Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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everybody. Hey, welcome to our next lecture series. Um
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we're actually just finishing
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The five Week Lecture Series on Professionalism.
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Okay.
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So as we finish part two of this course on professionalism,
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what I'm doing is I'm kind of
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Stealing from or replacing, I guess I'm not replacing. I'm moving chapter 16.
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If you're following along in the book, I'm moving it here. Okay.
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Because when I looked through the book to me,
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a huge part of being professional means developing good work happens okay.
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And a lot of this whole theme around being professional,
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the way I like to think about it is okay,
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what do my students need to know?
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So that when they were walking to their new career position,
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how do they make themselves look good in the first month or two?
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Okay.
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And developing good work habits and showing that
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you have good work habits is absolutely vital
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to having that level of professionalism that's going to
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make you look in those first few months,
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right.
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A lot of people out there,
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especially even those people who have really good technical skills,
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even if they note like if they're an accountant is really good at math or marketer
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who really understand social media or somebody who
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works and operations and really understand the equipment.
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Those are people who are good
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at the technical aspects of their job,
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but they still tend to fail because they can't
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be productive all the time in the workplace.
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Okay.
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Even though they know what they're doing, even though they have the knowledge,
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uh they get hung up for someone or one reason or another, right?
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Yes,
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a big part of the responsibility falls on the company in my mind and the management
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to say, well what are you doing
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to keeping your to keep your employees properly motivated and productive? Okay.
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A big portion of it falls on companies and how good or bad they are,
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but it's a two way street for sure.
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And if you want to thrive and in any situation with any company,
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you need to find a way
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to develop good
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productive habits at work.
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So you can turn out more work than the people that you work with, right?
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If you can you can make yourself look better than your peers by producing more
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work than they do because you have good work habits and you're more productive.
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Okay,
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So we're really going to take a look at four different areas
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and this follows along very closely with everything in Chapter 16.
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This is one of the few chapters where I ask you to read through the whole chapter.
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Okay, because it's all very relevant and I split it up into these four areas.
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First, procrastination.
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Then we're gonna talk about just how do you have and develop a productive attitude,
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time management techniques and then how do
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we overcome those time wasters out there?
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Okay, so let's go and get started with
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procrastination then,
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before we, before we talk about why people procrastinate and how to reduce it.
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Let's let's let's let's let's define a few things. Okay,
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first of all what our work habits in the first place. Okay um
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this is your characteristic
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approach to work.
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Okay this is like your character,
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how you are like your general characteristic away.
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Kristic characteristic approach to work.
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It might include things like how organized are you?
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How good are you at setting priorities?
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How good are you at handling paperwork and emails and such.
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That's just a general uh definition of work habits. Okay.
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Your characteristic approach to work
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productivity?
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I know this one seems somewhat basic but a
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lot of times people don't quite understand it.
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It's
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the amount of quality work, not just work,
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the amount of quality work accomplished in
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relation to the resources that are consumed.
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Typically we think of the main resources time.
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Okay so how much quality work can you get in per hour per day? Per minute? Right.
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That's what we're looking at for productivity. If people can produce
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more quality work in less time
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than bam productivity goes way up.
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It's a division problem is what it is.
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Okay so let's say on the top of the division problem is quality work
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and it's divided by
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some resources consumed. And let's just say it's time for right now.
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Okay so if time stays constant and then your amount of
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quality work that you do in that same amount of time.
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Congratulations, your productivity went up.
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But if you can also be more productive and less time,
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your productivity is going to go through the roof.
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Okay. And then finally let's, we needed to talk about those two so we can understand
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what procrastination is that
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right?
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You can still be productive using procrastination but
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it's delaying a task
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for a poor reason, right? An invalid or weak reason.
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And you know,
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this part came from the podcast this week, you know,
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there will be a consequence that goes along with it.
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Okay,
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so you've got this task,
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he decided to push it off
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for really weak reason, totally invalid reason,
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some form of poor reasoning, right?
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And you, even though you know,
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man I shouldn't put this off because if I do there's
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gonna be some negative consequence consequence that comes along with it.
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That's procrastination, We all do it.
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Okay, and let's take a look at why and then some tips on how to reduce it.
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So why do people procrastinate in the first place?
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A lot of times we procrastinate because the task itself is unpleasant,
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it's just like, oh I just don't want to do that, I hate doing that.
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Um or it's overwhelming,
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right?
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Especially when you're talking about a big huge project and you're just like,
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oh my gosh,
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I've got this huge project and it's gonna be a ton of writing a ton of work,
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I don't even know where to get started so I won't
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Okay,
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fear of consequences.
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Sometimes we procrastinate something because we're afraid to get
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the bad news um So maybe you're supposed to meet
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with somebody but you're afraid they're going to give you
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some bad news so we push off that meeting.
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Ok? Sometimes we even have a fear of success.
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We we don't want to overachieve because we're afraid that we
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might get new responsibilities that come along with that success.
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So we push it off and we don't succeed at our super high rate.
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This next one,
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I've got an asterisk next to it and I I italicized it because it's a biggie
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lack of meaningful reward. I just mentioned this in the last slide.
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A big portion of this falls on the company.
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And if the company does not do a good job of directly tying
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rewards or punishment, if you work for that kind of company
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to a task
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we might procrastinate on. It's like if I take a look at the list of my to do list
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and there's something and there's some things on there
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that I know we're going to directly tie to my
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bonus And there's other things that probably won't be
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taken into consideration when it comes to my bonus.
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Which one do you think I'm going to work on first.
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Which one do you think I'm gonna push off to the very last second if I do it at all.
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Okay, so you've got there's there's a lack of meaningful reward a lot of times.
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So we just push it up
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rebelling against control.
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Hey man, stop, stop over micromanagement, managing me,
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stop looking over my shoulder, leave me alone.
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I'm just not going to do it until you just leave me alone.
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That happens quite a bit with micro managers
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enjoying the rush.
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This is probably the number one that students try to tell me is Oh yeah, dude,
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I just work really well under pressure.
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I like that last minute push. It's exciting and I do my best work.
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All the science proves you wrong. I'm sorry to break it to you.
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I'm sorry to break it to me because I used to believe that as well.
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But like there are a lot of us out there who say yeah,
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I kind of enjoy pushing myself at the last minute, right?
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And so I push things off because I know I can get it done in that short period of time.
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On the flip side.
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You actually get some people who procrastinate because they're perfectionists.
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Okay.
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You would normally think that a perfectionist would start on something really,
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really early.
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Um and that can be, but then what happens is they don't ever finish it
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because they don't ever want it to end because it's not perfect.
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Okay, so they procrastinate the finalizing
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of the project. So that's
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another reason why
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sometimes people procrastinate.
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Okay,
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And so we're actually going to talk about some of these
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in our weekly discussion if you make the zoom meeting.
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Um how do we reduce procrastination.
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Uh first of all recognize that your goal is to cross the finish line, right?
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Your goal is to complete the project.
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Okay. That's the first thing you need to sit down and do is say, okay I have a deadline.
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Yeah, I gotta make this deadline no matter what, that's the goal. Okay.
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It's I know it sounds basic but that's
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especially for your perfectionists out there who never feel like it's done.
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Um or you people who procrastinate till the last minute because of the rush.
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You gotta get it done
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by the deadline.
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2nd is calculate the cost of procrastination
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cost. Sure could be money.
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But what about like your mental health and your stress levels And
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what about the other work that you need to be doing that?
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You have to then push off because you're just going to be
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all consumed by this project that you procrastinated until the last minute.
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Yeah,
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counter attack. Right? Just
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um that's that's a good way to sorry,
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let me go back to what is the cost sometimes when you count,
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what I would say is when you calculate the cost,
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hopefully what you do is you realize, oh my gosh,
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there is a big consequence here and that is a big cost.
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I'm not willing to accept that cost. So I'm going to start earlier on it.
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That's that's the idea of how to reduce it.
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The 3rd way is to counter attack. Just
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right? You you you become self aware, right?
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It's a big part of this class is you recognize that you're procrastinating,
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you become aware of it and then you say I
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counterattack myself. I got to force myself to sit down and get it done
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okay. Um and that goes along with jump, jump starting yourself, the next one,
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I like this, like the next two are really good.
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So when you jump start yourself, just start with a really small task or really
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small chunk of time.
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Maybe you just say you know what, I'm just going to spend it with this big project.
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It's overwhelming. I'm stressed out.
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I'm just going to spend 15 minutes on it today to just get the ball rolling
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because
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as the next one says packing away Okay, peck away at the overwhelming task.
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There's so many times that we just procrastinate. Procrastinate, procrastinate.
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And a lot of times we're just procrastinating the start of the project.
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So if we can just convince ourselves to sit down for 10 or 15 minutes and start it,
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we then we find that we can just roll
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we we procrastinate because it seems overwhelming and we always make up in our
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mind a story about how it's gonna be much worse than it actually hits.
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But if we can just get started, that's the key.
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Just get started and start pecking away and all of a sudden
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you get into the flow and you start to produce some good work
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uh rewards and punishments come up with some,
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some some ways to motivate yourself with rewards and punishments.
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I'm more of a positive psychology a guy.
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So I prefer uh motivating yourself with proper rewards, right?
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But making sure that you're rewarding yourself
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like immediately after you finish the task.
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Okay, Because that's what's going to cause you
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to develop it into a good habit.
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Um if you guys want to read a really good book,
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you're hot tip of the week is uh the power of habit,
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It's a great book and it talks a lot about how like
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there's,
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you really can't kill a habit, you just have to replace pieces of the habit.
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And so if you want something,
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if you want to really form some motivation and build good work habits,
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if you know that doing a certain task is going to come with it, an immediate reward,
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you'll actually find yourself doing it okay?
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So so it's really important then to do it right away and not
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not like reward yourself a couple days later. Right? Um
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Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and posit there,
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I still have a couple minutes left in the recording,
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but my screen keeps freezing up so I'm gonna go ahead and
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posit here and I'll come back and finish this list in volume two