Why We Procrastinate & How to Stop It

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I talk about why we procrastinate and how we can fight back. Let's hop into it. 

Why we procrastinate and how to combat it

We eat junk food, even though it's bad for our bodies. We doom scroll through Twitter and yes, I'm talking about myself, even though we should be working. We commit to Dry January and then drink a beer two days in. Why is it that we treat our future selves like absolute shit? So I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is your behavior or lack of willpower is not unique to you. The bad news is that it is a very, very difficult habit to break. Not only do most of us treat our future selves poorly, but we've been behaving in this way for thousands of years, at the very least since the times of Plato and Aristotle. In his dialogue, Protagoras, which sounds very formal, Plato asks a very simple question: If one judges action A to be the best course of action, one would do anything other than A, and based on our perennially irrational behaviors, the answer to that question is yes. You see the Greeks actually named this human condition akrasia,, which basically means lacking self-control or acting against one's better judgment. Now, as much as I'm a fan of the ancient philosophers, I want to get practical with this. And I want to answer two very simple questions. First: Why is it that we act against our better judgment or lack willpower, and second: What can we do to combat it? 

Why: Cognitive bias

So let's start with the first and my short answer in two words is cognitive bias. I recently did this Founder's Journal episode on cognitive biases, which we'll link to in the show notes, but basically what it is, is a specific flawed way of thinking that causes us to make irrational decisions or behave in an irrational way. And the specific cognitive bias that causes us to smoke, procrastinate, eat junk food, or spend instead of save, is this thing called hyperbolic discounting. And it's a word that's unnecessarily jargony because it was created by behavioral economists in the Sixties, but it's actually really simple and really powerful. All that it means is when humans are given two similar rewards, they prefer the sooner reward over the later reward and the greater the delay of the reward, the more that we discount its value. So here's a real world example: Buy now, pay later. You know on websites when you go to buy something and instead of spending full value today, you get to pay in weekly or monthly installments. The first thing that comes to mind is anytime I go to Apple's website and you go to buy an iPhone, you can pay like $20 a week instead of paying the full $700 for the phone. It is a massive business, like buy now, pay later is a hundred billion dollar industry with multi-billion dollar players like Affirm,  AfterPay, and Klarna. And this whole business is literally built around the cognitive bias of hyperbolic discounting. These businesses work because we act against our better judgment to buy goods today that will bring us joy right now, rather than to do the fiscally responsible thing long-term and save our money until we can afford the item. Which begs the question: If it is literally our evolutionary brain that gets our shor- term brain to be an asshole to our long-term self, what can we do to fight back? I have three strategies for you. 

How to fight back: Remove choice

First remove choice. Don't give yourself the chance to succumb to your short-term desires and force good behavior. When it comes to your finances, automate. Automate how much you put into your 401(k), automate the amount of money invested into the S&P versus what goes to your savings account and can easily be pulled out for just spending on the weekend. When it comes to work, create distance, leave your phone in another room, block your calendar so that you protect your time from calls or meetings, turn off notifications in Slack so it doesn't compete for your attention constantly. 

Bundle temptations

The second strategy is temptation bundling. This strategy acknowledges that we are human, and it will be impossible to remove our temptations to grab onto short-term rewards altogether. And with temptation bundling, the idea is to take a long-term goal, break it into shorter term goals and bundle them with cheap pleasures. So here's a few examples. If your long-term goal is to get in shape, commit to a 30-minute HIIT workout every day of the week or a few days a week, and you follow that HIIT workout with a short-term pleasure of yours. Say for you, it's playing video games, playing Call of Duty. Or if your long-term goal is to get to a hundred thousand followers on Twitter, make the short-term goal of creating one tweet thread, and then allow yourself to scroll through TikTok after you complete that thread. Temptation bundling is actually exactly why I love the Pomodoro method, which is this productivity method I talked about in a recent episode, we'll link to it in the show notes, because the method is structured in 30-minute increments, where you have 25 minutes of work and five minutes of break, so temptation bundling is built into that work process. 

Make social commitments

Now the third and last strategy: Make social commitments. Lock social currency into your long-term habits so that you face embarrassment if you don't do the things that you want to do. It's why created a book club to force me to read a book a month because I was holding myself accountable to a group of 20 people. Did a recent episode on that and we'll include that as well. And it's why in his book Indistractible, Nir Eyal recommended an app like Focusmate, which is literally a website where you get paired up with someone as an accountability partner, so that when you do work, you're accountable to someone else who's also doing work and holding themselves accountable to you. And I can't stress how important it is to internalize this episode and these strategies. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO, a manager, or just getting into your career. We all succumb to short-term pleasure over long-term pleasure, but the most successful people understand this challenge and they develop strategies to navigate it. 

I want to hear from you

So to recap, hyperbolic discounting is just fancy talk for this age-old bias that causes us to say yes to short-term pleasure, even if it causes long-term pain. And there are a number of ways to fight it, but my three favorites are removing choice, temptation bundling, and social commitments. Now I'd love to hear from you. What do you do to keep yourself from procrastinating? I would love to share the best tips that I get from listeners in an upcoming episode. So shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com. And while you're doing that, please, please subscribe to Founder’s Journal and leave a review on the podcast player of your choice, wherever you listen to the show, whether it's Apple, Spotify, or another player. It is the number one way we grow the show and it's how we get to the top of the charts every single month. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.