 Hey guys, I have another question here. It's on procrastination and let's see if we can shed some light on this problem. It says dear David, I really like your YouTube videos and they're really helpful. You're very welcome. So first I'd like to thank you for that and I have a quick question. I'm sure many people have it too. Actually all your techniques you present are wonderful and they're really effective in my case most of the time until I have a deadline. A deadline seems to blow up everything and actually I feel that I will never have enough time to accomplish the work correctly so I procrastinate. So my question is how can I avoid procrastination when we have a deadline and a limited time? Thank you for your help. Okay so that's a great question and it's a good question because to be honest a lot of the people that reach out to me for help with this issue, you know constantly putting off work, a lot of them are self-employed and a lot of them are trying to start a business or something and there's this problem with every deadline is kind of self-imposed. You know you make your own hours and you have your own goals and so this is a really interesting thing when you have like externally imposed deadlines. Now you have those too in business but it's a really good question. So let's think about deadlines for a moment. Just when you're looking okay when there's no deadline but when there's a hard deadline somewhere in the future things get difficult. Why? The reason for that is anxiety. Okay you see this external deadline it increases pressure and now there's more anxiety and what do we do with the anxiety? We use coping mechanism to deal with it and that's called procrastination. That's all it is. It's just a way your nervous system has found to relieve anxiety about this external deadline. Okay so just realize that when you're procrastinating like that you're putting off the work, you're not being as conscious about your decisions, that's a way to relieve the anxiety. So part of this is just to not give up on the techniques I'm talking about. Okay now a really interesting thing here is this. Let's say this is your starting point and your deadline is over here in the future okay this big scary deadline. The time it takes you to work towards that deadline right you could see this is a big but just one single deadline. You have a gazillion smaller deadlines in the middle. The only deadline you ever ever need to worry about when you're dealing with procrastination is what's my next step? Okay now in my approach to this the book I have on it you can get it on my website or the course you can get the whole course there on this but in my approach to procrastination you only ever take it one step at a time and if you fail to show up for when you say you're going to show up you stop okay that can be difficult when there's this external deadline but if you do fail to show up okay you will feel very anxious about not allowing yourself to do some work later that day in other words to push the deadline forward. Use that anxiety. My whole approach to procrastination is you're flipping the power of this this stress and this anxiety you're flipping it to your own advantage to move you forward okay so my point here is there's only one deadline and but it'll be more sort of high stakes deadline each one okay but don't allow yourself to put it push it forward like that because it has detrimental impacts on your self-esteem okay so stick to the plan is what I'm trying to advocate here it doesn't really matter anyway because you've only got a certain amount of time from now until that deadline right and the principles I'm advocating here will allow you to get as much work as possible done in that time okay the principles that I'm advocating here and in my approach to procrastination are designed to make you do as much work and high quality work as possible in that time period so it's not like relying on the procrastination the old model is going to make you do way more work okay in fact my model is very very flexible and when in certain times in life there is a requirement to do more work you can just still do that but you just maybe amplify or increase the amount of work that you do okay because you'll be driven to do that right you nobody has to tell you that you need to do more work okay that's never the issue with procrastination you already know maybe in this case with this external deadline then well maybe I need to increase my efforts here a little bit the question is what can I convince my nervous system to do okay and how can I do it in the most enjoyable stress free way where anxiety doesn't kick in and result in this fight flight or freeze response which is procrastination okay so stick to the plan you only ever have one deadline and that is your next deadline it's the deadline closest to you so just keep making conscious choices I'm going to do some work at this time I'm going to do some work at this time keep following through and enforce that barrier that boundary don't ever move that period of time okay out forward if you've missed it because that's just reinforcing the entire cycle or the the mechanism or the coping strategy that's dysfunctional in this case okay so great question it's a question I've asked I've had from a few people in the past when there's this external deadline it's harder to do it right to follow through on this but nothing changes with this just keep making conscious choices and in terms of your next deadline you've only got one deadline that's the next one right and you just keep using rolling deadlines like that it's not this external one out in the future it's the one that's closest to you right now that's the only deadline that matters hope that was helpful hope that answered your question great feedback and thanks so much for your question I will see you guys in the next video and if you like this you can subscribe and take care talk to you soon