 In today's video, I'm going to give you five really useful tips to keep you on point with your productivity going after your goals and overcoming procrastination. So stay with me. Have you ever heard that saying how long is a piece of string? If you don't know what it means, it basically means it's an answer. The answer is not defined. It's I don't really know, right? How long is a piece of string depends. It's relative. And the reason I'm bringing that up here is because this is the kind of the question that troubles those of us who have procrastination as a problem in our life. How long is a piece of string? How long is that task going to take me to do? Depends. Don't know. It's basically shown us we have a problem with boundaries. And I'm going to give you a few tips here that will help you with that issue around boundaries and it will help you overcome procrastination and overcome the indecision and the paralysis that we experience because of that. So the first point here I'm going to make when we're in terms of tips here for procrastination is without boundaries, your nervous system is going to become defensive. So boundaries in other words is when is this task going to be over? We need to be consciously aware of this. Okay. So without boundaries, our nervous system will be defensive. All the nervous system wants is to reserve calories effectively. It's basically its only function is safety. So what we want to do is we want to not only ask, well, when should I start this task? We should start to ask ourselves, well, when will I be stopping this task? Okay. So it's both of those without boundaries, the nervous system is going to get defensive. And that's fair because all it wants is to to preserve, keep that energy in case it needs it for protective purposes. You may have a thing for your career or you want to be going, be creative or do some project, right? And if it doesn't serve immediate survival, your nervous system may very well get defensive. And that's what procrastination is. It won't let you go ahead with it. So we need to start asking, when will I stop this task? Also, we don't do that. Okay. That's a really good habit to get into. The second tip I'm going to give you here, guys, is okay, we're setting boundaries, but it's okay to have standards in terms of what you want to accomplish in any given day. So you should want to see daily progress in your goals. And you can set minimum requirements in terms of the amount you would like to see. This is an amount of action you want to see even if you have a bad day. So what I mean by that is, usually our baseline for productivity on a goal, right, is zero. In other words, days will go by, I just have a bad day and I don't get to do it. I don't get around to it or put it off. Our standard will be even if I have a bad day, I do X amount, this small amount that I'm able to commit to. And it should feel uncomfortably easy to achieve and hit this amount consistently. Okay, so you want to have standards for yourself, it's okay. But the problem of course is people have these huge standards on realistic standards. And again, the nervous system sees that it doesn't like you that you're diverting all that energy and making a huge commitment to it. So yes, it's okay to have standards, but we want to be very realistic about it. Small consistent progress is what we want to be making. So the third point that ties in with that, it's basically you must have limits. So while you're allowed to have standards, you must have limits for yourself. If you don't have limits, the goal has taken control. The upper limit should be a challenge. It should be an amount of action you have achieved in the past, but not very often. In other words, if you're saying, okay, what's the maximum amount of time limit that I can spend on this on this task? And you might say to yourself, nine hours. Well, if you've come nowhere close to doing nine hours in that project in the past, that's not an appropriate limit for yourself. But maybe once you did four hours on it. Okay, that's your limit. That's your upper limit. Okay. Until you break that number. But you know, basically it's, or not until you're breaking it. So you consciously decide or choose to change the upper limit. The upper limit has to be adhered to. Okay. So it should be an amount that you hit occasionally, but most of the time you're not going to be hitting that upper limit. Yes, you're going to be hitting your minimum amount, but the upper limit is going to be something you occasionally hit. Right. Again, we just have it in a boundary. We are in control of the task or the goal. It's not in control of us. Okay. The fourth tip I want to share with you guys here is we're talking about a specific goal here, right? Now, that might be just one goal or one of your emotional needs. It might just refer to one of your emotional needs. You may have other things in your life that require your time and your energy. So the fourth thing here is see all of your needs as equal. So work, which is what I call responsibility, is one important need. Okay. But if it takes over, in other words, it becomes a tyrannical need. My model is there's five emotional needs we have inside us, essentially. And one of them is work or responsibility. You might call it, and if that can become dominant or tyrannical, it can take over and it can start to repress these other needs. So other needs will be crowded out. Should this dynamic stay in place for a long time, the system will break down. So you want to start seeing all of your needs as equally important, equally valid. And if one of your needs has become dominant, so you never get any of these, that means you're not seeing them as valid. You're treating one of them as much more important than the others. Now, this need is important, but they're all equally important. Okay. One is not more important than the others. And our job is to balance these needs. Doesn't necessarily mean they all get an equal share of your time, but it does mean that they're seen and validated as equals. The last tip, guys, I'll talk about today is guilt-free fun is rocket fuel. Okay. Guilt-free fun or guilt-free play, Neil Fiora talks about. The important part here is guilt free. So you will have fun no matter what. It's just a matter of giving validation to it or not. So you're going to be doing fun things because the desire and need for fun is one of the emotional needs we have. It's so strong that need. You're going to do, you're going to engage with these fun things anyway. Okay. It's just a matter of, do you validate yourself? Do you do it intentionally or are you doing it passively and reactively? We want to do it intentionally, consciously on purpose and that's validating it. Okay. If you can have fun while validating it, you are filling your tank for success. Okay. So this guilt-free play or fun that we have, if we've forgiven it to ourselves consciously on purpose intentionally, validating that need, you're actually now giving this, meeting this need and it makes it less likely that this need will do anything to sabotage this need. Okay. So what you're realizing is in a funny way, let's say productivity, you want to do something in your work life, your career, when you're giving yourself conscious deliberate guilt-free play, you're actually doing something for your career, for your work life because it's, it's going to be the fuel in the tank for success that drives you forward in this. So all these needs start to now cooperate with each other and help each other as opposed to be in competition with each other all the time. So those are five little tips and the main question here is how long is a piece of string? You know, how long is that task going to take me? And if you don't know, if you don't have boundaries around the task, you're going to struggle with it probably. Okay, you're going to probably have a procrastination issue around it. The other part that I talked about there is those five, those five emotional needs. If you want to learn about those needs, I have a free book on my website, my road, it's called Forget Happiness and it tells you what these needs are and how we can go about validating them and balancing them. So I hope that's a useful video guys. I try and make these videos on procrastination because I know it resonates with quite a few people out there who are suffering with this issue. And I'm going to keep making these videos for you guys because I get some great feedback on it and it's my pleasure to maybe give you a different way of thinking about this because you don't have to bully yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. In fact, it's the opposite. Just need to meet your needs, validate yourself, put boundaries on things, have healthy boundaries and this issue will go away. I promise you it will. Okay, so I'll leave it there for today guys, but take care and we'll talk again very soon. Bye-bye.