World's Leading Expert On How To Solve Procrastination - Dr Tim Pychyl

1. 0:00 – 1:58

   Intro

   1. TPDr. Tim Pychyl0:00

      Here we have to accept our common humanity. You know? Here you and I are talking. We're different ages, living in different places, but we accept where there's a lot of things that are common between us 'cause we're human beings. We've got light inside of us. We've got darkness inside of us. We've got good things happening. We got bad things happening. We've got strengths. We got weaknesses. We do wonderful things. We make mistakes. And so when we can accept that common humanity and have some self-compassion, and recognize I can have these feelings and not be these feelings, then that's the emotional work done. Then I can go back to that wonderful phrase we used earlier, which is, "And what's the next action?" And you can lay on top of that implementation intentions if you want, making things concrete, just getting started. And you see they have to dance together. If you don't do the emotional work, you're, you're not gonna get to the cognitive work because you're, you're gone.

   2. AAAli Abdaal0:53

      Hey, friends. Welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week I have the immense privilege to speak to authors, researchers, entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring people about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to apply to our own lives. Now, this conversation that you're about to hear is fantastic, if I say so myself. It is a conversation with Professor Tim Pychyl, who is a retired professor of psychology at Carleton University, but he's one of the world's most foremost experts in the field of procrastination. He's written two whole books about it. He's authored dozens and dozens of research papers stretching back to, like, the '90s about the concept of procrastination and goal setting and motivation, and essentially all of the stuff that we love to talk about around productivity. So in the conversation, we talk a lot about what is it that makes us procrastinate and why we do it, how... and what we can do about it. We talk a lot about the idea of goal setting and what sort of goals that we should set to actually kind of work towards in the most intentional way possible. But we also talk a little bit about spirituality, about Tim's love of Alan Watts, who's a person that I've gotten, uh, recently introduced to. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much

2. 1:58 – 9:43

   Procrastination vs. delay

   1. AAAli Abdaal1:58

      as I did. I am also in the process of writing a book about productivity and-

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:02

      Mm-hmm

   3. AAAli Abdaal2:02

      ... currently working on the, the, the middle bit, which is three chapters about procrastination. So I feel like I'm trying to absorb all the things.

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:10

      Perfect.

   5. AAAli Abdaal2:10

      And it feels kind of weird because I, I've been seeing your name referenced in, like, research papers for years. The whole procrastination is emotional regulation, I think that's a phrase that's often attributed, attributed to you. But I didn't, I didn't know what you looked like until I watched your YouTube video talk where... that you did for TAs studying procrastination.

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:26

      Oh, yeah. That's a long time ago.

   7. AAAli Abdaal2:27

      And that, that was, like, nine years ago or something. [laughs] So I was like, "Oh, okay."

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:30

      Been, been a while, yeah.

   9. AAAli Abdaal2:31

      "This is what Tim, Tim Pychyl, PhD, looks like." [laughs]

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:33

       That's right. And I... Well, I watched you. I, I ran into you a while back. I don't know what I was searching for, but I watched you, and I really enjoyed your work. I, I can't say I've, uh, gone deep into all of your episodes-

   11. AAAli Abdaal2:45

       Yeah

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:45

       ... uh, but I, I did enjoy your, your, um, episode on procrastination where you delve into Steven Pressfield's The War of Art 'cause I-

   13. AAAli Abdaal2:53

       Yeah

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl2:54

       ... I was introduced to that once giving a talk to teachers, and an English teacher asked me if I read the book, and I hadn't. And I agree with you that resistance is something very important to understand. Yeah.

   15. AAAli Abdaal3:04

       Yeah, amazing. So I'd love to have a chat mostly around [laughs] kind of the idea of procrastination given that that's your, that's your field of research. I guess one place I wanted to start was, with was the idea of procrastination versus delay. What do you mean when you say that, you know, sometimes when we think we're procrastinating, we're not actually procrastinating? How do you, how do you think about the difference between those two things?

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl3:24

       Oh, I'm glad you started there. Procrastination in the research literature is defined as the voluntary delay of an intended action despite expecting to be worse off with the delay. So right from the beginning, we define procrastination as a type of delay, and so often when I get interviewed, especially by reporters who always wanna have a catchy title by turning a vice into a virtue, they wanna show there must be a good type of procrastination, and I get very upset about that. I think those are oxymorons. Like, let's just talk about different forms of delay. So to answer your question now, with that as a background, there's purposeful delay. Like, we... You and I could have done this interview at another time, but we chose now, and in a sense we delayed it from other times because it fit our schedules best. It was purposeful. And we do that every day. It's part of being a rational agent when we use our practical reason and all things considered, we say, "This is when I should do this," and it might mean I delay it. And if something else comes up that's a higher priority, we'll... we could change our minds. An intention update. Now, there's also inevitable delay. Imagine, for example, recently here in Canada we had a major disruption of the internet. Well, if that happened today, inevitably you and I would delay our interview. So... And that happens all the time. Say, uh, plane travel right now [laughs] is, is legendary for that. And, and no one looks at this poor traveler and says, "Oh, you're such a terrible procrastinator." They, they understand it's inevitable. And then you can't see where I'm sitting. I'm sitting in my porch, and next to me is a picture of my father, and he died in 2016, and I loved my dad a great deal, and when he died, my world stopped for a little while, and things didn't get done. But not once did I say, "Oh, Tim, you're such a terrible procrastinator," nor did anyone else. And we frame that as delay due to emotional problems. So there's three right off the top, purposeful, inevitable, delay due to emotional problems, that aren't procrastination, and we need to separate those 'cause often in our lives, if we only have one word for delay, we end up at the end, end of the day beating ourselves up when in fact it might have been a very sagacious delay. It was a good idea to s- to, to wait. There. I'll stop there 'cause I could go on forever on just that topic. But there is hedonistic delay and, and irrational delay, and all these other ones that you and I will talk about, I'm sure.

   17. AAAli Abdaal5:39

       Yeah, absolutely. I guess one of the things that we found when w- w- when we were doing kind of research for this is that th- you seem to be very, like, procrastination is always bad kind of vibes, and in a lot of the articles it's like some people are trying to make the point, oh, but, like, sometimes some procrastination is good procrastination. And we've talked about how the idea of delay potentially solves this, this issue, but I wonder d- do you- One, one idea I've had floating in my mind for, for, for some time, you know, th- this idea of every behavior evolved from an evolutionarily useful behavior. Do you feel like procrastination has any kind of roots in evolutionary psychology, in terms of short-termism actually benefited us rather than long-term planning?

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl6:21

       Yeah. That's a very good question, a difficult one to answer. I want to take exception to your first statement that every behavior h- was adaptive somehow. We can have things that occur that have no, uh, function, or i- and more importantly in our, our modern world, we have this Stone Age brain running around in the modern [laughs] world. And so even if our ancestors, there was a reason to believe that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, that may be one way we think about the impulsivity that we see in procrastination. Uh, certainly impulsive correlated with procrastination, and it made sense just to do it, just act. But I, I don't think that every behavior is that way, is adaptive. There's three things, and, and we don't want necessarily dive too deeply into evolutionary psychology. Interested listeners can go read the work of David Buss, for example. Uh, but there are other, um... Things can happen evolutionarily that are, are not adaptive. So i- is there a reason that we procrastinate that is related to those things? Sure. But I think that it would have a lot to do with the nature of reward and certainly our emotions.

   19. AAAli Abdaal7:31

       Yeah. Nature of reward and our emotions. Okay, so if, if we knew the reward was, I guess, coming up in the short term, then... What do you mean by the nature of reward?

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl7:40

       Well, we, we do prefer short-term rewards. I mean, some people who take a behavioral economic view of procrastination say it's all about utility, and they, they'll frame it this way, and that we end up doing the thing with the highest utility right now. It's a specious reward in some ways, because it's, it's not related to our ultimate goal, but we're getting the sooner, smaller goal, uh, reward instead of the later, larger reward. And so that's one way to frame this. But, you know, and even as I listened to you when you talked about Steven Pressfield in your earlier episode about procrastination, you talked about resistance, and the reward and avoidance is very big. It, I, I liked your question about evolution, you know. If we look at Robert Wright, who wrote a wonderful book years ago about The Moral Animal and pro- and, uh, evolutionary theory, he said probably the fundamental behavior of every organism since the beginning of organisms has been the choice to avoid or approach. [laughs] And isn't that, in some ways, the simplest way to think about procrastination? And even Pressfield's notion of resistance, what does resistance lead to? Avoidance. And what does that avoidance do? It's a negative reinforcer. Now, I think it's important just to step back for a minute for listeners to say, "What's a negative reinforcer?" If, if it's raining outside and I put up an umbrella, I get rid of the negative stimulus of rain, so it's a reinforcement. I get rid of a negative stimulus. We call that negative reinforcement. It's not punishment. So if I avoid something because I'm feeling this internal resistance, and you dealt with it so clearly when you talked about Pressfield's work. I'm afraid, for example, or I want to start a podcast, but I'm afraid it'll be a failure. I want to write a New York Times bestseller, but, you know, what's the odds of that? So it freezes in our tracks. So we avoid it, and we get rewarded because it gets rid of those negative emotions. And that, in a nutshell, is what I look at in terms of when I say that procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy. And there, there is the reward. The reward is-

   21. AAAli Abdaal9:40

       Yeah

   22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl9:40

       ... I get rid of, uh, aversive stimulus.

3. 9:43 – 13:41

   Why can procrastination feel good?

   1. AAAli Abdaal9:44

      Yeah. That, that, that was something that really struck me as, as I was reading your book, this idea that it feels good to procrastinate in the moment, and you're choosing to feel good in that moment over, I guess, serve your future self, as it were. And I found that idea very interesting because I imagine, you know, l- later tonight, I've got a personal trainer session, and, you know, it's, you know, I've pre-committed to this, paid for like 12 of them because I know it's a thing I want to, want to take seriously. But if something were to come up and he were to message me being, "I'm so sorry, I can't do it," I would feel this immense burst of dopamine. "Yes! Oh my God, it's been canceled. I don't have to do it. This feels so good." And it's weird because I know that that would be acting against my interests. And of course, if I were more, quote, "disciplined", maybe we can talk about discipline, I would choose to work out anyway. Realistically, I would feel like I've earned back an hour of my time completely for free and it would feel incredible, and I'd, I'd... It would be the happiest thing that's happened to me all day other than, other than this conversation with you, of course. So what, what, what's going on there? Like, why, why, why does it feel so good to not do the thing? [laughs]

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl10:51

      Oh, you know, I think everyone had a visceral reaction to the personal trainer story. Uh, it's, it's a great deal of effort. It's one thing to even go for a workout on your own, because you can put in as much or as little effort as you feel at the moment. Like, you can wander around the weight room quite aimlessly and, and still say, "Yeah, I went to the gym." But when you have a personal trainer, you know you're going to bust your butt, and you're going to do the extra set, and you're going to work to exhaustion a- and past that. And so right there, it, it, it's built in aversity. Now, you want it. It's serving your long-term goal. But you don't want what it means in the short term. Isn't that true of so many things, like saving for the future? I'd like to have money for retirement, but I, I'd rather spend the money now. I'd like to be fit. I'd like to eat well, but I'd like to have the donut right now. And so then we have this compensatory thinking. In fact, some of our most recent research in the area has been looking at what dieticians know as compensatory beliefs and compensatory thinking. And, and so in fact, you, you think, for example, "Oh, I really want that donut. Well, I'll eat just a salad tonight." You know, this commitment to later, but it's always later, and that's the same thing that's going on with procrastination, and it's the same kind of rationalization that goes on with, "Well, I didn't cancel the workout." And you're absolutely right, you could work out. We should spend more time on that, because I love the feeling that yoga gives me.

   3. AAAli Abdaal12:15

      Yeah.

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl12:15

      Stretching is just the best thing for my body. There's so many days when I don't feel like stepping on the mat, and, but the moment I step on the mat, magic happens. So it's in that precipitous moment of- Beating that resistance that you talked about in that earlier episode based on Steven Pressfield's notion of this, uh, resistance, and getting past it. You know? Y- one of the chapters in that book you're reading through is just get started. Now, it's funny because I'm very public like you have, or, or I have been. Not... Recently I haven't. And people would write to me and say, "Well, Dr. Pychyl, you know, it's really great if I could just get started, but honestly, sir, if I could just get started, I wouldn't have a procrastination problem. Could you do a little bit better than that for me, please?"

   5. AAAli Abdaal12:59

      [laughs]

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl12:59

      And I thought, "Oh, that is so fair," right? So let me go on a little bit longer. So I had to go to the work of a product gu- productivity guru you'll, you'll know very well, uh, David Allen, and he says, you know, "We don't do tasks, we don't do projects, we do actions, and the best question you can ask yourself is what's the next action?" And so that's become this own... my own personal mantra as the gateway to just get started. What's the next action? Tim, just roll out that yoga mat and stand on it. [laughs] And, and as soon as you do that, you know your body's gonna respond, you're gonna lift your arms, and things are gonna start to happen. So there. A bit of a rambly answer to your question, but still on topic.

4. 13:41 – 21:10

   Getting started

   1. AAAli Abdaal13:41

      It's, it's, it's great stuff. One of the, I guess... You know, I'm, I'm in the process of writing a book about productivity. Uh, the, the core thesis is that, at least for me, what I've found is that the secret to sustainable productivity has been to find a way to make the things that I have to do more energizing so that, A, I'm m- feel more productive at doing them, and B, then I'll have more energy to be able to give to my YouTube channel in the evenings, or playing board games with friends, and just not being completely drained at the end of the workday. And so the first part of the book, the first three chapters are about power, play, and people. Essentially autonomy, mastery, purpose, bringing other people, getting energy from that, making it fun, gamification, all that kind of stuff that generally-

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl14:24

      The basic human needs.

   3. AAAli Abdaal14:25

      Yeah.

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl14:26

      Yeah.

   5. AAAli Abdaal14:26

      Yeah, all of those things, and if we can find a way to apply them to our work, then, hey, it, it becomes more energizing. But then we run into that thing of like, okay, I know that doing yoga or going to the gym is gonna energize me, but it's just such a struggle to get started. And one of the things, one of the statements that I kind of want to make in the book, and I'd love to get your take on, is that really 95 to 98% of procrastination is just about that getting started. And almost like Newton's first law, you know, the law of inertia as, as you'll be familiar with, where it's like an object at rest will continue to stay at rest, but an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an external imbalance force. Or the idea of activation energy in biology and chemistry reactions, where it takes a bit of energy to get started, but once the reaction gets going, then it's, you know, it's unlikely to stop and it's gonna, it's, it's gonna do the rest of its thing. To what extent do you think, I guess then, that it's fair to say that, to be honest, if you wanna solve procrastination, just solve the getting started problem. Just, like, find a way to just do the... take the f- first stab, do the, do the thing. Or, like, w- what else is going on?

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl15:29

      I mean, it's, it's fun to wanna be able to say something like 95% of the issue is this. I can't tell you that based on research.

   7. AAAli Abdaal15:37

      Sure.

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl15:38

      Uh, but I, I know the rhetorical purpose of that, and I, I would agree with you in principle that it is the major step. It's priming the pump. It... And it is becoming my personal mantra, uh, 'cause there's... Every day there'll become a point in my day, either because I don't feel I have the energy or because the task I have in front of me is aversive, usually a combination [laughs] of both because they play on each other. The moment you face a, a task you don't want, you start to feel a, a, a waning of your energy. It's a reaction to stress as well. Back... I'll take you back into the 1990s when I first started doing research on procrastination. So for a lot of you younger listeners are going, "What a geezer. The 1990s, really?"

   9. AAAli Abdaal16:18

      [laughs]

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl16:19

       Yeah, I'm gonna take you back there. There were no cell phones. I had to buy pagers. You probably don't even know what a pager is, right? But as a physician you would. So, uh, this, this... I bought pagers for students, I gave them little binders, and I paged them throughout the day. In psychology we call this an experience sampling approach. And so I'll just make up some days here, 'cause we did it throughout, um, quite a few months, but let's say we did it Monday to Friday. And on Monday we'd page the students and say, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm hanging out in the coffee shop with my friends." "So how do you feel about that? Uh, how difficult, how stressful, how enjoyable?" Not surprisingly, not that difficult, not that stressful, pretty enjoyable. "Is there something else you should be doing?" "Oh, yeah, yeah, I should be working on my stats assignment." "How difficult, stressful, and enjoyable is that?" "Oh, crazy difficult, crazy stressful, horribly not enjoyable." You know, zero. So they were rating these things from 0 to 10, 11-point scale. And then we asked them, "What, what other things are you thinking?" "Oh, I, I f- I'll feel more like doing it tomorrow." We need to come back to that, this whole idea of future self you b- mentioned. And, uh, "I work better under pressure." These sorts of things, right? So we page them throughout the week, and sure enough, they keep putting things off, and there's some wonderful philosophy ar- around this notion from transitive, intransitive preferences here. But we... Let's not get carried away into that right now. We can come back if you want. But the... every day they put it off. Now finally this assignment stress, uh, this, uh, stats assignment's due on Friday. Thursday night we page them, and sure enough, "What are you doing?" "Working on my [laughs] stats assignment." "How enjoyable, how difficult, how stressful?" The amazing thing was we saw a statistically significant difference in the enjoyment, the difficulty, and the stress. It became more enjoyable, perceived as less difficult, and less stressful. Now, it doesn't mean that enjoyment was something like 8 out of 10 now. It just means it wasn't 1 or 2.

   11. AAAli Abdaal18:12

       Mm-hmm.

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl18:13

       And the stress and the difficulty, it was still there, but it was lower in a way that w- more than you would expect by chance alone. And then when we asked them, "What are you thinking?" You didn't hear people spontaneously say things like, "Oh, I'm so glad I waited till now because I work so much [laughs] better under pressure." They said things like, "This isn't as bad as I thought I was. Why didn't I start earlier? 'Cause I could do so, so much better job on that." I mean, that was a turning point for me in our research in terms of the way I was conceiving this. Now, in some ways, that's nothing new. Like, we've all experienced that, but to see it consistently across people in a dataset this way really taught me something. And so I would argue based on just that, that we delude ourselves a lot. We're really good at self-deception. In fact, John Perry, who's written a wonderful little book on procrastination, if you haven't seen it, called The Art of, The Art of Procrastination, I think it's called. John Perry, he's a retired philosopher from Stanford, and he's written this wonderful essay on the internet, if you haven't seen it already, called Structured Procrastination. But John Perry, I won't go into that now, but we can go back to it. What he says is, you know, all of this takes a bit of self-deception, but don't worry, procrastinators are very good at that. And I saw it in our research. We- we're really good at saying things, "I'll feel more like it tomorrow. I work better under pressure," and on and on and on.

   13. AAAli Abdaal19:29

       Yeah.

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl19:29

       So back to your point, you know, you'd like to write in your chapter that 95% of it is getting started. And I say, "Yeah, I agree with you that it- it really is the kingpin in this," that once you get started, uh, you've... you probably will keep going. 'Cause not only have we seen it change our perceptions of the task, but I would a- argue that it changes your perception of self as well. There's nothing like the downward spiral of procrastination to make you feel like an abject failure, right? That's why, what's the most, uh, uh-

   15. AAAli Abdaal20:00

       Nope, sorry

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl20:00

       ... strongest emotion associated with procrastination? Guilt. And if we do it for long enough-

   17. AAAli Abdaal20:06

       Mm

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl20:06

       ... that can become shame, because now we take it as this somehow this moral failing, not just guilt for this one action, but this something about our whole personhood. Now, the last thing I'd add is that other research in social psychology shows us that even a little bit of progress on a goal fuels our wellbeing, and that fueling our wellbeing can be what we can build our motivation on. You know, th- it's the, um, the difference then between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness, which, you know, I know that your, your channel here is all about happiness and productivity, and you would know. You've probably talked about eudaimonia before. But by engaging, we find reward, and so getting started is the beginning of that reward.

   19. AAAli Abdaal20:54

       Yeah.

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl20:54

       Long answer, but one that is, takes you back into some research.

   21. AAAli Abdaal20:59

       Fantastic. Yeah, really appreciate the, the in-depth, in-depth answer- answers here. And also, I, I hadn't come across John Perry before, so I will definitely check that out. And str- I found Structured Procrastination and I found the book. Perfect.

5. 21:10 – 33:54

   Goals, discipline, motivation

   1. AAAli Abdaal21:10

      There's a few terms related to the idea of procrastination that I have always found various different definitions for, and there's three of them, and I'd love it if you can just riff on those three words. I guess the first is goals, the second is discipline, and the third is motivation. I guess discipline and motivation to me feel, like, more related than the idea of goals does. But, like, how, how do you think of those different concepts or constructs? Uh-

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl21:39

      Could spend weeks on each one of them, but I'm gonna add another one, 'cause I know you've interviewed-

   3. AAAli Abdaal21:43

      Sure

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl21:43

      ... James Clear on habits, and, uh... or at least you've talked about his work. I would also think about an earlier book called The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg.

   5. AAAli Abdaal21:53

      Mm.

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl21:53

      Another really wonderful book. But we'll, we'll leave that to last. So goals. You and I would quickly agree we're social animals. You even put that in the first three chapters. You know, the, the people.

   7. AAAli Abdaal22:03

      [laughs] Yeah.

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl22:04

      Uh, but we're also goal, goal, goal-oriented. If you think about that last part of the brain to be added evolutionary to make us a human species in so many ways, the prefrontal cortex, and there's a story in there about procrastination as well [laughs] , uh, it is all about goals, uh, inhibiting actions, short-term memory. Executive functions, we call it. So we are a goal-oriented species. We represent our goals mentally, and we work to achieve them. Uh, so really important. And in f- in fact, we create intentions around our goals, and it's the gap between intention and action which is the heart of procrastination. As an aside, Ali, I didn't do my PhD in procrastination, although I procrastinated for a bit [laughs] on the way, like many students. I, I would tell you now, though, I don't almost ever procrastinate, so I can... I'm a poster child for saying that once you learn some things about procrastination, you can reduce it if you want to. But, uh, with... I studied goals. That's what I was studying. I was studying people's personal projects, what they were doing, and how it made them feel. And what I turned a corner on is that when I was doing my PhD research, when I interviewed people, it was the goals they said they were gonna do, projects they said they were gonna do, they never did, that really predicted their wellbeing, and if they had a lot of those projects, I knew where their wellbeing was. It was in the toilet. So [laughs] there, goals.

   9. AAAli Abdaal23:26

      [laughs]

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl23:26

       That- that's me riffing on goals. And there's tons in goals. Like, you could talk about how do you set a SMART goal, you know, specific and measurable and on and on. Could talk about that if you want to. I don't want to [laughs] because what I wanna talk about are what gets in the way. You know, someone can help you set your goals. Someone can help you be a better time manager, and you can still completely fail, because what's gonna get in the way is procrastination.

   11. AAAli Abdaal23:50

       Mm.

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl23:50

       And why you do that is everything to do with emotion-focused coping. End of my talk about goals. Discipline-

   13. AAAli Abdaal23:57

       Can I ask a quick follow-up question on the goals front? You're probably familiar with Piers Steel. Um-

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl24:01

       Very much.

   15. AAAli Abdaal24:02

       I, I actually had a, just a random Zoom call with him a few, a few weeks ago. He was, he was very gracious with his time. We were talking about procrastination, unsurprisingly. Something that he says in The Procr- Procrastination Equation, which is his somewhat more accessible kind of summary of the research, is that he doesn't like the idea of SMART goals because it contains too many and yet also too few letters in that, like, specific and measurable are somewhat, like, redundant because it sort of means kind of the same thing. And I've... I have some... I have a weird relationship with goals in that for me, for certain goals, I get very motivated, motivated, uh, we can define that later. Uh, I get very motivated by the pursuit of numbers. Like, I had a DEXA scan a few weeks ago to measure my body fat percentage and muscle mass, and seeing the numbers and having a goal to work towards in terms of calories and training felt very motivating, and it f- it felt great. But when I have a goal to work towards like I wanna hit five million subscribers on my YouTube channel, which is outside of my control, at that point it starts to feel very demotivating and I think, "You know what? I'd way rather have a non-SMART goal like make a video a week and enjoy the process," or s- or, or something like that rather than a more specific, like, X number of subscribers by X date at X time. What's the answer here? Or is it just, like, a, a bit of a... Yeah. Yeah

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl25:18

       Let me break... back it right up to Piers' comment about SMART. Of course, I think many things that are pitched out there in the name of productivity and goal pursuit can be criticized, but they're not bad heuristics to work from. And I don't think we should spend a lot of time on saying it's got two letter- too many letters or too few, or that's specific and measurable or too similar. That's not important. The thing that y- you just mentioned about the different kinds of goals you have, the one being the body fat measurement and the goal and the other being the number of viewers or, or followers, that reminds me of something you said in an earlier podcast about inputs. You like to focus on inputs and not outputs, things that are beyond your control. These are sometimes known as process versus output, and so we need to focus more on process goals. I, I'm not k- uh, keen on criticizing these heuristics, as I say, and at the same time I would say that your notion of inputs is really important here. On the one hand, you know you have control over the one with body fat. It's how much you're gonna exercise. The other one is the internet here is a strange place.

   17. AAAli Abdaal26:28

       [laughs]

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl26:29

       And you don't know what's gonna go viral and what's not gonna go viral, or when you're gonna say something that's gonna offend a million people, right [laughs] ? And, and so, uh, uh, because it's out of your control, then you don't wanna set a measurable goal or a specific goal. And there's even, for most people... Like, I have a good- very good friend in the Netherlands, and we might talk about him later, Joel Anderson, uh, 'cause he's a philosopher who writes about procrastination. And he and I often argue about the specificity level of our goals. Some people like them really specific and some people don't. It's could be an individual difference variable. So there, you s- let- you allowed me to riff. I'm riffing back on you about this notion of what Piers said about your... the SMART notion and about your earlier concept of inputs, and I think you're smart to focus on the things that you can control.

   19. AAAli Abdaal27:15

       Nice. Okay.

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl27:16

       Uh, we could spend a lot of time on goals, and, and in fact a lot of my colleagues do. In fact... And I, I remind you, that's where I started my own work.

   21. AAAli Abdaal27:24

       Yeah.

   22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl27:24

       But what I wanna talk about, what, what gets in the way of our goal pursuit. 'Cause quite frankly, human beings are, are always in g- goal pursuit. What I think we have to do is talk about what gets in the way, and I borrow that actually from Berne Brown. Uh, you know, she's a shame researcher who talks about wholehearted living. And when I read one of her books, The Gift of Vulnerability, and, and [laughs] a point of connection for you and me, you and I, is that, uh, it was... I listened to it on Audible, and I know you're a big Audible fan.

   23. AAAli Abdaal27:53

       [laughs]

   24. TPDr. Tim Pychyl27:53

       And so am I. I can remember the moment I heard this phrase in her book. I was riding horses here. I was crossing the creek on the gully pa- to go over to the pasture. And she said, "We have to talk about the things that get in the way of doing what is best for us." And I thought, "Yeah. That's where... why I'm a procrastination researcher and I can talk about productivity." And that's why she's a shame researcher and she can talk about wholehearted living, right? They, they... One gets in the way. And so we can talk about goals forever, but... And I could help you set better goals based on some of my colleagues' research, and we don't have to s- use SMART, right? We could put that aside if, if we wanted to. But, uh, and there's still other things we could learn about our goals. For example, I could use the heuristic of meaning and manageability. We need goals that are meaningful and manageable. And if they're not both, you're not going anywhere, [laughs] right? So all of that's there. Now discipline, your next topic. Well, discipline tastes and smells like willpower. And you're going to see I have a short chapter in that book in your hands, 'cause it was written in 20- actually, the book was probably written in 2010 and then republished in 2013. 'Cause it was... I originally published it on my own and then Penguin asked if they could publish it, and I said, "Sure." "Do you wanna change anything?" I said, "No." [laughs] We just-

   25. AAAli Abdaal29:10

       [laughs]

   26. TPDr. Tim Pychyl29:11

       ... changed the title and, and I didn't have anything to change at that time. But since that time, that s- chapter on willpower was based a lot on the ego depletion model, and it's come under quite a bit of scrutiny. And I, like, uh, Roy Baumeister, would not throw the baby out with the bath water. There's certainly this notion that at some points in the day you feel depleted. But this notion of willpower and, and Kelly McGonigal's Willpower Instinct, you know, we, we know that it- it's, it's a very... You can't depend on your willpower. And in fact, I, I said we could talk about Joel Anderson. Joel Anderson says, uh, we, we could actually outsource our will, and that's where I thought you were going a few minutes ago. Because-

   27. AAAli Abdaal29:54

       Hm

   28. TPDr. Tim Pychyl29:54

       ... if I said to you, "What's three times three, Ali?" you'd say, "Nine." And if I said, "What's 487 times 963?" You might tell me... Although you might not, 'cause you're a pretty bright guy. [laughs] It's called extended cognition.

   29. AAAli Abdaal30:06

       We interrupt this episode to bring you news from our sponsor, which is Shortform. This is very exciting. Shortform is sponsoring basically this whole season. They are by far the best service that summarizes books that I have ever come across, and I have used all of them. I don't think I'm allowed to mention the competitors by name, but you know who the competitors are. Shortform is just way better than any of them. It's great because not only do they summarize books, they give you a one-page summary of the book, and then also a whole chapter-by-chapter summary of the books. But they also have interactive sections where they give you these little boxes to do exercises and stuff, so you can really engage with the ideas in the book. And also, if the author, for example, Carol Dweck of Mindset, sick book by the way, but if the author says something particularly controversial or something that has been since Um, kind of updated or someone else has done a new study. Some stuff around like willpower and ego depletion and stuff. Shortform will put in a little note saying, "By the way, the study that she cites in this book is 10 years old, and actually last year a new study came out that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And it's sick because then I don't have to think critically [laughs] about the ideas myself. Shortform does the critical thinking for me, and it gives me the different sides of the different debates for situations where there's some kind of debate. So if you like the idea of doing that, head over to shortform.com/deepdive, and that will give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you, Shortform, for sponsoring this episode

   30. TPDr. Tim Pychyl31:15

       The highest correlation between any personality trait and procrastination is conscientiousness. And conscie- and conscientiousness is really defined by dutifulness, organization, and self-discipline. Couple others-
6. 33:54 – 38:02

   How can we achieve effortlessness?

   1. AAAli Abdaal33:54

      I guess one thing I've been trying to get at with this idea of sort of making things feel energizing-

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl34:01

      Mm-hmm

   3. AAAli Abdaal34:01

      ... is that feeling... Hmm. And I'm... I gue- I, I guess I'm sort of thinking about the concept of flow here.

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl34:08

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AAAli Abdaal34:08

      But just that feeling of effortlessness.

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl34:12

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AAAli Abdaal34:12

      Where, for example, you know, uh, people always ask me, "How did, how did you make a YouTube channel while working as a physician and, like-"

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl34:21

      Mm-hmm

   9. AAAli Abdaal34:21

      ... "and stuff?" And, uh, what I would do is when I would see... When, when I would feel like it, it was becoming, like, too much of a chore, and I would just, like, sit down and do the thing, I would still sit down and do the thing, but I would at the same time be thinking about, "Okay, cool. I actually don't want this to feel like a chore. I want to... In a, in a dream world, I actually would enjoy the pursuit of the goal rather than treat it... or almost coerce myself into doing it."

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl34:45

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AAAli Abdaal34:45

       And I haven't yet gotten to this point with personal training. Like, I don't enjoy the sessions. I'm glad I do them anyway, but I would, I would love to be able to enjoy them. What... Do you think there's anything here around, like, help- helping us find the thing that we're doing itself more fun by f- changing the way we frame it, or adding gamifications or a progress bar or any other of the strategies that people use to theoretically make things a bit more fun?

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl35:07

       Uh, yes and no. Like I say, like everything. Yes, we can find... We can... Gamification is a good way to go at that, right? But, you know, let's take your example, because you used yourself as an example. You're a highly intellectual guy. And so for y- I, I, I'm really impressed with what you do in the, the episodes I've watched because there's a ton of creativity in there. Like, even just choosing the shots and how you're changing things, and sometimes it's writing down and then it comes back to you. Y- you're gifted in terms of keeping people's attention, messaging. You're articulate. And so y- that feeds you, partly because of who you are. So, you know, there's going to be a limit to, to how much you can enjoy that compared to how much you can enjoy working out.

   13. AAAli Abdaal35:54

       Yeah.

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl35:54

       Because that may not be your first nature. Let's put it that way, right?

   15. AAAli Abdaal35:58

       Mm-hmm.

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl35:58

       It's, it's... To use a, a very loose expression that, you know, so... There are, there are other people who wouldn't love the creativity of creating, of the podcast that you do, but would love to go and refine... Let's take tennis as an example, because I've taught tennis for so many years. A down the line slice backhand approach shot. And they'll hit hundreds if not thousands of them, right? And they do get into the flow. But what's so fascinating... I'm glad you brought in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow because flow takes effort before you get there. The effortlessness is an outcome of a whole whack of effort earlier, of training and discipline and focus, and then you get to a point where now the skill and will meet and boom, all of a sudden it feels effortless. But you don't go into it thinking, "This is gonna feel effortless," right? But it feels... It can feel Better for some people based on what I'm w- I'm just loosely calling first nature. And I would say your first nature is much more intellectual. Not that you don't have a strong physique. In fact, noted... Mentioned training today because when I was watching one of your videos, you were wearing a T-shirt, and I watched you move your arm, and I thought, "Yeah, that guy's got quite a bicep going on there." And so it's obvious that-

   17. AAAli Abdaal37:13

       [laughs]

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl37:13

       ... you're, you're training, right?

   19. AAAli Abdaal37:14

       Thank you so much. [laughs]

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl37:15

       Well, you're welcome. But I... it was easy to notice, as we notice things about each other. I noti- I noticed your intellect as well. But, see, you took special pride in that because you're working harder at that. Where as intellectual stuff, I bet you since you were a little guy, it just, it just comes out of you, right? It's not hard.

   21. AAAli Abdaal37:33

       Mm-hmm.

   22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl37:33

       But this other stuff, you, you wanna own it, but it's, it's not something that's first nature. Yeah, so that's my reflections, and you're letting me riff, which is fun. Because to do that means I have to pull in things that I can, uh, verify with papers I've read and data, and things that are my impressions as a psychologist of 66 years. Well, 66 years old. I haven't been a psychologist for 66 years.

   23. AAAli Abdaal37:57

       [laughs]

   24. TPDr. Tim Pychyl37:57

       I've been on the planet for that long. Yeah. [laughs]

   25. AAAli Abdaal38:01

       Love it. Ca- can

7. 38:02 – 45:00

   Spirituality and flow

   1. AAAli Abdaal38:02

      we talk a bit about... So you, you mentioned earlier in the conversation the idea that we ha- there, there is happiness and joy to be found within goal pursuit. Or-

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl38:11

      Mm-hmm

   3. AAAli Abdaal38:11

      ... you know, what, what's to that effect. That seems to be somewhat opposed to the idea within, for example, mindfulness, meditation-y, spirituality type people that says, "Hey, actually in fact, all the happiness is found in the present moment. And the more we kind of, I guess, striving and desire equals suffering," and all that kind of stuff.

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl38:30

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AAAli Abdaal38:30

      Given that you're into yoga, you strike me... And you've mentioned meditation a few times. You strike me as h- having some-

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl38:34

      Mm

   7. AAAli Abdaal38:34

      ... understanding of that side of things as well. And I wonder how-

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl38:37

      Mm

   9. AAAli Abdaal38:37

      ... it's... Are the, are these two things really in opposition? Like, it's, is it like... What's, what's the deal? What's going on there, I guess?

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl38:44

       No. It's, they're not in opposition. But to re- reconcile this, we have to embrace the really difficult notion of a paradox. The opposite of one great truth-

   11. AAAli Abdaal38:55

       Mm

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl38:55

       ... is often another great truth. And I first encountered that by reading Parker Palmer, who I really love. He's a Quaker, and he's written a wonderful book for anybody who's into education, The Courage to Teach, published back in 1999. Wonderful book. Am- amazing human being. But if I think about it in terms of meditation, one of my favorite Zen stories in relation to procrastination is about, I think it was Joshu. And so a new monk comes to the monastery and meets the head monk, and he said, "Well, I'm here. Teach me." And the head monk looks at him and says, "Have you finished eating your rice porridge?" Like, "Have you finished eating your breakfast?" And he said, "Yes." And he said, "Then wash your bowl." And at that moment, some of the stories go, the monk was enlightened. And it, it did the same to me. It went over me like a truck, right? [laughs] Yeah, it's washing my bowl is this is it, the Alan Watts notion of this is it.

   13. AAAli Abdaal39:52

       Yeah. Yeah.

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl39:52

       Which is your idea of it's only found in the present. But this notion of that the happiness only comes from being in the moment, on the one hand, and yet we're... Human beings have, are goal-oriented. You've said this in some of your earlier podcasts as well, that we have to lose the I. And in fact, in flow-

   15. AAAli Abdaal40:10

       Mm

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl40:10

       ... that's one of the experiences where become less self-conscious. Doesn't mean my self is gone. I'm still the guy hitting the tennis ball, to, to keep on that one theme. And I can be in a... Or I had been in a wonderful flow state playing tennis. The, that was me, Tim, doing it, but self was gone, right? I was just in the action. And th- that kind of captures how, yes, joy can be found in the moment, but it... Goal pursuit is still part of what it means to be human. And to become a meditator doesn't mean become any, any less human, and that's the paradoxical part of it. And if that's confusing a listener, then yeah, who... Nobody isn't. [laughs] Right? And that's where we spend time studying the Dharma, uh, doing mindfulness meditation to try to come to an understanding that it's not just intellectual. Because if you, if you scratch the surface of that intellectually, you reject it. But you can come to understand it in a way that, uh, resolves the paradox there. I'll leave it at that. But i- and because it's not an easy, uh, question to answer.

   17. AAAli Abdaal41:15

       Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I've got lots of thoughts which are sort of floating around. My personal trainer incidentally is super into meditation, so he and I just did a, did a session two days ago-

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl41:24

       Mm

   19. AAAli Abdaal41:24

       ... where he... We, we, we did... Uh, it... I guess it's hard to describe. It's always hard to describe meditation. But, like, after 20 minutes, I felt, like, the sense of calm and peace and-

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl41:34

       Mm

   21. AAAli Abdaal41:34

       ... serenity, to use that word, that I just haven't felt in a very long time or don't remember ever potentially feeling before. And then I went on the Sam- Sam Harris' Waking Up app, and I was like, "Oh, wow, he's got all the Alan Watts stuff." So that's now-

   22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl41:45

       Mm-hmm

   23. AAAli Abdaal41:45

       ... my binge, uh, when I'm, I'm driving. [laughs]

   24. TPDr. Tim Pychyl41:48

       Oh, and then you can have a, a meditation for 20 minutes, and think you're gonna lose your mind, right? 'Cause all you're doing-

   25. AAAli Abdaal41:54

       Mm-hmm

   26. TPDr. Tim Pychyl41:54

       ... is thinking, and it's not going very well, and there's no calm at all. And that's meditation too. And there's another form of the paradox, right? And that... And, and it's not the clinging. This is what you'd mentioned, that idea of this notion of identification or clinging. And you can think of that as, well, if I have a goal, then by definition, am I clinging to it? No. [laughs] You can have a goal, but are you, are you identified with the goal? Are you clinging to the goal? That's different, right? And, and that's an important distinction. We don't become less human and less goal-oriented, but we can become less identified with and, and not be clinging. That's where... And you used the word unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, dukkha would arise.

   27. AAAli Abdaal42:38

       Mm.

   28. TPDr. Tim Pychyl42:39

       Because y- it's inherent then. If I cling to it... And I mean, we can, we can go on this forever because it's just like the Zen archery thing. When you aim, you miss, right? And, and so again, these are things that are difficult to understand just a strictly intellectual level, 'cause you think, "Well, how are you ever hit anything if you don't aim?" Like, what a ridiculous thing to say.

   29. AAAli Abdaal42:58

       Yeah, it sort of re- reminds me of the stoic idea of preferred indifference that I sometimes-

   30. TPDr. Tim Pychyl43:04

       Mm
8. 45:00 – 56:44

   How do we nudge ourselves into habits?

   1. AAAli Abdaal45:00

      This brings us very nicely to the thing that I was gonna talk to you about next, which is... And again, I'm gonna zoom out a bit and tell you what the sort of structure of my book is tentatively because that's sort of the angle that I'm approaching this, kinda based on a reading of your work and Piers' work and a, a few oth- other people, whereby... And actually I got, I, I got this 'cause I paid $5,000 for a productivity coach at one point, and I was-

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl45:20

      Yeah

   3. AAAli Abdaal45:20

      ... I wa- I was just kinda curious, like, hey, what does a productivity coach do? And essentially what he did was basically talk me through a method for goal setting-

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl45:27

      [laughs]

   5. AAAli Abdaal45:28

      ... that actually worked, worked really effectively.

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl45:30

      Mm.

   7. AAAli Abdaal45:30

      And it kinda got me thinking that if, if, if we think of... Let's take a thing like I'm gonna... I wanna improve my Mandarin Chinese, for example. Now, you would say that the anemic intention is, "Oh, yeah, I'll just do that on the weekend."

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl45:42

      [laughs]

   9. AAAli Abdaal45:42

      And I would agree c- that, like, it's... What, what the hell does that look like? "Oh, I'll just learn Mandarin on the weekend" is clearly r- never gonna happen because, like, there's no plan. It's not on schedule. I don't know what I need to do. And I find that, like, often for me when I'm, whenever I'm struggling with procrastination or what I think is procrastination, the first step is to actually just stick the thing in the schedule and figure out what, what specifically the next action step actually is.

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl46:04

       Good. Yeah.

   11. AAAli Abdaal46:05

       And I find this a lot with students when I, when I'm teaching. It's like, "Oh, I'm gonna study physiology tomorrow." I'm like, "Okay, hang on." [laughs] "Firstly, what time?" They're like, "God, okay, fine, uh, 7:00 PM, 7:00 till 8:00." "All right, cool. Now, study physiology is never gonna happen, so, like, what specifically are you gonna do?" It's like, "Okay, cool, I'll read chapter four." "Okay, cool. Now, within chapter four, reading chapter four in Guyton and Hall's Physiology is, is never gonna happen. It's too long. Like, do you wanna pick some questions and..."

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl46:30

       Mm-hmm.

   13. AAAli Abdaal46:30

       Guiding people through that thought process results in a-

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl46:33

       Yes

   15. AAAli Abdaal46:33

       ... "Okay, fine, tomorrow at 7:00 PM I'm going to s- do questions eight till 13 in this book." Does that kind of vibe with your experience of solve- helping solve procrastination?

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl46:43

       Oh, yeah. I'm gonna give you a big hug from across the ocean here. I've leaned a lot in that book that you're reading on Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions. So there's goal intentions. We spent a lot of time talking about goals. You just told me you hired a personal trainer to help you set better goals, but it sounds like the trainer also introduced you to implementation intentions, and they're often framed and, and research shows they're best framed as, "In situation X, I'll do behavior Y to achieve sub-goal Z." And, and there's other research to show that when we think about things in the abstract, they seem to belong to tomorrow. There's no sense of urgency to them. And when we think about things concretely, they're, they belong to today. So you put those two things together, and it says something about the way the human mind works, that we can... well, in a sense we can borrow this notion of nudge, right? That we're, we, we move ourselves in the direction of the way the mind works by saying, "I'm gonna set a time and a specific behavior. I'm gonna make it as concrete as possible," 'cause concrete goals, my brain treats them differently. And, uh, again, on, on implementation intentions also help us break habits or establish new habits because we put the cue for the action into the environment and not rely on internal cues. Because internal cues, I've already got my habits established. And the example I constantly use, Ali, is how years ago I, I wasn't flossing my teeth, and my dentist told me that I was developing problems with my gums, not surprisingly, because of that. And for whatever reason, I, I brushed my teeth every day, really habitually, and I felt it was an important health habit, but I resented flossing my teeth. I didn't like it, and it was just too much of a bother, but I realized I had to do it. So I made an implementation intention. When I pick up my toothbrush, because I always did, I will put the floss on the counter. When, then. When, then. When I put down my f- toothbrush, I will pick up my floss. Now, some of your listeners might be saying, "No, you should floss before you brush your teeth." I got there, but I needed to bootstrap this process by saying, "When, then," and then it became a habit to have floss there. And then I also realized that flossing actually feels good. It, it wasn't as aversive as I thought. In fact, I can't imagine not flossing now, and if I floss every day. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some days when I'm tired and, and the little, little Timmy, little six-year-old Timmy, maybe even older than that, will say, "I don't feel like it. I don't want to." And I then I have all sorts of other strategies I go to. Like, what's the next action? Just pick up the floss. Like, and or, uh, more importantly than that, going back to our earlier discussion of meditation, mindfulness, a Buddhist mindset, you, you name it. Parker Palmer, because he said this. "I can have an emotion without being that emotion." This is another big personal mantra. Yeah, I'm having this emotion. I don't want to. [laughs] Like, I don't want to floss my teeth. I don't have to be that. I can work from other parts of my inner landscape, and my other part of my inner landscape is I have a health goal that's important to me, healthy gums and flossing a lot, one day a week. You floss every day. And then I pick up the floss and I floss, right? And in a sense, then I'm not becoming identified with a thought. But to take it back to where this part of our conversation began, absolutely, implementation intentions are a great step towards reducing procrastination. But as Peter Gollwitzer makes clear, even some of his papers in the late 1990s when he was really starting to roll this stuff out, you have to have a commitment to that goal or it's not gonna work, right? This... No trick or technique on its own will ever make a difference if you're not committed to the goal achievement. These tools serve goal achievement. And if you're not committed to that goal, well, nothing magic's gonna happen.

   17. AAAli Abdaal50:30

       Yeah, like I've... So I'm, I'm, I'm in the, in the middle of teaching a live course online helping people become YouTubers, and I often get a bunch of questions around the, the, the tactics, the implementation and, and, and stuff, and especially when it's kind of friends in real life asking for my, for my advice around starting YouTube channels.

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl50:49

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   19. AAAli Abdaal50:49

       And my thing al- always kind of starts with, okay, I can... Let's... We c- we can talk through it, we can work through it, but like really if you don't fundamentally want to do this thing, there is nothing I can say that's gonna make you do the thing.

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl51:02

       Yeah.

   21. AAAli Abdaal51:02

       So let's tackle that part of the equation first.

   22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl51:05

       Yeah. And, and, and the question becomes, why do you want to do this thing? And it's, and it can come... You can get, finally get down to an answer. Well, I want to write a bestseller that, on the New York Times list, right? And I actually had a fellow contact me, because again, I've been very public with my research. People have emailed me from all over the world. And this one fellow, I, I won't even name the country just to keep it as anonymous as possible. It was on the other side of the world. Said, "I, I wanna write a book." I said, "Well, what's stopping you?" Right? It's kind of the Pressfield thing. [laughs] And he had resistance. And, and it came down to, after a f- a little bit of nudging and questioning, that he said, "Well, it, I, it's gotta be a bestseller. It's gotta be on the New York Times list." I said, "Well, you can't start there. Right? You, there's never a guarantee in life like that way." And then we often get into, and you and I ought to at some point in this conversation, deeply existential issues, right? That we, we can all, we can want all sorts of things, right? But we're all alive here in a certain set of circumstances. And, you know, the only non-renewable resource that you and I have in life really is time. [laughs]

   23. AAAli Abdaal52:05

       Mm.

   24. TPDr. Tim Pychyl52:06

       And we don't even know how much of we're gonna get. And so in a, in a sense, your focus on productivity and now our discussion of procrastination s- rests so much... That's kind of why I like Oliver Burkeman's new book, you know, Four Thousand Weeks, because he gets into this as well. That, you know, you gotta be invested in where you wanna live your life. Th- this is not a dress rehearsal. And let's go full circle back to Alan Watts. This is it, right? [laughs] Th- this is it. And it even goes back to your notion of, isn't joy found in the moment? Yeah. Right now I'm really enjoying myself talking with you, right? You g- you know why? Because I showed up and so did you, right? And then when we end this call, I'll have just as much fun packing for the week ahead of me. Because why? I'm gonna show up and get into that. Uh, yeah. So there.

   25. AAAli Abdaal52:56

       Mm-hmm.

   26. TPDr. Tim Pychyl52:56

       Again, a, a bit of a riff on that, but that's good. I think it's important to riff because all these things will come together.

   27. AAAli Abdaal53:02

       Yeah. Yeah, I think... Well, one of the... I find myself almost automatically doing the whole when-then thing. Like I, you know, a few, a few months ago decided I was gonna try acro yoga, which re- relies on ridiculous hamstring... Well, or rather the, just the ability to do an L-sit, like hamstring flexibility-

   28. TPDr. Tim Pychyl53:18

       Mm

   29. AAAli Abdaal53:18

       ... which I just don't have at all.

   30. TPDr. Tim Pychyl53:19

       Mm-hmm.
9. 56:44 – 1:07:28

   Procrastination as an emotional problem

   1. AAAli Abdaal56:44

      say someone's listening to this and kind of step one of my patent-pending procrastination method is make a plan and stick it in the calendar and, and stuff.

   2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl56:52

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AAAli Abdaal56:52

      Let's say we've gotten to that point, and the thing of start my podcast or, uh, or whatever the next action step of that, or, you know, do those questions from Guyton and Hall's Medical Physiology. And, and at that point it's like it's in, it's in the calendar, and you're sitting down to do the thing, and then there is this other... This, this more, more resistance.

   4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl57:14

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AAAli Abdaal57:14

      And we are genuinely procrastinating from the thing.

   6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl57:16

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AAAli Abdaal57:16

      Now, I feel this is where all the emotions come in. Your... I think your, your most famous quote, at least from all the stuff I've read, is, "Procrastination is an emotional regulation problem or emotional dysregulation."

   8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl57:26

      Mm-hmm.

   9. AAAli Abdaal57:26

      I wonder if you can riff on that, 'cause I know that's like a whole-

   10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl57:29

       Ab- absolutely

   11. AAAli Abdaal57:29

       ... a whole, a whole thing. [laughs] Yeah.

   12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl57:30

       So we're all gonna get there, like we all... You know, from the outset we said we're goal-oriented. We're, we're... We maybe have enough insight to put them in the calendar, and so make a very specific intention. It's not anemic. It's quite an implementation intention. But we get there, and then something's happening inside of us. And because you've brought meditation practice to the forefront, I'm gonna add a name here and say Tara Brach. And Tara, she loves the RAIN approach. RAIN like the, the rain coming down. She, she uses it a little differently than other people have in the past, but I'll use it both ways. RAIN is an acronym for recognize, accept or allow, int- investigate, interrogate, and then she says nurture, and some people, other people would say non-identification. The, the last one we can talk about if you want. But so I think this is an important technique to bring to those moments when that resistance starts. First of all, to recognize it. Yeah, I'm, I'm resisting. Like I, I intended to go to my desk. But this is quite f- real. A lot of us can feel that. We... Our bodies start to move away from the desk, like we're heading to the fridge now. Why am I going to the fridge? I say I'm hungry, but that's not why I'm going to the fridge. Like I, I'm excusing myself. I, I said I was going to my desk. So I have to recognize that and then allow it and, and recognize the emotions that are there. Can you label them? I'm feeling anxious. I'm, I'm afraid this is gonna... Not gonna work out.

   13. AAAli Abdaal58:58

       Mm.

   14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl58:58

       We haven't talked about this yet, and I should do it as an aside. Perfectionism rears its, rears its ugly head. Socially prescribed perfectionism, like I'm internalizing the values of others. Some people call these perfectionistic concerns as oppo- as opposed to perfectionistic strivings.

   15. AAAli Abdaal59:13

       Mm-hmm.

   16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl59:14

       So I, I'm having these thoughts of it won't be as good as Ali's. You know, Ali's is my, my coach for creating this podcast, and I can't create something like him. What's the point, right? I, I'm not gonna get on the bestsellers list. What's the point of writing the book? Well, a- allow that emotion. And I can go back to Parker Palmer's quote. I can have that emotion, not be that emotion. And it's... But then I can do that next step in RAIN, which is investigate it. Where is this coming from, and what does it mean? Uh, and, and is this the only emotion I can draw on here, right? And, and it's not, right? We can... But as soon as we start to name things, oftentimes they go poof. They go away. Or we start to bring into it, and this is where the, the last, the N comes in for nurture or non-identification. And they can, they can naturally down- dance together even though Tara doesn't always do that, uh, 'cause non-identification is probably in there anyhow with investigate. But here we have to accept our common humanity, you know? Here you and I are talking. We're different ages, living in different places, but we accept where there's a lot of things that are common between us 'cause we're human beings. We've got light inside of us, we've got darkness inside of us. We've got good things happening, we've got bad things happening. We've got strengths, we've got weaknesses. We do wonderful things, we make mistakes. And so when we can accept that common humanity and have some self-compassion, and recognize I can have these feelings and not be these feelings, then that's the emotional work done. Then I can go back to that wonderful phrase we used earlier, which is and what's the next action? And you can lay on top of that implementation intentions if you want, making things concrete, just getting started. And you see they have to dance together. If you don't do the emotional work, you're, you're not gonna get to the cognitive work because you're, you're gone, you know? And, uh, physiologically we can say, yeah, you're... It's amygdala hijack. Your whole limbic system is screaming at you, you know? The... Your... The six-year-old in you is alive and well, said, "Get out of here." We've learned early in life that if you get out of here, you can get rid of these... You're gone. So you gotta do them both. Yeah.

   17. AAAli Abdaal1:01:22

       I guess in, in your experience, what... Well, experience plus research. What are the common emotional barriers that get in people's ways? We've kind of touched on a few of them.

   18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:01:32

       Mm-hmm.

   19. AAAli Abdaal1:01:33

       The idea of perfectionism, potentially fear, potentially anxiety.

   20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:01:37

       Mm-hmm. Okay. So Alan Blunt and I published a paper way back, and we were looking at task aversiveness. You know, that task aver- how aversive is something. But he- Alan and I sat together, brilliant guy, and, uh, said, "Well, what the heck does that mean?" [laughs] You know, aversiveness tastes different to different people, and it probably is different for different tasks. And, uh, I won't get into all the details, but you invited me to talk about research. We actually looked at tasks over time. If you look at tasks over time or projects over time, there's an inception phase. Like, you know, I might write a book, and then there's a planning phase. You said, "I'm... You know, I've got these chapters and this is what they're gonna be about." And then there's the action phase, and then there's this closure phase. And we'll leave the last part out. We'll just look at inception, planning, and action. And what Alan did was he had people list all their personal projects and have them say, "Where are you in th- in, in these phases?" You know, 'cause you can explain this to people. "Oh, well, it's just a, uh, just an idea at this point. It's inception." "Oh, I'm actually, actually planning it." "No, I'm working on this one. It's action." And then he had them rate them on psychologically meaningful dimensions. This is Brian Little's work on personal projects. Brian Little was at Cambridge for quite a while. He was at Carleton, did his PhD at Berkeley, was at Carleton. He was my mentor for many years. I owe him so much that way. And then he was off to Cambridge because he was sharing things more widely, and Harvard, too. Q- quite a guy. And his work it has people take their personal projects and rate them on meaningful dimensions like, and you've heard me mention them some before, enjoyment, stress, difficulty. But things like value, congruency, outcome, progress, all sorts of things that are psychologically meaningful. And Alan put in there as well task aversiveness. How aversive is this to you? Lo and behold, what we found is that the nature of task aversiveness changes depending on where you are in the project. In the inception and planning phase, if something generally what we'd call lacked meaning, it was aversive to us. But when we get into the action phase, it's not so much of whether it's meaningful anymore, it's whether it's well-structured. Do you know how to do it? And so this notion of aversiveness has many flavors. Now, the last part to my answer is really more bang on to what you're actually asking me, which was, well, so what are these things? Boredom, frustration, difficulty, resentment, anxiety, fearfulness. All those things are related to task aversiveness. Some of them, depending on the phases of the project I've just explained, and some of them based on, on our personality as well, 'cause that's always present. If I'm a highly anxious person, then anxiety might be something that comes to the m- uh, fore more. Things in terms of interpersonal difficulties, then resentment and frustration may play a role. But all of these things, you could have any of them e- emerge, and sometimes they're a blend. "Oh, this task is so boring. I resent having to do it. It frustrates me to no end that my colleagues, uh, don't wanna do these things." You see that wicked blend that's there? Well, no matter what they are, I have to start to identify them, learn from them. So why am I frustrated? Because I feel like everyone's putting on me and the team. Well, maybe I gotta do some work there, but right now I've gotta do the task.

   21. AAAli Abdaal1:04:51

       And I guess once you've f- I, I guess applying kind of the RAIN method, recognize, accept-

   22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:04:56

       Allow. Yeah

   23. AAAli Abdaal1:04:57

       ... uh, accept or allow, yeah. In- investigate, and then nurture/non-identification.

   24. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:05:02

       Mm-hmm.

   25. AAAli Abdaal1:05:02

       For what- whenever we find ourselves struggling with any one or more of these emotions, just running through that method, uh, will probably... Even just naming the thing, just recognize, "Yeah, I don't wanna do this thing 'cause I, 'cause I feel fear or anxiety." All right, cool.

   26. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:05:14

       Yeah.

   27. AAAli Abdaal1:05:14

       Now I've named it, I've taken some of the power away from it, and I can just-

   28. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:05:16

       That's true

   29. AAAli Abdaal1:05:17

       ... choose to do the thing regardless of how I feel about it.

   30. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:05:20

       And you could also investigate and say, "So why am, do I feel anxious? Well, 'cause this means so much to me. Like, this is my whole identity on the line." And then you can probe that a little bit and realize, first of all, that it's pretty irrational [laughs] and, and you can deal with that. And then that's the common humanity, self-compassion part. But it's also then you recognize that this is really important to me, so rather than putting it off today, which is gonna jeopardize me, I really need to work on it, right? We often talk about volitional skills, or I do. 'Cause I say that procrastination is a breakdown in volitional action. Volition, just another fancy f- word for will. Like, that, you know, this is my voluntary willful behavior. One of the most important volitional skills someone might have is just being able to take a few deep breaths. Gee, there's a lot of focus right now on the vagus nerve, for example, and you can g- do a deep dive in there if you want. I won't. But calming down, we've known this all our lives. And I've got a daughter who is like her dad. She can get quite worked up. And I have to say to her, "Laurel, breathe. Let's just do this together." [inhales] [exhales] And even that one breath, right? 'Cause you and I are talking right now, and you're a fast talker. You're even faster when you're do- when you're doing solo. And, and that just calmed me down. And so I would argue that even before you start doing the RAIN technique... In fact, there's a, a wonderful German psychologist who talks about emotion regulation training or affect regulation training. He's got a book called ART that's well worth looking into, Affect Regulation Training, uh, Matthias Berking. And he, he talks about deep breathing. Like, or, you know, s- in some of your yoga classes or in your mindfulness meditation, doing a body scan where you slowly just relax the whole body. Uh, those things work magic for you to be able to get your focus back to do the task at hand. So, but I'm a big believer in the breathing, 'cause it's very portable. [laughs] And two or three deep breaths and you're, you're changing your perspective again. Yeah, I just wanted to add that.
10. 1:07:28 – 1:13:15

    Why tips and tricks don’t always work

    1. AAAli Abdaal1:07:28

       Okay, so we've got the thing in our calendar. We've figured out our implementation intention. We've found that there's some sort of resistance holding us back. We've done the deep breathing thing. We've gone through RAIN. We're like, "All right, cool. I know I'm feeling anxiety and fear and perfectionism about releasing this podcast episode, but I am gonna do the next action. I'm just gonna do it anyway and see what happens." Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that, uh, one of your personal things that you almost live by is just do the next action. For the yoga mat-

    2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:07:58

       Mm-hmm

    3. AAAli Abdaal1:07:58

       ... just get the mat out and stand on it. I wondered, do you have any other, I guess, tricks, techniques, strategies for getting over that, like, just that final bit of hurdle where it, it no- it, it now just involves actually just doing the thing or getting started with the thing?

    4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:08:15

       Well, those two together are pretty much bomb-proof for me. What's the next action? And I can have an emotion without being an emotion. Those two paired together are very powerful for me. You know, y- I thought you were going there with your question, which is, you know, you've, you've put all your ducks in a row, to use another overused metaphor.

    5. AAAli Abdaal1:08:34

       Yeah.

    6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:08:34

       And you're right on the precipice of doing it, but there's still a great deal of anxiety. This is where it goes back to this deeply existential question, and I can go back to a really famous author by the name of Paul Tillich, who in the 1950s wrote the famous book, The Courage to Be. Deeply theological, but really deeply existential. And it is this affirmation of self. That is the courage to be. Affirming self in the face of uncertainty. And, and there's... And he, in his book, he describes... But that's really what it's gonna come down to. When I give talks on procrastination, I end up talking about Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, right? I can't help but. 'Cause not only, like, th- I turned a corner when I read Alan Watts, uh, as a young undergrad. Certainly Man's Search for Meaning did the same thing for me. Deeply existential. And, you know, in his writing, he, he speaks of the fact that between the stimulus and response, there is the self, right? That, that can make the choice there. And in that courage to be that Paul Tillich writes about, it's the same idea. At some point in all of this, you can learn tips and techniques, and we can draw on modern... It comes down to a human issue of getting on with our lives. And it's okay not to do the podcast. It really is. It's to say, "You know what? I thought I was gonna do this. I took the workshop, Ali, but you know what? It's not me. Uh, it's not value congruent for me. It doesn't feel, uh, that I fit this. I thought it would be cool. Uh, but maybe I was enticed by the thought that some people go viral and they make a lot of money [laughs] . As opposed to I really like to share stuff that I learn, and I'm really good at it, and I f- I find a flow moment in it, and I find it really creative." So sometimes when we get into that, we realize we shouldn't do it, and it's okay to abandon it, but you've got to do that from a place of being authentic. You know, authoring our own lives. And when you get to that moment, procrastination disappears. Because when you're authoring your own life, and you mentioned this word earlier in y- your first three chapters, autonomy's in there. That when I feel autonomous and when I'm authoring my own life, this word procrastination doesn't even exist. You, you might remember it. Maybe you don't because, uh, uh, maybe they didn't have this, uh, film in the UK. Do you remember the, the movie about the clown that... The physician who was a clown that healed people?

    7. AAAli Abdaal1:11:00

       No. What was this?

    8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:11:02

       I'm blocking on the name, but I, it, it'll come to me. Uh, Robin Williams starred in this movie. Patch Adams.

    9. AAAli Abdaal1:11:08

       Mm.

    10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:11:08

        So Patch Adams was a physician-

    11. AAAli Abdaal1:11:10

        Ah, yes

    12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:11:11

        ... who healed by making people laugh, and Robin Williams played him. And, uh, a, a few years ago, Pa- the real Patch Adams, the physician, not Robin Williams, and I did an event together. I spoke in the morning, he spoke in the afternoon. So I stuck around because I wanted to meet Patch Adams. Uh, and he's not as funny as Robin Williams. [laughs] But he, he was, um, an interesting man. Very intense, very political. And at the end of his talk, I said to him, "So Patch, what do you think about procrastination? This notion of procrastination." Now, I'm channeling Patch here. I'm not trying to be rude. But he said, "Procrastination? That's bullshit. Put your pants on this morning, or did you try to put your pants on this morning?" And at first I thought that was a trivialization, but in some, some ways it's, it's just truthful, right? That we can make some things so much bigger than they are. And, and if you-

    13. AAAli Abdaal1:12:05

        Mm

    14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:12:05

        ... as a physician, you probably know this because you'll, you unfortunately get to meet a lot of people who are struggling with their own mental health, where putting pants on isn't a trivial thing at all, right? They don't want to get dressed. They don't feel they can get dressed. They can't, they can't feed themselves. We can get to a place in life like that. And, and in our, the human continuum of abilities, we can look at tasks like, "Oh, I'll try to do that." As soon as I hear someone say that, I think, "No." Where's that courage to be, going back to Paul, to Tillich's idea? Where's your self-affirmation? And to go back to that very deeply Zen perspective, this is it. Are you going to assert yourself with now? And if it's through the podcast, then you're going to do it. But don't think for a moment, I, I will tell people, and this is why I think it'll be interesting for you to rec- reconcile pure steel equation with my existential ramblings, to say that it's co- comes down to one engaging in his or her life, right? His, her, or their life. That, you know, these are deep choices. And, and if you think you can move away from that, uh, around the things that you're really procrastinating on, that's just naive. No technique or trick is ever gonna save you.

11. 1:13:15 – 1:15:14

    Reading philosophy

    1. AAAli Abdaal1:13:15

       What was your experience discovering Alan Watts, and how did that change your perspective?

    2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:13:22

       Ah. Well, uh, you know, like many undergrads, uh, I w- I was an undergrad... Let's go back even further. I was an undergrad back in, in, in the mid-'70s. So 1974 I began university. And so w- who did I read? Well, I'd read Nietzsche, of course, and, and Watts, and then that led me to other, uh, radical Zen and those sorts of things. Took some courses that, you know, I think it was George Carlin who used to joke-

    3. AAAli Abdaal1:13:49

       Mm

    4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:13:49

       ... "You take just enough philosophy to screw you up for the rest of your life." [laughs] Right?

    5. AAAli Abdaal1:13:53

       [laughs]

    6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:13:54

       And that's kinda what happened with those things, that you get introduced to these big ideas. Not passing calculus or learning the periodic table, but, oh my goodness, like, all, all of these ideas are out there as well.

    7. AAAli Abdaal1:14:08

       Yeah.

    8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:14:09

       So it, it was, uh, revolutionary that way for me to be introduced to ideas that did those things. And if you listen to someone like Sam Harris and his Waking Up app, and he'll talk about, uh, psychedelic use and changing perspectives that way. And-

    9. AAAli Abdaal1:14:25

       Mm

    10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:14:25

        ... so we've all have life experiences that can forge these- these- these parts of us that realizes that life is more than just making a living. And to use an overused phrase for some people, it's making a life. But until you get there, you never really embrace autonomy and authoring. And that's why, of course, I used to teach developmental psychology, and I had a section on it called midlife crisis. And it's those people who didn't have any of these struggles, of course, that hit the midlife crisis. And they go, "Oh, geez, you know, this isn't that fulfilling or rewarding." Well, it took you a while to get there, didn't it? Right? And so it's w- well advised in your 20s to do some of that grappling. And when you read some of these things, they are... They bend your head. Because when you say, "This is it," you go, "This is it? Really?" Yeah, this is it. And you don't even know how much of it you're gonna get.

    11. AAAli Abdaal1:15:13

        Um,

12. 1:15:14 – 1:21:08

    Being a father

    1. AAAli Abdaal1:15:14

       I guess final question I wanted to ask you about is, I'm not sure if I, uh, if I, if I... This was in your talk from nine years ago, which may- maybe means your kids are older now. But you-

    2. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:15:24

       [laughs]

    3. AAAli Abdaal1:15:24

       ... mentioned something somewhere that you're a fairly old dad.

    4. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:15:28

       Mm-hmm.

    5. AAAli Abdaal1:15:28

       Or words to that effect.

    6. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:15:29

       Mm.

    7. AAAli Abdaal1:15:30

       And I was curious as to, to what extent did having kids give you one of those perspective shifts that's often... Or sometimes people talk about that, "Oh, the kid came into the world and all of a sudden I realized something...," da, da, da, da, da. [laughs]

    8. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:15:44

       Oh, of course. Yeah. I'm a, uh, so I'm a self-described dinosaur dad. It's interesting because I-

    9. AAAli Abdaal1:15:49

       That's all right [laughs]

    10. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:15:49

        ... I don't, I haven't ever put-

    11. AAAli Abdaal1:15:51

        Yeah

    12. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:15:51

        ... any videos of myself online or any lectures, although I've done many lectures, invited lectures and things like that. And, and that, that workshop, people say, "I saw your lecture." I'm thinking, "What lecture? I never put it up." But I see that my university did.

    13. AAAli Abdaal1:16:04

        Yeah.

    14. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:16:04

        Uh, so that's... And, and I, and my perspective is refined since then in an important way. I'm much more proud of my talks, but that's true of everything, right? For anyone. So that's a bit of, uh, airing some of my own stuff when I say all that. But yes, when I had children, I actually thought I was... I pushed back hard on my wife saying, "You know, I think I'm past this. I'm 50 years old." And, uh, we had to work hard at having our first child, uh, f- some fertility issues, something that many listeners will say, "Yeah, yeah, we've been there too." But we won the lottery and had an in vitro fertilization work for our daughter. And then our son, as many people will f- find out with these stories, just decided to... That w- every- all systems were running again. [laughs] So we- we got the, the luck of having a son as well. And so I was an older dad. I was established at the university, so I took time off and I w- I was Mr. Mom for a while. Like, I... Full time. And my wife can get really frustrated with that. She said, "Yeah, I was Miss, Miss, Miss Mom for a while there too, but nobody celebrates that the same way." [laughs] So what does... How has it changed me? Well, my daughter just got back from camp yesterday. She was away for a month, and I was just so anxiously awaiting her return. And to see her step o-... Just last night my son and I went out to get some sushi for her, because she's been in the wilderness canoe trip for a month, and she hasn't had these kind of foods, and we wanted to treat her. And, and I'm in the truck- car with my son thinking, "I, I don't know how to tell much, how much I love you. I can't even put it into words." So loving another human being, like a child, i- is something that I, I could never have experienced ahead of time. I've watched other people love their kids, but typically what we see is, when we're not parents, is we see the interactions in the department stores, which are [laughs] out- outrageous sometimes, right? And you think, "The last thing I want to do is have kids." It is life-changing, for sure, and I'm glad I didn't miss it. And it's the most important thing I've ever done in my life, and I'm really happy to be a father, and I'm trying to do my best, which then you've, you're going face first into your own, one's own incompetence, right?

    15. AAAli Abdaal1:18:08

        Mm-hmm.

    16. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:18:09

        And then we can get into the, the psychodynamic theories, um, of the good enough parent. It's actually the good enough mother. Again, we've named so many people in this conversation, and I'm blocking on this psychotherapist's name, but he's quite famous. Like, he just-

    17. AAAli Abdaal1:18:25

        Is it Winnicott?

    18. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:18:25

        Winnicott, that's right. Winnicott.

    19. AAAli Abdaal1:18:27

        Winnicott, yeah.

    20. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:18:27

        Exactly. Good for you. Yeah. And so, you know, that's influenced me in terms of being the good enough dad.

    21. AAAli Abdaal1:18:33

        Yeah.

    22. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:18:33

        And, and also, as my wife would say, "Don't steal their struggle." And, and I would bring from my psychological background of procrastinating children because they don't learn to self-regulate. So I work very hard at modeling self-regulation. And that's a little bit for... But all these things come out of, um, parenting as well. And the last thing I'll add is that my daughter, you're right, she's older now, she's 17 when this episode is, or when this, this conversation is happening, and she, in her high school she was nominated as as best procrastwitate. I said, "Laura-

    23. AAAli Abdaal1:19:08

        [laughs]

    24. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:19:09

        "... there's a little bit of irony here. [laughs] I hope you can see that."

    25. AAAli Abdaal1:19:12

        Yeah.

    26. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:19:13

        Yeah. There. That's full stop.

    27. AAAli Abdaal1:19:14

        Tim, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being so, so gracious with your time and expertise. I'd lo- I'd love to stay in touch. Would it be all right if I email you further down the line when my book is a little bit more shaped, just to get some feedback on the procrastination stuff? Um-

    28. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:19:27

        Oh, I'd, I'd like that, to be honest with you. Because I'm invested in it being pr- if you're gonna include anything I've said, I'm invested in it-

    29. AAAli Abdaal1:19:34

        Yeah

    30. TPDr. Tim Pychyl1:19:34

        ... being correctly pr- uh, presented. Uh, I don't think you would misrepresent it, 'cause I complimented you earlier on your intellect. I know you're good at what you do. Um, but it's nice to be able to just, uh, make sure nothing's taken out of context. Yeah.

Episode duration: 1:21:08