The Career Killer You Need to Overcome RIGHT NOW ?

In this letter: 

Procrastination takes center stage.

First, we dive into the science to see what causes us to procrastinate. 

Then, we look at 3 tools to overcome procrastination: 

1. View your life calendar.
2. Rewrite your emotions.
3. Refine your system.

Ok, let's get to it.        

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Ok, now on to today’s topic. . .

Uh-oh, procrastination

There’s one TED Talk that gets me every time.

I’ve watched it over and over. I’ve laughed. I’ve pondered. I’ve even felt the sting of past struggles and missed opportunities.

It’s called Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator.

Have you seen it?

Tim Urban, author of the popular blog Wait But Why, knows a thing or two about procrastination and the struggle to get work done.

In his TED Talk, Tim tells an all-too-relatable story from college.

Here’s the gist:

In his final year of college, Tim was responsible for writing and turning in a dissertation. This paper represented a huge portion of his grade and was designed to take months to complete.

As a procrastinator, he naturally waited until the very last minute.

I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters — humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters — sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline.

Funny. Relatable. Anxiety-inducing.

Procrastination = human

But Tim doesn’t stop there.

Toward the end of the TED Talk, his message takes on a more somber note. He talks about the countless people who messaged him after reading his blog post on procrastination.

Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. These are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students.

He continues.

But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives.

Procrastination, simply put, is a career killer.

I’ll develop later

I’ve worked with thousands of professionals and college students over the course of my career. And one trend stands out when it comes to growth and develop.

I’ll do that later.

Instinctively, most people recognize the need for continuous learning and a growth mindset. But when faced with competing priorities or distractions — looking at you, the latest seasons of The Bear and House of the Dragon — career development gets casually pushed to the sidelines.

This is human. Relatable.

But when development gets pushed off for too long, the results can be disastrous. You end up stuck in your career. You end up like the people writing to Tim, frustrated with the progress they’ve made in life.

Let’s avoid that, shall we?

3 tools to overcome procrastination

We need to put procrastination on the back-burner. And we need to do it now.

Otherwise, we’ll wake up scrambling to write a dissertation — or worse, wasting potential year after year.

Here are the best tools I know for the job:

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