How Does Deep Procrastination Evolve With Time? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | Okay, let's let's try to one more question, Jesse, what do we got here?

00:00:04.000 | Okay, the next question we got is about deep procrastination with students and non students.

00:00:11.000 | Hi, Cal, what advice would you give to people grappling with deep procrastination? And specifically,

00:00:20.000 | how does that advice change between students and professionals? I work with both. And I

00:00:25.000 | think knowing how you would approach the question differently between students and professionals

00:00:31.000 | might give some additional insight into the idea. Thanks.

00:00:34.000 | All right, so deep procrastination is an interesting, complicated topic. So deep procrastination

00:00:42.000 | is a term I coined back in those halcyon days of my study hacks blog, and we all were just

00:00:48.000 | writing for RSS feeds. And I was mainly doing student advice. And it described the phenomenon

00:00:53.000 | that I would see frequently, which would be undergraduates at these elite schools. So

00:00:58.000 | I was at MIT at the time, but I would also work with some students at Harvard and other

00:01:02.000 | nearby schools, students at elite schools, losing their capability of doing schoolwork,

00:01:09.000 | like completely losing the capability to the point where they would have to do leaves of

00:01:12.000 | absences, right? Because it would be your final paper is due and you just couldn't do

00:01:17.000 | it. And your professor say, Okay, well, look, I'll give you a week extension. And you just

00:01:21.000 | want to do a lick of work, like you just lost the ability to do schoolwork. And I called

00:01:25.000 | that deep, deep procrastination. And typically, where that came from for students was a fritzing

00:01:35.000 | out or a burning out of the their cognitive motivational systems. And so you usually would

00:01:41.000 | have two ingredients would come together to cause this extrinsic motivation. So they were

00:01:47.000 | just high achievers, just you gotta get good grades, grind for grades, you know, to get

00:01:52.000 | the good college grind for grades, like do three majors and take on all these clubs and

00:01:56.000 | grind through so you'll be impressive so you can get the right job. Just kind of like

00:02:00.000 | extrinsic motivation of just my family and town think I'm talented, and I got to do

00:02:04.000 | impressive things. So it's not coming deeply from an intrinsic place of extrinsic

00:02:08.000 | motivation. And then you combine it with difficulty, like, is this hard? Like this, this

00:02:13.000 | cognitive toil, like the work is just really hard. You're doing a lot of you have a lot

00:02:16.000 | of majors, a lot of clubs, it's really mentally demanding, you're at MIT, trying to do two

00:02:20.000 | majors, and it's really difficult, right? When those two things come together, extrinsic

00:02:24.000 | motivation, plus a consistent toil, cognitive toil, you can fritz out the system, and your

00:02:31.000 | mind's like, no more, no mas, we're not going to work anymore. And that would cause deep

00:02:36.000 | procrastination. It's important to try to differentiate this from depression. They're

00:02:42.000 | similar, but it's not quite the same thing. So with depression, it's much more broad in

00:02:48.000 | its impact. So with with depression, which also, of course, is common among students,

00:02:54.000 | especially at these elite schools, you go a hedonic, so you can't imagine finding pleasure

00:03:01.000 | or happiness in anything. That's why depression is so insidious. Deep procrastination is

00:03:07.000 | more focused. Like you're still other things in your life you're really into, you just

00:03:11.000 | like can't do the schoolwork. In fact, there might be things you really love doing. You're

00:03:15.000 | like, I don't know, I'm reading instead and going to these movies, and why am I even in

00:03:18.000 | school? And you still have motivation, and you still can find pleasure in life, you just

00:03:22.000 | can't do schoolwork. Whereas depression is more of a fritzing out of the entire ability

00:03:27.000 | to have optimism or hope or feel like you're ever going to enjoy anything ever again. And

00:03:32.000 | depression tends to come more from, you go through a period of heavy negative self-talk

00:03:39.000 | and rumination. So there's sort of a different path to depression that you're down on yourself,

00:03:44.000 | down on yourself, obsessing over like things going on in your life that are bad, and that

00:03:48.000 | conversation was bad, and I'm bad. And again, there's overlap here, but it's typically fritz

00:03:52.000 | out your, the pleasure centers, the ability to have any happiness or optimism gets fritzed

00:03:57.000 | out by heavy rumination, where deep procrastination was very specifically schoolwork. Again, they

00:04:02.000 | can overlap. If you're depressed, you're not going to do schoolwork. But if you have optimism

00:04:07.000 | and enjoy things in your life, just can't do the schoolwork, that's deep procrastination.

00:04:10.000 | All right, so they're two different things. When it was clearly deep procrastination for

00:04:15.000 | students, the key was to reduce both of those instigating factors. Extrinsic motivation,

00:04:24.000 | large cognitive toil, it's just physically really demanding the cognitive work you're

00:04:28.000 | trying to do. So this is where I started writing about, at first, the Zen valedictorian philosophy

00:04:34.000 | on my blog, and then later, the romantic scholar philosophy, which was all about taking your

00:04:39.000 | college career, moving the locus of control from the extrinsic end of the spectrum back

00:04:44.000 | to the intrinsic, so you take back control of what you're studying and why, and then

00:04:49.000 | reducing, changing, and modifying your approach to the schoolwork so it's not nearly as, it's

00:04:54.000 | not a toil, so you get rid of that negative affect, the friction of actually doing the

00:04:59.000 | work, you make your work easier. Intrinsic motivation make the work easier. Deep procrastination

00:05:04.000 | goes away, because those are the two things that cause it. Now again, if it's depression,

00:05:08.000 | you need clinical help, there's a whole different way you deal with depression, but if it's

00:05:11.000 | just deep procrastination, that would be my cure for people who had it, it would also

00:05:15.000 | be my preventative for people who worried about it. And this is where I would have people,

00:05:19.000 | for example, take control over what they major in, and I didn't care how they made the decision,

00:05:25.000 | but just so it was theirs, and not their parents, or not something I think would impress their

00:05:30.000 | aunts and uncles at the family reunions. This is where I would get the students to be very

00:05:33.000 | heavy on lifestyle-centric career planning, where they put out a vision of their life

00:05:39.000 | one year after college, five years after college, 15 years after college, that resonates with

00:05:44.000 | them deeply. I live here, this is what my days are like, here's the role of work, here's

00:05:49.000 | the activities I'm involved with, like they can taste and feel and smell what this lifestyle

00:05:52.000 | is like. And then they're working backwards from that to figure out, what should I be

00:05:57.000 | doing in school now to help move me closer to that? So now you do those things, now it's

00:06:02.000 | intrinsic motivation. The work you're doing is part of this vision you created that resonates

00:06:06.000 | with you, motivation's intrinsic. Now to get rid of the overwhelming just toil of the work,

00:06:13.000 | I say, and again, I tell these students again and again, get rid of all these stupid majors,

00:06:18.000 | get rid of all these stupid activities. You have this mindset that somehow there's going

00:06:23.000 | to be an admissions officer in your future that's going to say, this looks like a really

00:06:26.000 | hard schedule. You are very impressive for doing that hard schedule. You get to have

00:06:30.000 | this job. I would tell them, no one cares. Like, where'd you go to school? What'd you

00:06:33.000 | major in? What are your grades? That's about all I care about. So get rid of all these

00:06:37.000 | majors, just have one major. Make your schedule easy. Complement the required courses for

00:06:42.000 | your major with very different style of courses and easy courses. If you have all these, like

00:06:47.000 | all these kids did, advanced standing credits from AP courses or whatever, use them to take

00:06:53.000 | less courses. Do independent studies, like make your schedule easy so you have more than

00:06:57.000 | enough time to work. I used to go give talks at colleges back in the day where I had this

00:07:01.000 | student named Tov and he was my case study. And I would show his calendar because he used

00:07:06.000 | the time machine function on his Mac to go back and show me a calendar from a typical

00:07:11.000 | day and it was full of junk. He had all these majors and activities. He was so stressed

00:07:14.000 | out. And I would tell the story about how he ended up drastically simplifying his life.

00:07:18.000 | And I would cut to his current calendar. And it went from a kaleidoscope of colored

00:07:23.000 | appointments to mainly white space. Course, course, low schedule, basically no extracurricular

00:07:29.000 | jobs. And how he just came alive once he had breathing room. And so I would say you make

00:07:33.000 | your life easier. And then once you have more than enough time to handle the work you're

00:07:37.000 | doing, use good time management, use good study techniques. You're spreading it out.

00:07:41.000 | You're not staying up late. You feel like you can easily control it. And then I have

00:07:44.000 | people invest, okay, go to talks, buy books, like get really into your major subject so

00:07:50.000 | that your mind begins to think about this as something you care about. And it's not

00:07:53.000 | just a means to an end. You do all these things. You don't worry about deep procrastination.

00:07:58.000 | And so that was deep procrastination for students. That was its cause. That was my suggestion.

00:08:05.000 | The same thing applies, I think, for the professional world. And again, we differentiate

00:08:10.000 | between depression and deep procrastination. In the professional world, deep procrastination

00:08:14.000 | is, hey, I run this company and I just can't do the work. I know this thing is due. I got

00:08:18.000 | to get this report to the client. I got to whatever. I just can't do it. But I have all

00:08:23.000 | these other plans and I'm daydreaming about what I wish I could do instead. And I'm

00:08:26.000 | daydreaming. I'm reading a lot of Tim Ferriss. And like, this is all a sign that it's deep

00:08:30.000 | procrastination, not depression. Okay, so what do you have to do? You got to solve those

00:08:33.000 | two problems. So you got to get the motivation back to intrinsic, which means what's your

00:08:37.000 | lifestyle centric career vision, work backwards and reshape your working life to be aimed

00:08:41.000 | towards that. Now you're in control to get rid of the toil. The biggest cause of toil

00:08:46.000 | for professional jobs is chronic overload. You have more on your plate than you can easily

00:08:50.000 | imagine getting done. If you go back and watch my core idea video on slow productivity, you

00:08:58.000 | can find it youtube.com/calnewportmedia. I'll get into this. But basically, if you have

00:09:02.000 | chronic overload, it's a huge drain on your brain. So do less, take stuff off your plate,

00:09:08.000 | switch from push the pole, I will pull something new on my plate when I'm ready for it. You

00:09:13.000 | can't just push on my plate, drastically change your work if you have to so that you have

00:09:17.000 | a reasonable amount of stuff to work on at any one time. Get rid of the chronic overload

00:09:21.000 | and then apply good habits, time block planning, weekly planning, quarterly planning, full

00:09:25.000 | capture, organized to do systems, the low hanging fruit to get rid of that extra friction.

00:09:31.000 | Do those things. So your work is now oriented towards a vision that you believe in and resonates

00:09:37.000 | and you reduce the actual difficulty of your work by getting rid of overload and being

00:09:41.000 | smart about your habits. That's how you get back. That's how you get around deep procrastination.

00:09:45.000 | The same thing that worked for students, I think works really well for professionals.

00:09:49.000 | So I'm glad you asked this question because I think it's a really interesting impact.

00:09:53.000 | It gets confused with other mental health issues, but it's very focused and I think it has a

00:09:57.000 | really clear solution. And so I'm glad to have a chance to actually review those ideas.

00:10:03.000 | [MUSIC]

How Does Deep Procrastination Evolve With Time? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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