How to Beat Procrastination With Stoicism

Procrastination is something we all have to struggle with. It can be so tempting to put off a daunting task indefinitely. On today’s episode, Ryan talks about how Stoicism has helped him overcome procrastination, be more productive, and have more free time. Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IdMDhrkxts&t=38s This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. This episode is also brought to you by Literati Kids, a subscription book club that sends 5 beautiful children’s books to your door each month, handpicked by experts. Literati Kids has book clubs for children ages 0 to 12, and each club has age-appropriate selections tailored to what your child needs. Every Literati Kids book in your child’s box is hand-picked by experts and guaranteed to spark their curiosity, intellect, and spirit of discovery. Go to literati.com/stoic to get 25% off your first two orders and receive 5 incredible kids books, curated by experts, delivered to your door every month.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Here I am on a weekend out, a couple of weeks ahead of where you're listening to this. I've battled procrastination enough in my life that I try to actually anticipate and get ahead of things. So one of the ways I record episodes of these podcasts is in advance, in a batch, so I'm not having to do it every single day. There's less room for procrastination. But that word procrastination, it is a timeless concept. As we're going to talk about in today's episode,

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  the greats have been battling it all through history. The Stoics fought against procrastination, just as you fight against that impulse to put off, to delay, to get out of things you don't want to do. And so today's episode is how we beat procrastination with Stoicism, how you get to a place where I was as a teenager and at different points in my life where I put off things, I delayed, I tried to shirk responsibilities or duties, and got to a place where I'm always, I've always got a surplus, I'm always ahead of where I need to be. I enjoy the work of it. And I've beat the resistance, to use Steven Pressfield's phrase.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  And so here today is how we beat procrastination with Stoicism.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  People have been procrastinating for thousands of years. It's just part of the human condition. Twenty centuries ago, Seneca says the one thing that all fools have in common is that they're always delaying to live. They're always putting it off. They're delaying getting started because they'll get to it later, it's not that important, someone else will take care of it. This is no way to do it, right? Procrastination is a very real thing. We've always struggled with it, we continue to struggle with it, but that's not who you want to be. The things you want to do, you know you have a limited amount of time, you know there are things you've been put on this planet to do. How do we beat procrastination? I think you start with this Stoic idea of tackling it action by action.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius says, "Don't get crushed by the whole of life. Don't let your imagination get carried away. Stick with the situation at hand. Say, 'Why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it?'" He said you'll be embarrassed. So I think oftentimes we get intimidated by stuff because we make it bigger than it needs to be. We think, "Well, what about this, and this, and this, and this?" And then, of course, we don't do it. We put it off because we're scared by it. We've made ourselves scared. And so, I think if you can zoom in your focus, you'll have a lot more luck, right? So Nick Saban talks about the process. He says the average down in football is like seven seconds. Just do your job, seven seconds. Don't let the timeline get carried away, right? And I think if we zoom way in on the task, we're going to have a lot more success.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  This ties into another Stoic idea: just do a little thing. Zeno says that "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing." Marcus Aurelius says, "Assemble your life action by action." If we can just do one little thing every day... Remember Seneca saying that the path to wisdom is just acquiring one quote, one insight, making one bit of progress every day. If you can think that way, then the task is not so overwhelming. When I tackle a book, I don't go, "Oh, I have to write this huge book, it's going to be 80,000 words, I'm going to have to go through multiple rounds of edits." I break it down into many, many different small composite pieces. The obstacle is the way is 32, 33 chapters, but I broke that down into three parts.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  And then, 10 chapters in each part. And then, you know, the beginning of the chapter and the end of each chapter. And I just try to tackle each one each day. There's a great rule in writing: just two crappy pages a day. You do two crappy pages a day. If I show up and write every day, published pages come out of the backside. That's like a reality of the business. And realizing that, hey, crappy pages come out of the backside. If I show up, tackle a little bit each day. That's a really important thing. But I think this is another part. People are intimidated by their sense of perfectionism. Churchill's totally right when he says perfection can also be spelled paralysis.

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's when we obsess over getting it exactly right that we don't get down to do the dirty work of it. Right? So I don't focus on the results. As they say in the Bhagavad Gita, you're entitled to the work, not the fruits of the work. So my job is to just get to work every single day. I'm very routine focused. I think you have to be routine. I think a lot of the reasons people procrastinate is because they're overwhelmed. Right? They have a chaotic life. They have a million things that they're doing. And because they have a million things that they're doing, they don't focus. So Marcus really says every day, every minute, we have to ask ourselves, is this essential? We eliminate the essential things from our life, from our routines, from our to do list.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Again, I have a short, tight to do list every day. I'm writing chapter six, part two of the next book. Right? That's a big part of it for me. I'm not thinking, I've got all these million things to do. No, I have my little piece in front of me today and I'm going to tackle that thing. And by knowing what I have to do today and what I don't have to do, as Marcus says, we get the double benefit of doing less better. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I'm a big believer too of tackling the big, hard parts first. Right? So I wake up, I tackle the hard thing for the day first. I think it's also when you're pushing things off till later.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  I'll do that in a couple of weeks. I'll do it when things slow down. I'll do it in the afternoon when I feel more like it. That's a recipe for never actually getting around to do it. Epictetus talks about how every situation has two handles. Grab the heavy handle. Get the hard thing out of the way. Don't even create room for procrastination to creep in. So this is a really key part of it, I think, is creating a schedule, a routine, a set of habits or systems that don't allow that procrastination to leap in. Seneca says, "Life without design is erratic. As soon as a system is in place, principles become necessary." And look, if you're all over the place, you're not going to default to doing your best work. The small wins, really important, as I was saying, a couple crappy pages a day.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  I know that if I do that, day in and day out, I will get a manuscript which I can then refine. If I am obsessed with the results, with what other people think, I'm not going to be in the best headspace. By obsessing about what other people think by the results, that also contributes to being intimidated or overwhelmed because I'm nervous, right? I'm thinking, "Well, what are they going to say? What if I don't get it right? What if I don't do it right?" And that's not a place you want to come from. So again, by zooming in and saying, "What's in front of me? What do I control? What can I do well? What can I do to the best of my ability?" Even if that's just a couple crappy pages a day, I've narrowed in what I'm supposed to be intimidated by. I think Steven Presswood's right.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he says, "You experience the most resistance on the most important things." I don't procrastinate brushing my teeth. I do procrastinate, you know, starting the next book because it's going to push me. It's going to be scary. It's going to challenge me. So in a sense procrastination, the more resistance you feel, it's probably a sign you're on to something. It may be a sign that this is the most important thing that you could ever do in your life. And so as we're delaying, as Seneca says, as we're putting stuff off, we should almost go towards that, that hesitation we're feeling. That's confirmation that this is a good thing for us to do. There's a great video that Arnold Schwarzenegger did. Someone was asking, "How is he still in shape?" And he says, "Just that you do one thing every day, that's what counts."

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  So I know if I'm just putting points on the board, putting my ass in the seat, doing some writing, that's going to cumulatively add up to where I want to get. That's going to cumulatively add up to the pages which can be edited and eventually published. I think we can often be so paralyzed by what other people think, by our own standards, that we don't do the work. And because we're not doing the work, then we don't feel good about ourselves and we lose confidence. It's a momentum thing. I try to keep myself as a writer, always at my fighting weight. What I mean by that is I always want to be writing a book. Starting a book is really hard, especially if you've not been writing a book. So to always be in the middle of a book that prevents procrastination, laziness, complacency from creeping in.

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  My last book, Lives of the Stokes, when it came out, I was just in the middle of winding down the next book. And then I'm in the middle of the next one now. So I'm always writing and my routine is a big part of, you know, it's sort of a defense mechanism from that complacency or procrastination creeping in. In Zen and the Art of Archery, you hear Eugen Herigal talk, very similar actually to something that we get from Cicero, the image of the archer. And he talks about you aim it, you let it go, but then it leaves your hands. And so the understanding that at a certain point, this project leaves your control and that you can't care about that as much, I think also reduces the stakes a little bit and helps you see this calmly and clearly and be a little less intimidating.

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  Everywhere is nowhere is a great saying. So if your life is chaos, disordered, or trying to do a million things at the same time, that's a way of procrastinating. Busyness, being overwhelmed, not having the bandwidth to do a thing is just as bad as sitting on the couch and saying, oh, I'll get to it later. So you have to really ask yourself, what matters? What am I really trying to do? What are my main priorities? And then focus ruthlessly on those things. Procrastination is real. We all suffer from it. We all deal with it. Marcus really Seneca, me, you. Procrastination, as I said, is part of the human condition, but we beat it with systems, with routine, by focusing on what's essential, by making a little bit of gain every day, putting one foot in front of the other. There really is no other way.

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  But the final part of memento mori, you could die. Who knows how much time you have left? Why would you waste it? Why would you put off till tomorrow when tomorrow is uncertain? To me, is the ultimate way of battling procrastination. And concentrating like a Roman, as Marcus really has said, doing this as if it is the last thing you were doing in your life. Let's do it like that. And I think we'll be amazed at what we're able to accomplish.

• 11:28Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.