End procrastination for good: neuroscience-based framework & solutions

We're going to be talking today about procrastination and how you can really end procrastination for good. I myself

have actually uh learned even more around the neuroscience of procrastination in the last like year

and a half. There's been some really good research that's come out as well that's made my own understanding of the

issue much more nuance. So, I'm excited to share some of these things with you guys and provide you with a framework of

first of all how to think about procrastination in a productive way and understand that there are many possible

solutions for it. And it's not that there are certain solutions that work or don't work. It's that you have to find

the solution that works for you relative to the type of procrastination you're experiencing in that moment. So, I'll

touch on that and how to think about that as well as some fairly simple solutions that should allow you to make

procrastination functionally obsolete. Point number one, procrastination is not a single behavior. Procrastination

[music] as a set of behaviors can happen through multiple different mechanisms and we

have to understand those mechanisms to figure out which solutions are best suited to address those mechanisms. So I

want to give you this overarching definition of what procrastination actually is. You can think about it as

toll over toll. This toll is two L's. What we're really talking about here is emotional toll of a task exceeding our

tolerance. This is what procrastination really boils down to. All forms of procrastination, whatever the mechanism

is, it means that there is a certain task and our perception on the emotional toll that that task is going to elicit

exceeds the amount of emotional work, baggage, burden that we're able to tolerate at that time. And there are

different things that will either increase the emotional toll or uh decrease our tolerance. And that's what

we see manifested as procrastination. And the way they want to break this down is into a few different categories of

things that cause an emotional toll and things that reduce our tolerance. So let's start with the first one which is

the most common reason for procrastination which is innate to the task. This one is about the task

process. Specifically, we're talking about an aversive task process. So an aversive task process is one where when

you think about doing the task, it involves a lot of stuff that you don't want to do. So this could be writing a

really big essay or thinking through a really complicated problem. You just know that the amount of thinking and and

mental discomfort and the effort that's going to need to go into it is going to be really high or it's just something

that you innately just do not enjoy. So, one thing that people procrastinate a lot is difficult conversations with

people that they care about. So, let's say that your friend did something uh and you felt really betrayed because of

what they did. People don't want to have that conversation. They'll procrastinate that that conversation because it's a

difficult thing to have and they're not going to enjoy doing that. People will procrastinate um booking something in

with their dentist because they don't want to be there at the dentist and it's painful and they don't like the

experience. So, this is innate to the task itself. creating some kind of aversive emotional response. So in this

type of situation, what we're saying is that the aversion that we feel about the task exceeds our tolerance for that

aversion. Increasing the tolerance we have for the aversion is possible, but it's uh not sustainable and it's also

tiring in and of itself. Instead, what we want to do is use a strategy that reduces the emotional spike of that

process. So, if you kind of think about a graph showing the emotional toll on the y-axis over time, what we are

predicting is that when we start this activity, it's going to be this, you know, big emotional toll and then maybe

it lingers for a while and you know that eventually it's going to get better, but you still like this this initial thing

is is problematic. you're going to feel averse to that. And so what we can try to do is we can mellow that out. And the

way that we do that is by ramping into the activity. So we spread that emotional cost over a longer period of

time. And so now there is no big spike for us to feel so averse about. And this is the reason why I personally regularly

like multiple times a week rely on this strategy which is leaning very heavily into the zygarn neck effect. The zygenic

effect, for those of you that are not familiar, is this phenomenon where when you leave something unfinished, it's

easier for your brain to come back to finish it than it is to just initiate something from scratch. And this is

really good because it means that you can start a task deliberately leaving it unfinished as a setup for the

next step. So, let's say that I need to write this big complicated essay and it's going to involve a lot of like

organizing my thoughts and it's a huge topic and I just don't want to get into it. So, I can deliberately choose not to

finish this and I can just take the first few parts of it which are in and of themselves pretty simple to do like

open up a document, open up all the resources that I'm going to have to read through and just start like kind of

spamming ideas in no particular order just so that I've got stuff on the page and then I can just stop and just save

that and I'll come back to it tomorrow. So, there's two things that this activates actually three things. Number

one, it makes it easier for you to come back to it the next day because it's already started. So that inertia has

already been broken. You activated the zygenic effect. So now the next day you're less likely to procrastinate. The

second thing is that the next step could happen straight away. You could because you've already gotten started realize,

hey, I'm actually like already in the flow of it. I don't mind just continuing anymore. And now that you've gotten

started, you just choose to to complete it. What I will say though is that although you may complete it because you

don't feel like stopping, you shouldn't feel like you're tricking yourself. Some of you will feel this yourself. It's

like an inevitable life feeling, I'm sure. Whenever I do laundry, I wash my clothes and then I dry the clothes and

then I I put I put them in the basket and then I just can't be bothered packing the clothes away for some

reason. Like that's something that I procrastinate all the time. It just sits there in the basket and when I need my

clothes, I just fish it out from the basket. It's like the giving tree of clothes. I just take it from the source

directly. I don't know why. I just don't pack it away for some reason. Uh and so what I do is like zygonic effect this

all the time. We'll put away like however much I feel like putting away. Like I just do like a few socks. And my

mentality on this is if I put away a few socks, at least that's a few things that have been put away compared to nothing

being done. It's like a net positive, right? And then I do it and probably like 80% of the time, maybe 90% of the

time, I'll end up just packing everything away anyway because now that I've started, I'm like, I may as well

finish. It's not a big deal. But every single time I initiate that task, I remind myself, Justin, you do not need

to finish. You can leave it. You can literally do two socks and just call it a day. You give yourself the full

conscious permission to do that. And I think that's important because if you get into this mentality where you sort

of secretly know that you are tricking yourself into finishing it, then it loses the impact. You have to realize

that you are genuinely giving yourself the option to just do a little bit and stop. So that's that's the second

benefit. So the first thing was the fact that uh you're less likely to procrastinate on it when you come back

to it. The second thing is that you may just end up finishing it because you're already in the flow. And the third thing

is that even if you don't finish it, you are making legitimately good progress on the task itself. Like if there are 100

steps, you've legitimately done three or four of those. So if you continue to do this every single day for 10 minutes,

just little bits chipping away here and there, then you would eventually finish the task without ever really feeling

like you you've like done this big task. Hey guys, it's Justin from the future here. Uh, I wanted to jump in and

highlight something that I don't think I made clear enough in the original video, which is that this zygenic effect is

really powerful. I would say that 70 to 80% of the time, the zygonic effect itself is enough to stop you from

procrastinating. In my experience with coaching, most people most of the time have this process aversive response. And

so, the zygenic effect is really great at overcoming that. And the other thing is that there are variations of applying

the zygic effect in different scenarios. I don't go over some of those variations in this video. If you are interested in

some of those variations and how that looks different in different kinds of situations and how you can apply that

for yourself, then a great place for you to check out would be my free weekly newsletter. I talk about the zonic

effect a few times uh dressed in different flavors. And as you go through each of the emails, I think you'll start

seeing the trend of really the principle that you need to hit to overcome this procrastination even when the cause of

procrastination is different. There's also uh a bunch of other useful insights and tips uh that I share in these

newsletters as well. So if you're generally interested in staying productive, reducing procrastination,

learning faster, thinking more clearly through uncertainty, this is kind of the focus of where I try to make those

newsletters hit. So, if those topics are uh of interest to you, then make sure to check out my newsletter. I'll leave a

link for you to sign up in the description below. It's completely free to join and you can cancel at any time.

But otherwise, on to the next type of procrastination. So, so that's about task specific one. But if it's not

because you're averse to the task, it may be an implication of the task. So, it's not the task is something that I

dread. It's if I do the task, what I think is going to uh lead from that. That's the thing that we are dreading.

That's the thing that gives us that emotional toll. A great example of this is just straight up perfectionism. I

think that many perfectionists believe that their perfectionism is because they care about having a great outcome

because they they hold themselves to a high standard. And while that is true that they do hold themselves to a high

standard, I think what is very necessary for a perfectionist, this is speaking as someone who I think I'm generally used

to be severely a perfectionist, especially when I was much younger and then I realized some of these things and

have really actively been working on it for years. Perfectionism is actually not about the outcome at all. Perfectionism

is about insecurity. Perfectionism is the insecurity of the judgment that someone will make on you or the judgment

that you cast on yourself as a result of not reaching a standard. And that standard is often not even necessary.

It's not actually productive. It may not even be producing the best result. So, for example, if there are three things

you need to do, but then you spend all of your time on the first one, well, you've actually guaranteed

[clears throat] that your result is not going to be very good. And I think perfectionists know

it's not about productivity, but it's easier to believe that it's about productivity or having a high standard

because those things are societally valued. If you say, "I have a high standard for my work. I have attention

to detail. I hold myself to that high standard. I am very productive." These are things that people look at and they

say, "Wow, good job." Like these are good things. Hey, can you, you know, be a good influence on on my children?

These are things that we believe are good attributes to have. Whereas if you say I spend too much time on things that

are of massively diminishing return because I have an insecurity about being judged, people would say well you should

work on that. And that is really the truth. And I think there is an open honesty that is necessary and accepting

that which at least for me allowed me to start untangling this idea of why I am spending so much time on certain things.

And that in itself allows you to overcome procrastination because the implication is lower. So if I don't do

this task in this way exactly so that it's correct and done to this standard, well then there's no point. But in order

to do it like this, it's going to require all of this and that the emotional toll just builds. But really

what's underlying that emotional toll is if someone says, "Well, why don't you just not do it like that? Why don't

instead of doing a hundred steps, why don't you just do like the 10 most important steps? You're still going to

get it done. Why don't you just do that? That's where the real issue is. Because when you ask that question, the response

is, I can't do that because if I do that, then this person is going to think this of me or like I I I can't do that.

Like that's beneath my standard of work or or whatever it is, right? We're just kind of rationalizing it. And then that

emotion of not being able to reach that standard and that fear and insecurity of the judgment from others or from

ourselves that creates the emotional toll. And this is this is another separate mechanism that procrastination

can happen under where it's really nothing about the process in and of itself. It's actually just about the the

fear of judgment related to it. And so we can apply a similar concept to overcoming this type of procrastination

where we're taking an emotional spike and we're sort of leveling it out. And instead of like with the zygenic effect

where it's about starting the process, what we can do is that we can level out the risk. So if we have a graph over

here and on the x-axis is risk over time. The thing with perfectionism often is that we are anticipating that the

work is going to look like this where we're doing some work and then we show the work to someone. We finish the work.

There's like a point of completion and then here there's very high risk because at this point is where there is

judgment. So instead of doing it like this, we can even this out by doing a bit of work, exposing it, getting

feedback on it, drafting it, doing like deliberately bad things where the risk of it never really goes very high. And

there are two mechanisms that allow that risk to be low. The first thing is about having a higher frequency of iteration

and feedback. So this means that it's less likely for you to spend all this time working on something and then here

here it is and then you just get shot down. You're just getting more frequent feedback on it. So this is this is

mechanism number one. Mechanism number two, this is much more powerful is that it allows us to own our vulnerability by

openly creating a draft. We're saying this is not perfect. This is not a perfect form of this result. by having

frequent feedback and saying, "Hey, I'm trying to work on this thing and I'm trying to get better at it. Uh, but I I

need a little bit of help on it. Can I have some time with you once a week to get your feedback?" Perfectionists want

to be really good at something. It allows us to preserve that identity, but then align our processes a little bit

more towards something that's actually truly productive and it makes us open and actually acknowledge the fact that

making mistakes is part of that journey of getting towards perfection. And now it's not as scary getting judged on

something because we're actually turning that judgment into deliberate voluntary feedback that we're getting for

ourselves. You know, it's like um there's this quote that's that's sitting around in my head and for some reason I

feel like I I'm getting this quote from Tyrion from Game of Thrones where he was like, "Turn your weakness into armor and

it can never be used against you or something like that." You know, it's just take this insecurity, this fear of

being judged and then turn that into your own tool and say, "Hey, I'm actively going to get feedback. I'm

actively going to iterate. I'm actively going to make these drafts which I'm saying loud and proud the this is not

perfected. There are mistakes in this. There are errors in this. I'm going to work that out later. And by deliberately

doing that, it reduces that perceived risk and the emotional burden of perfectionism which can make naturally

make it easier for us to get on with the work and not procrastinate. So we've covered task innate issues like aversion

to the process. We have covered um issues with the implication of the task. So it's not that the task is hard but

the consequence of if we do the task badly. So for example with perfectionism there's another one that is very uh

similar. It's tied into that and this is the idea of a decisional procrastination. This is one that

affects both the emotional toll by making it higher and lowers our tolerance of it. Decisional

procrastination is when we procrastinate because there is a lot of uncertainty around how we need to do something. You

have to make these decisions around your approach and whether one way of doing it is better or worse than another way, but

then if we do it this way, that's going to lead to this and then I'll have to fix it with this other thing, but then

that seems too complicated. So, so maybe I'll just do it this way instead, but but if I have to do it this way, then I

can't do it until this date and then that relies on me. So there's all these different things. We're thinking through

the strategy. We're thinking through how do we navigate [clears throat] this thing and we're making all of these

different decisions. And the reason this affects both things is number one, it increases the emotional toll because

it's a lot of effort to think through it. So again, this is different to the task in thing because the difficulty is

not in the task itself. The difficulty is in terms of where the task sits relative to all the other priorities and

all the other things that you're trying to do in your life. you're project managing that particular task in

conjunction with everything else. It's just too much to think about and so you just decide not to do it at all. So

that's the emotional toll part, but it also has a negative effect on your tolerance because often the decisions

don't actually matter. It doesn't really matter if you do it this way versus this way. It's it's actually usually pretty

inconsequential. If you do it this way, maybe it is slightly more optimum, but let's say you do it this other way

instead. Well, so what? just just do it that way and you can just fix the issue later. It's just not a big deal. But we

can make it a big deal in our heads and we feel like we have to find this like optimum path of doing everything and we

don't have faith in the fact that we will just figure it out. And so the tolerance for it goes lower because we

perceive the risk of each of these decisions to be higher than it actually is. This is the one where I would say

that the fix the solution for this is a little bit more complicated. uh but it's easier for me in this live clinic in a

way because the best fix for this is actually just to learn about decision-making frameworks. You can just

upskill yourself on making decisions to structure and organize your thinking so you can just make these decisions faster

and more easily and more accurately. So that's the first thing is just get better at decision-m. The other thing is

to simply time box your decisions. So time boxing is a strategy where you give yourself a dedicated amount of time to

think about something and then by the end of it it's it's it's done like you have to finish it in a certain amount of

time. So if I give myself 10 minutes to think about a certain decision by the end of that 10 minutes I I have to

arrive at a decision and you enforce that you could get to the 10 minutes and still be like oh I'm not really sure.

Get as sure as you can be because once that 10 minutes is up you have to take that decision and just go with it. So

time boxing can be really useful for like those daily decisions where you probably know that in the grand scheme

of things 10 years from now or you know lying on your deathbed you're not going to be looking back and thinking oh if

only I had picked the most optimum path to go grocery shopping before I went to the gym it's like you're definitely not

going to be thinking about that. So those are the types of things that you could just give yourself. I'm going to

think about this for 2 minutes and in 2 minutes I'm going to arrive at a decision and I'm going to move on. And

that in itself is a form of of training that gets you used to just making certain decisions and evaluating risk a

little bit more proactively. The reason that sometimes the decisions take so long is because we spend a lot of time

being uncertain and just feeling the uncertainty without being productive in what we're thinking about because we

don't know how to balance different factors against each other. We just feel each factor and then we let out and we

think about a different factor and we just feel that one and then we compare how do we feel about this versus how do

we feel about this one and we think oh wait I can't really remember how I felt anymore let me just try again tomorrow

and then late at night you're thinking ah what if I do this and you just feel it you know you just like decision-m on

vibes alone like really analytically and you can not get very far with that and you can waste like days weeks just

vibing through your decision ision making in this way and not really make any productive progress when actually if

you have a framework for thinking you can work through that uncertainty rapidly within like minutes. So that's

the reason why the most important thing is just to learn how to make decisions. It's an actual skill. So that's

decisional. Uh so that's the third one. The next one which also affects tolerance reduces your tolerance is

something that I call pressure dependent procrastination. So pressure dependence here is when you figure out that you are

able to overcome procrastination by leaving things to the last minute. And so you use the urgency or the deadline

of a task to artificially increase your tolerance so that you just get things done. And there are two uh there are

there are two different types of this and this is why it gets a little bit interesting is that there is strategic

delay which is very different to just rationalization. Strategic delay is when you know that a certain task doesn't

need to happen earlier. You know that the outcome is not going to be any different if you leave it till later and

you know that you can just do it in a short amount of time. So you deliberately just leave it until it has

to be done and then you do it then. So this is okay and there are a lot of things in life where you feel like you

have to do it today but actually you don't have to do it today. You can do it next week and it would actually just be

totally fine and that can be a healthy way of managing your priorities because part of prioritization I always say is

that you have to say no to almost everything. Only when you say no to almost everything can you say yes to the

things that really matter. So part of saying no is about delaying that until when you really need to do it. So that

is strategic delay. It's a slippery slope sometimes comparing that with rationalization because rationalization

is you can convince yourself that I'm a person who operates best under pressure. I leave things to the last minute

because I'm the best version of myself when when I'm like that. That is more just like rationalizing the fact that

you procrastinate but you uh like are dependent on requiring high amounts of pressure. This is dangerous because this

is not an objective assessment of whether something should be delayed or not. And there are lots of things that

you should not delay even if it feels like it's not going to be important. But what I'm referring to here is the

difference between something that's important versus something that's urgent. There are things that can be

urgent but not important. There are things that are important but are not urgent. And often the things that are

important but not urgent, we don't feel that it's important because our brain's intuitive way of assessing importance is

mostly based on urgency. We're a short-term wired organism. And so we're not really good at I think this term is

called distant horizon rewards. It's basically when the reward is a is in the long term. We're not really good at

feeling that that is very valuable. So there are many things that are important enough that could really be needle

movers and game changers, trajectory setting things in your life that if you leave it until it is urgent, you

actually just don't have enough time. A a great example of this is actually learning skills. A lot of people leave

their learning skills until just before an exam. You can't really get great at learning and undo like a decade of bad

habits within like 2 weeks. So by leaving it until you became urgent, you kind of screwed yourself really. And

there are lots of these little things. Most skill development initially is important but not urgent. And most skill

development if you leave it until it's urgent uh is too late. So this is the issue with if you leave things that's

like pressure dependent. If you have to create that artificial urgency for yourself and it's also not healthy

because it puts you in a high stress state chronically which is not good for your mental health and not good for your

physical health. So what what's the solution to this? Uh the solution to this is to learn to be productive

without having to put pressure on yourself. And there are sort of two ways that we can handle this. The first is

that you artificially create the pressure for yourself earlier on. So you just spend more time planning or you

create a like a fake deadline that is way way way in advance. And so you're kind of still in this pressure dependent

state, but you're creating healthier pressure in a way because it's not sort of the hard deadline. This does work

short term and I think it's good for just conditioning you out of having this like ultimatum do or die type of

mentality. So definitely use that if you really strongly resonate with this type of procrastination. But that's not also

a sustainable solution because of the fact that number one you will one day realize that that first deadline that

you set for yourself is not the true deadline and number two because it doesn't take you away from this pressure

dependence mindset. And so what is a little bit more sustainable with this is to spend additional time upfront being

clear about your planning and do the reverse goal setting which some of you will have encountered which is where you

you take the goal that you're trying to reach and you reverse engineer what has to happen for you to reach that goal.

And the reason is that often our ability to think about reaching complex goals intuitively is very limited. we often

don't know all the steps that have to happen and all the wiggle room. So if we just leave it based on feeling when that

feeling of urgency arrives, it's often when it's already far too late anyway. And so by doing deliberate planning up

front and saying in order for me to reach this particular goal, here's everything that actually needs to

happen, we get a realistic picture of the scope of work that it takes. And what you'll see is that if you do not

reach a certain deadline by a certain time, you are going to fall behind. And this creates in a way that same sense of

urgency because you realize that to reach this goal 6 months, a year from now, you actually do have to be starting

that today. But it's healthier and more sustainable in that it's dependent on an active process of logical objective

planning that you're going through rather than just arbitrarily saying, "Hey, I'm going to do it by this

deadline. I'm going to give myself just a week." And then you're still just relying on this short-term emotional

push to get there. You cannot easily get to a point where your brain naturally values long-term reward more than

short-term reward. That's not easy to do. It is possible. It takes years um and lots of experience like repeated

experience having reaped these life-changing rewards over and over again. So if you, you know, play your

cards right, maybe 7 years from now, you will start feeling this. But again, that's like a really long-term strategy.

So what is much more viable as a practical solution is to just get to a point at least where you are willing to

do the planning necessary to scope out all the steps required to reach your goal. And then if you're trying to do

that and you procrastinate that, that's probably a type of decisional procrastination. And so now you have to

go and either time box it or do those decision-m modules that you've got a framework to think through. Uh so that's

pressure dependence. There's two more and I'm going to talk about them really quickly. Uh the first one is a

generalized anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder. The second one here is about ADHD or ASD. Uh the reason I'm going to

talk about these two quickly is because they are more uh medical sort of conditions. um and then they really do

require like specialist input if it's actually holding you back in in your life to a meaningful degree. So with

generalized anxiety disorder, this is uh you have a very low tolerance because you are fearful of responsibilities and

commitment to to something or doing something and getting it wrong. It's different from perfectionism because

perfectionism is specifically because of a judgment that you or others make. It's it's specific to the judgment. Most

people will classify perfectionism as a form of anxiety. It's like a subset. I think it's useful to think about them

differently because you may not resonate with this idea of perfectionism in terms of judgment, but you may resonate with

this idea of generally being anxious about agreeing to responsibilities and um having this pressure on yourself to

do things in a certain way or to perform in a certain way. And so that can reduce your tolerance of how much you're able

to to hold on to and your overall resilience. What's the solution for this? I would highly recommend that you

see a clinical psychologist for CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, or acceptance commitment therapy. like an

actual uh clinical intervention because anxiety can be often is life-changing. It's like life-defining and there are

really effective strategies of working through anxiety. But those strategies are actually very specific and these are

not things that most people will naturally just figure out by themselves. And if you do, it's going to take you a

really really really long time and it's just not worth it. So one of the things people say is like I just can't afford

like a psychologist. I mean, there's not a lot of things that are worth the money more than a clinical psychologist. If

you actually struggle with this, the rest of your life is going to be through this lens. The chances that you can just

kind of naturally just figure it out is it's either low or it's unnecessarily painful. And so, you know, I would

strongly recommend that. And it's the same thing that I would recommend if you have ADHD or ASD. If you haven't been

formally assessed, get assessed. uh if you have been assessed but you're not working with a clinical psychologist

around ADHD interventions do that as well. The way ADHD works is that the executive functioning part of your brain

and the part in involved in task initiation and time perception do not function like a neurotypical brain. And

so there are sort of a wide ranging set of complications that make it harder for you to initiate a task. And you sort of

all see that as procrastination. But it's much more complicated than that. and simply just doing the zygenic effect

may not be enough. The good news is if you do have ADHD, the zygenic effect is is is very helpful. So everything that

I've told you about process aversive solutions, so all of this stuff, everything I've told you about, you

know, this stuff over here, that all still applies if you work with the psychologist. They will probably teach

you this as well. And they'll also teach you some other strategies. But this idea of kind of ramping up into the task,

just breaking a task down into like really small pieces, being very structured and routined when you do

stuff instead of just kind of like jumping into it. That is all going to be very effective for you, but it may still

not be enough alone, which is why I recommend that you do work with a clinical psychologist around that if you

are not already because uh there's a limit to how much you can kind of just self psychologist yourself. So yeah,

these are the six uh main mechanisms. 1 2 3 4 5 6. And so the idea is figure out what type of procrastination you are

being affected by on any given time depending on your context and then use the strategy that is going to be most

effective for that type. So for me most of the time it's related to this. So I'm using the zygenic effect a lot. I used

to have uh this not so much anymore because I've kind of trained myself out of that. In terms of decision- making, I

often do time boxed uh decision- making. I have spent a long time learning about decision-m frameworks and getting really

fluent at those. Another thing is making important decisions when you are feeling more energized. So, your prefrontal

cortex, which is the part of your brain involved in making decisions, this gets fatigued very easily. So, if you do all

of your planning at the end of the day and you're already tired, you'll be making decisions all day, you're just

not going to want to do that and the quality is going to be diminished. So do this type of important decision-m when

you're feeling fresh, like at the beginning of your day, when you can really really focus and your prefrontal

cortex is not fatigued. A really good way to tell whether your prefrontal cortex is fatigued or not is how

bothered you can be making decisions that you know are good for you, but take effort. So, if you can't be bothered

doing things that you know are good for you. And the reason you can't be bothered doing it is just it takes

effort, like you're ordering takeout instead of cooking a meal for yourself because you just can't be bothered,

that's a very accurate way to measure prefrontal cortex fatigue. So, if that's happening, that's not a great time to be

making important life decisions and doing important planning for yourself. So, that's another quick little tip. And

in terms of the pressure dependent one, if you think that you are doing strategic delays, but you're not quite

sure, I would earn the side of caution and just assume that you're just rationalizing because the human brain's

ability to like rationalize is very strong.