The Procrastination Calculation That's Keeping You Stuck
You've got a big project in front of you. It may even have a looming deadline. But whether you're staring at your calendar, an empty search bar, or a blank document with a blinking cursor, the same thing is true.
You're overwhelmed. The project feels like too much.
It feels impossible.
Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.
You've done the calculations and decided you don't have enough time to make meaningful progress right now (whatever that means), so you open your phone and start scrolling.
Future you will have to handle it instead.
My future me was so infamous, I gave them a name, the "one hit wonder."
The one hit wonder was too good at their job, and my dependence on them was so stressful I never knew a moment's peace.
If you're ready to retire future you once and for all, this video is for you.
Hi, I'm Cas Winter. I help ambitious Neurodivergent and Chronically Ill people close the gap between their ambitions and reality with productivity and self care tools made for their unique brains and bodies. I'm neurodivergent and have been chronically ill for over 25 years. I figured this out the hard way so you don't have to. Subscribe if you're ready to finally discover HOW to spend your precious time and energy the way you want and need to.
And that one hit wonder I mentioned? That was me for years. I know exactly what that procrastination calculation feels like, and I know what it costs.
Let's take a deeper look at the procrastination calculation.
It feels like your time and energy capacity are a scale, and when you go to put your project on the scale, it breaks.
Which can mean only one thing: the project is too much and therefore impossible right now.
(Ignoring the fact that it's somehow possible for future you.)
But the reason the scale always breaks is that you're weighing the entire project against the time and energy you have available to you right now.
Whether it's 3pm on a Friday and you'll be clocking out in two hours, it's your lunch break and you only have 5 minutes left after eating, or it's the weekend and you have a whole day in front of you, it usually doesn't matter.
You're trying to weigh an elephant on a kitchen scale.
Of course it's going to break!
You may not even realize that's what you're doing. Logically you know that the project is too big to reasonably do in one sitting, but because you have a history of always leaving big projects to future you (who somehow always gets it done) you expect future you to show up NOW and get it done in one sitting.
It's an endless cycle, and it bites you in the ass every time.
I'm getting stressed just thinking about it.
To escape this cycle, we need to take control of what we're weighing on the scale.
Before we go further, I want to give you something you can use today.
If you've ever felt that overwhelm hit before you've even started, I made something for you. It's called the Anytime Reset, a free tool for getting unstuck in the moment, whatever that moment looks like. Grab it at here.
Okay, back to the scale.
Allow me to introduce you to the one-hit-wonder. College Cas always left things until the last minute which, more often than not, meant banging out an essay in a few hours late the night before it was due. And here's where the moniker comes in. I didn't write multiple drafts. I wrote one draft, did basic proofreading for obvious spelling and grammatical errors, and turned that in. And more often than not, I got an A.
The endless cycle was so intense for me, not only was I always weighing an elephant on the kitchen scale, I believed that I needed the one-hit-wonder to get good grades.
On the outside it looked like I had a lot of spare time. It looked leisurely. But on the inside? I knew I was constantly procrastinating, and I was so stressed about it. It was miserable.
And it drove me to burnout.
After graduating from college I spent almost ten years in my own personal groundhog day.
Was I burned out? Yes.
Was I still disabled? Yes.
I did have a little bit of time and energy, but I wasn't spending it on anything that mattered to me.
Almost 10 years after graduating, I'd had enough. Nothing the productivity experts, self-help books, or psychologists had suggested worked.
Specifically, the thing I'd stopped doing was writing fiction. I'd been prolific from childhood all the way through college, but burnout stole it from me. So I made one small change: instead of telling myself to write, I committed to spending time trying to write. Even if I sat at my computer for an hour and didn't type a single word, it counted. And that changed everything.
Over time this system grew and developed into The Navigator's Compass inside The Action Navigator.
One of the core ideas is that hard work is sustained effort over time, not how much effort you can cram into a small amount of time. And the way you sustain effort over time is by leaving things unfinished on purpose.
When I started spending time trying to write instead of expecting myself to write, I knew something was shifting. I was deliberately practicing something uncomfortable. And the more I practiced, the more I understood what I was actually doing.
I was creating Safe Expectations for myself, expectations that were based in the reality of my time and energy capacity, not wishful thinking.
And one of the ways I was able to do that was practicing leaving things unfinished at the end of each writing session. Practicing this taught me that I don't have to expect myself to finish everything in one sitting, so I no longer depended on future me, and no longer procrastinated.
The ability to leave things unfinished is a skill you can develop, and just like most other skills, it will feel uncomfortable to practice.
The trick is creating a level of discomfort that you are willing to tolerate.
A while back I did a post on the window of tolerance, which includes things you can experience without getting dysregulated.
To grow our window of tolerance so we can more comfortably leave things unfinished, we need to slowly increase how much discomfort we are leaning into.
This will look different for everyone because we all have different nervous systems and different opinions on what would be less uncomfortable.
Let's take doing the dishes for example. You have 10 dirty dishes in the sink. When aiming for a tolerable amount of discomfort, leaving the dishes unfinished for one person might mean only cleaning one dish and leaving nine in the sink, whereas for another person it may look like cleaning 8 dishes and leaving two in the sink.
The goal is to deliberately practice leaving a task or project unfinished to a degree that is uncomfortable, but is an amount of discomfort you are willing to tolerate.
Over time you'll notice a compounding effect. Every time you leave things unfinsihed and then come back to it later, you're not only growing your window of tolerance, you're building Self Trust.
You'll discover that you no longer rely on future you to save the day at the last minute because you trust present you to make meaningful progress.
One more thing before you start practicing, because this is really important. Just because you were able and willing to tolerate an amount of discomfort yesterday, does not mean you will be willing and able to tolerate that same amount of discomfort today.
When we start to gain momentum, there's a tendency to stop meeting ourselves where we actually are. The goal is to expand our window of tolerance over time, not to incrementally increase it every day.
As you practice the skill of leaving things unfinished, you will find some days harder than others, and that's okay. That's normal. It's more important to choose an amount of discomfort that you are willing and able to tolerate in the moment than it is to improve upon past you's tolerance.
Hard work isn't how much you can cram into one sitting. It's sustained effort over time. And the way you sustain that effort is by trusting yourself to keep showing up.
When you can say you're going to do something and trust that you'll follow through, it doesn't just change how much you get done, it changes how you feel about yourself.
Practicing leaving things unfinished so over time it's easier to start not only retires future you, it puts you in charge.
If you haven't grabbed the Anytime Reset yet, click here. It's free, and it's there for the exact moment the procrastination calculation tries to win.
I'd love to know: what's one project you've been leaving to future you? Drop it in the comments. You might be surprised how many people are sitting with the same thing.
If you were here for my last video, you know I mentioned having a lot of medical stuff going on this month. I'm proud I was able to get this video out, but now I have to take a break. I'll be back in one to two months with another video. See you then. Bye!
