In this blog post, Cal Newport talks about the reasons for severe “laziness”, or total demotivation, which he calls “deep procrastination.” He finds this happens to many college students.
Cal lists the following reasons for procrastination:
1. Fear (of both success and failure).
2. Perfectionism.
3. We think our work is of low quality.
But the biggest, Cal says, is that, “Your brain doesn’t buy your plan.”
The solution, obviously, is to get a better plan.
Cal designs good plans for students. Ramit Sethi designs good plans for earning money. But these are specific rather than general plans.
The real problem is not any specific plan, but the plan before the plan… or, HOW you plan. The way you plan is your organizational method. It’s how you process all your thoughts, including your tasks.
A bad method generates mental resistance by exceeding the limits of your working and long-term memory, by creating info fragmentation, and by failing to provide default procedural algorithms. Or it just generates so much overhead that adherence is impractical. This is the slippage in the gears before action ever begins.
If you automate your finances like Ramit Sethi recommends, how much more important is it to automate your brain and life?
Human working memory is limited to 7 items. Long-term memory forgets everything that isn’t vividly imprinted and then given spaced repetitions. Your creative right brain works differently than your logical left brain. Does your organizational system account for all of these mechanics?
The solution is Cyborganize. Using it allows you to effortlessly absorb and act on relevant information. Cyborganize defeats procrastination by breaking down every job into predefined baby steps. Even when you’re totally stuck, there’s a procedure for that too – just open a new scratch file and brain dump your frustrations. Then Cyborganize will chew through them and present an actionable solution.
Cyborganize takes life’s mountains and crushes them into smooth asphalt roads. Learn it once, then use it forever.