy this episode.
Den Lennie (53s):
Right? Procrastination. It is the enemy of all creatives. I am a recovering procrastinator. And so I know what it’s like to sit in the seat and know you’ve got things to do, but avoid doing them. And this follows on from last week’s session, we talked about the good, the bad and the ugly of habits and how the affect sales procrastination is a form of delay tactic. You know, it’s, it’s when we start, you know, looking at reviews on the latest camera or the latest upgrade or the latest bit of software, instead of actually focusing on nurturing prospects, talking to people and that, especially talking to people, I think that’s probably the area that I find most creatives really struggle with when it comes to procrastination, we avoid the things that make us uncomfortable and yet what it successful sports people do.
Den Lennie (1m 52s):
What successful business people do. They feel the same sense of dread. Sometimes when they wanna speak to someone or pick up the phone or an athlete goes gonna train at four in the morning, but they do it anyway. And I’ve talked about this before, but procrastination is one of those blanket. How would I describe it? It’s one of the greatest excuses in filmmaking when it comes to business. So how do you stop procrastinating? Well, you have to create some systems, the habits that keep you procrastinating will keep you doing it unless you break them.
Den Lennie (2m 38s):
And so how do we stop procrastinating? Well, first of all, you need to create an environment that sets you up for success. So what does that look like? Well, it involves creating some structure in your day. And the first way to do that is to take some very specific steps to ensure that your time is protected. Now this is going to feel uncomfortable. Okay? But I wanna recommend that you don’t have your phone standing by ready to pick up at a moment’s notice. It’s very unlikely that you’re doing work that is life and death.
Den Lennie (3m 19s):
And so if you believe that a client might call, and if you’re not able to pick up the phone, you might miss out in the work. Then that is a terrible situation to live on a terrible cloud, to live under the reason being that if you were in a studio filming all day, you wouldn’t be able to pick up your phone. If you were out in a job, recording an interview, you wouldn’t be able to pick up your phone. So if you are looking to break this procrastination, you have to take some pretty dramatic steps. So put your phone on, do not disturb. Now, if you wanna put a voicemail on there, put a voicemail on there.
Den Lennie (3m 58s):
My voicemail actually reads, I’m sorry. I’m not able to take your call just now. I actually don’t check my voicemail, but if you need to get a hold of me, please text me. Now you might decide that you wanna have people leaving voicemail messages. That’s fair enough. So by taking the phone out of your equation, you’re no longer gonna be picking it up to see if you’ve missed anything, putting it on, do not disturb means no incoming calls will come in, which means you can have uninterrupted time to spend focusing on meaningful work. The other thing you wanna do is take all of your alerts off your phone and all of your alerts off your computer silence, absolutely everything.
Den Lennie (4m 41s):
Every time an alert comes in, you will be distracted and that distraction will take 15 to 20 minutes to recover from. So, if you wanna beat procrastination, take all the alerts off your phone, all the alerts off your computer. And then the third thing you wanna do is get very clear on what your intentions are for the day. Now I have a little, A5 notebook and I put in the top left hand corner, the date, and I write one through to five or seven items that I’m focusing on in the day. I wouldn’t go any more than that. And then it’s a manual process. So I don’t have to open any apps. I don’t have to have my calendar open.
Den Lennie (5m 23s):
I just look at what’s on the page. And that helps with focus. Procrastination is the enemy of focus. So if you’re, you know, got alerts coming into your computer, if you’ve got social media open, something’s gonna drag your attention away from what you should be working on. So it’s very important that you do that. The other thing with procrastination is to create structure in your day. So I would say, have your calendar open at the very beginning of the day and put blocks of time into the calendar for focused work. Now, the only alert I will suggest you have on your computer is your calendar notifications. So that it’s reminding you that you’ve got a block of work coming up and I would set an alarm 10 or 15 minutes beforehand.
Den Lennie (6m 8s):
And then the final thing that I would recommend for beating procrastination is if you struggle with focus is you can download something called a Pomodoro Timer or an app’s called be focused. And these apps, they help you to, they act as a timer. They’re a focused timer. So with that focused timer in mind, you can set yourself up to do very specific tasks. So how I tie that into your calendar is when you have your five or seven items for the day, locked into your notebook, actually place them into the calendar so that they become priorities, they become appointments.
Den Lennie (6m 51s):
And when you treat them like appointments, you’ll find yourself locking in, in the same way that if you had a 45 minute call with a client, you would turn everything off. You wouldn’t be checking your phone. You’d be completely focused on that client. So if you take that approach, you’ll find yourself really starting to thrive in an environment where you used to procrastinate. Now, what I would say to you is the desire to go and look at cool stuff. It’s I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m saying diarize it. So if you were to set yourself up with two or three slots in a day for focused work, you could give yourself half an hour at the end of the day to say, this is gonna be about half an hour time for looking at YouTube, looking at Vimeo, looking at, you know, whatever you wanna be checking out online.
Den Lennie (7m 34s):
And that’s the way that you beat procrastination.
(7m 41s):
You’ve been listening to the video business accelerator podcast with your host, Den Lennie. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the accelerator program can help you today. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the show over on iTunes. And we’d really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.
