Okay, I'm going to talk about three reasons that people procrastinate. Reason one, they haven't taken the time to make a decision. It sounds kind of weird, but it's true. It happens a lot. People often don't get to square one, I'm making decisions. There's a document on their desk, maybe a new credit card offer.

Every time they see it, they think, Oh, yeah, I have to take care of this. But in that moment, they don't do it for good or bad reasons. And then they move on to the next thing. reason to they're waiting for more information that might be needing information needing input from somebody else are waiting for a phone call to be returned. So you've made a call to ask for something. They haven't called you back yet to keep track of that.

But this problem can be tricky because sometimes you don't stop to consider what information you need. You cannot seek out information when you don't really know what you're looking for. And you just kind of got lost in that whole, you know, downward spiral on that one. I see this A lot. I asked a client about a letter that's been sitting on her desk for a while, she'll say she needs to decide on it, but she hasn't figured out what will help her make the decision. Another problem, again, is that information that you're waiting to come back to you.

So once you put on that phone call and cross the task off your list, you still need to check back to see if the return call doesn't come. Reason number three, people are planning to sit down and figure it out, but they haven't had any spare time to do it. Does that happen to you? Okay, I got a hint for you. spare time does not exist. It's a myth.

People routinely think that they will have more free time in the future, and more motivation to do what they've been putting off. I did a class about willpower at Stanford recently. And we read about an experiment where people were asked to predict how much they would exercise in the next coming weeks. Most people predicted they would exercise a lot more than they actually did. That's not too surprising. But then they were asked the same question, prefaced by the phrase in an ideal world.

So in an ideal world, how much will you exercise in the coming weeks? And their predictions? exactly the same. So what does that mean? That means that they were predicting their own behavior all the time as if they were in an ideal world. And of course, predictions were all way too high.

The lesson is, you have to schedule time to do things and not wait for it magically to appear. All that time next week that you had to do the things you're putting off, it doesn't really exist. Here's some examples of what people are thinking about when they're procrastinating. See how many of these apply to you. Remember that were to Croatia. It means acting against your own self best interest.

Try to figure out why you're doing that. If you are acting against your own best self interest, if you aren't getting to the things that you actually want to do. Any kind of destructive behavior is done because Cause you think you're gonna get something out of it. If you can determine what that is you've got a better shot at overcoming it.