Committed Action plan
Stop procrastinating: grieve comfort & set better goals to be truly productive
“Start before you’re ready.”
Set “SMART” Goals
📋
Whether we are setting a goal for the day, week, or year, it’s pivotal to have a very clear sense of what those goals are, how to work toward them, what values and needs they are serving, and what we are willing to sacrifice and accept in order to stay committed to those goals. When goals are vague and unrealistic, this almost always leads to a weak commitment that stops before it really started. Over time, we internalize “this is too hard” or “this is not worth it” before we get to modify goals and follow the principles presented here.
1. Choose only 1 or 2 valued areas of life you want to work on:
❤️ Physical Health (Sleep, Diet, Exercise)
🧠 Mental Health (Skills/Concepts, Self-Care/Coping)
👥 Social (Relationships, Communication, Parenting)
📚 Work/Education (Training, Development)
🎵 Creative (Interests, Hobbies)
🔋 Personal (Recreation, Recovery, Leisure, Relaxation)
🧘🏻 Spiritual (Religion, Secular/Earth-Based)
🌎 Community (Volunteerism, Donation, Citizenship)
If you try focus on more than 3+ things at once, you increasingly risk the loss of focus and bandwidth to productively commit to all of them. Anxiety, perfectionism, or ambition can easily convince you “1-2 things is not enough, that’s a waste of time, you should be doing more.” Just notice this as a thought: the mind’s protective “reminder or push”, not a literal command. This redirects you from just mindlessly or impulsively moving onto something else or anxiously committing to more goals than you can handle.
2. Within these selected areas, set a “SMART” goal:
Specific: be very specific about what behavior, action, or skill you are committing to.
Meaningful: is this goal truly guided by your personal values/needs? Or is it an external influence you don’t actually value or align with?
Adaptive: is this goal likely to improve, enrich, or enhance your quality of life? Will doing it move you closer to your values?
Realistic: attainable but outside of your comfort zone (required for growth). Consider your current strengths and limitations, e.g., health, competing demands of time, financial resources, whether you have the skills to achieve it or ability to sit with discomfort of change/effort.
🥱 Too easy = boredom, agitation, stagnation, lack of growth, emptiness, depression
😓 Too difficult = fear, avoidance, procrastination, failure, rejection, guilt, shame
Time-framed: where, when (what day/time), how, and for how long?
Mindset: Willingness & Acceptance
😰
IMPORTANT: Be honest about how willing you are to let go of comfort and instant gratification [in the service of your goals and values]
We often know what we need to do and why it would help… But we often forget about what we are losing when we try to improve ourselves. We get sold on the benefits of change and sign up without reading the “hidden costs” of change:
“Change” has a constant recurring grieving process that most people grossly underestimate or neglect to prepare for: change often requires effort that is packaged with discomfort, stress, or pain. We often underestimate its difficulty, discount realistic barriers, and commit to over-idealistic goals (stage 1: denial).
We become upset and frustrated with this reality. We get caught up in how change “should” feel and how quick and easy it “should” be (stage 2: anger).
We desperately struggle with that pain/stress, doing whatever it takes to control it: procrastination, avoidance, shortcuts, waiting for motivation or inspiration (stage 3: bargaining).
Our weak, inconsistent commitments to change leave us stuck, getting nowhere… (stage 4: depression).
At a certain point, we have two choices: stay stuck OR shed our expectations about how easy and quick change “should” be. Our mind views any new change as a threat to comfort, resulting in the mind providing us all sorts of feelings and excuses that urge us back toward comfort and familiarity. Remember: it’s the mind’s job to focus on protection and it’s our job to focus on building a life based on our values, behaving like the person we truly want to be. Commit to values-driven actions regardless of current motivation or confidence. Be willing to “jump in the water” even when the over-protective mind says “it’s too cold to get in”. It might be cold but it won’t kill us, and hey look: at least we are finally “in the water”, getting somewhere (stage 5: acceptance).
We don’t just meaninglessly pursue or accept pain and stress, otherwise we give up quickly! It needs to be in the service of something we truly stand for and care about, important things that we are willing to accept these sacrifices and feelings for (stage 6: meaning).
Examples of Goal Setting:
Example 1: “Walk for 30 minutes on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday morning around neighborhood or park. The first 10 minutes will be in silence while the remainder of the walk can be with music or an audiobook.”
• Sacrifice: I will experience momentary feelings of resistance, cold weather, boredom, lack of motivation; I lose immediate comfort and doing whatever I feel like whenever; I lose some time, energy, and effort upfront.
• For the purpose/value of: staying health/strong for myself and my family; being outside in nature (instead of in my head, isolated in my room); strengthening tolerance to resistance and boredom and my commitment to my values.
Example 2: “Tonight, I will delete social media accounts/apps and move phone and phone docks away from bed and desk (wherever I need to rest and focus). Going forward, I will limit recreational screen time to 2 hours per day (around lunch and before dinner). In the morning, I will focus on getting sunlight, stretching, and walking… At night, I will focus on journaling or mindfulness meditation. In my free time, I will [insert specifics about hobbies, goals, interests, values].
• Sacrifice: I will need to sit with initially difficulty feelings of boredom, anxiety, and restlessness when I am not on my phone; I have to put in effort to plan for what I will do instead and commit to those alternative activities; I lose a quick distraction and instant gratification; I lose a small amount of convenience (cannot immediately receive/respond to things).
• For the purpose/value of: getting my attention and time back so I am more present and engaged with people and activities I actually care about instead of wasting my life on my phone. My phone/social media are more harmful than they are beneficial in serving my goals and living in accordance to my values.
Expectations About Progress
🐢 🐇
Consistency > Intensity/Perfection
If you are just starting to form a new mental or behavioral habit (often during the adjustment of reducing or replacing others unhelpful behaviors), resist the urge to “sprint” if the goal is a “marathon”. We are often motivated by obvious or clear results but the problem is that we don’t often see immediate big results at the start of many our personal goals. Often times, this impatience causes people to either give up too quickly or go way too hard at the start of a goal (with or without results, this basically leads to burnout and failure).
Stop trying to get 100% results immediately and just commit to being 1% better than the day before.
Do this for a few days, then weeks, and then months… You will get much further even though, at the beginning, your mind might give you the thought or feeling that it’s “too slow, too hard, too much work”. If you are putting in the work, feeling like you are getting nowhere ≠ factually getting nowhere. This applies to any desired change: managing anxiety, improving health, following through with goals/projects, learning/mastering a skill. Remember: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
WARNING: if you believe or feel you are behind or running out of time (whether just today or in life), your mind will urge you to be unsustainably consistent AND intense/perfect as a way to “catch up” for lost time (setting over-idealistic goals, being unrealistic, trying too hard). You will fail to account for many other factors, fast-tracking you to burnout and failure and, reactively, more procrastination, distraction, or numbing to cope with it! Get out of your comfort zone, get back on if you fall off: just be consistent!
Motivation Myths
🦄
This is an important expansion on willingness and acceptance (see above), particularly related to “instant gratification/comfort”. We often try to evade the “hard work” involved with change and goals (especially change/goals in therapy) by focusing on shortcuts or waiting for some type of motivation, inspiration, or “chemical” to finally get us started. We complain about needing to feel motivated to start but this “feelings-driven strategy” results in constant waiting. The more we continue to wait to feel ready, the more time “things” have to get worse (ironically making it even harder to feel focused and motivated!).
Assuming there is not some underlying physiological problem (including technology or substance abuse), I generally see “a lack of motivation” as mindlessly listening to your beliefs or feelings about what you are “able” to do or how difficult something will be. Again, this thinking is a result of how the over-protective analytical mind has evolved to preserve and protect (even at the cost of our long-term goals):
The conveniences of the modern world and technology (in addition to over-simplified comparisons or observations from social media) have greatly skewed the reality of how hard important things are to do. Our mind has learned to expect personal work to feel easy and quick. By default, we have less grit and are less accepting and flexible to however things are because we are so used to things coming easily or quickly, with no effort or stress!
Our over-protective mind emphasizes all of the reasons not to do something new or different to avoid stress, effort, discomfort, pain, or the unknown and unfamiliar. It turns up the volume and the lights on these selective aspects, making it difficulty to see or hear other possibilities.
The mind selectively filters out and silences all of the benefits and reasons why it’s worth going through the stress and discomfort of change (i.e., in the service of your personal values, needs, and goals!). When understood and channeled correctly, feelings like anxiety, guilt, or anger are extremely powerful motivators for action!
The mind uses “positive thoughts” to numb us from feelings or realizations that are helpful to motivate action: “It’s not that bad yet, others are worse than me, I still have time, I can just start tomorrow, I’m fine, I just need to keep praying or manifesting, it will get better eventually!”
These are also known as “excuses”.
Reality of Motivation
🐴
“Feeling motivated, prepared, or confident enough” cannot be a prerequisite for action. We need to drop this rigid expectation by grieving comfort and accepting discomfort in the service of our values and goals (see above in Mindset: Willingness & Acceptance). It is not wrong to use shortcuts to optimize things or prefer to have a reasonable level of motivation, but the reality about relying on motivation as a strategy for life is that…
Motivation (like “perfect weather”) is inconsistent and unreliable. If we keep waiting for the right “weather or feeling” to get started, this can prevent us from ever starting to help ourselves. Waiting for something unpredictable and random can also cause us to neglect following structure and routine. The more we avoid and procrastinate, the more we reinforce feelings of inability, inadequacy, and helplessness… This kills motivation.
Relying on motivation reinforces avoidance and procrastination and undermines self-efficacy when we primarily get things completed while feeling motivated. We teach ourselves (and our mind) that “not having motivation” or “not feeling like it” is an adequate reason for not doing something, that “we were and are only able to get things done when feeling motivated, we can’t do it now”. The more we avoid and procrastinate, the larger our problems pile up, the larger our anxiety and depression becomes… This kills motivation.
Motivation is often the product and consequence of action. Start with smaller, manageable thing to build the willingness and ability to do larger, more difficult things (see goal setting and mindset above).
Instead of focusing on how to get motivation, focus on working for motivation:
Effortful Action… 😫
↓
Some Motivation… 😐
↓
Less Effortful Action. 🙂
↓
More Motivation! 😬
↓
Effortless Action! 😊
↓
Intrinsic Motivation. 🤗
↓
Repeated Action + Time = “Habit” 😎
PaCING: “Tomato Timer”
🍅
Once we set a SMART goal (see above), we need to set proper pacing to work on it (rather than letting anxiety or perfectionism set it). The Pomodoro Technique, named by using a pomodoro ("tomato” in Italian) kitchen timer, is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo. Regular use of the technique enhances focus, reduces procrastination, and improves productivity by breaking down work into short, timed intervals. This pacing aids in avoiding blocks, burnout, and unproductive cramming.
First, decide on the task to be done (refer to your calendar, to-do lists, reminders, or values/goals [see above]). Then:
Set timer for 25 minutes.
Work on the task.
Stop when the timer goes off.
Take a short 5-10 minute break (e.g., stretch, rest eyes, drink water, breathe, meditate, ground or “drop an anchor”).
☑️ You have now completed one “pomodoro”.
When you have completed four pomodoros (~2 hours), take a longer 20-30 minute break before starting over again.
Install Personal Update
📲
Whether we succeed or fail, there is always valuable feedback from winning and losing. Exposure from personal life experience helps us update our “programming” (it greatly depends on how aware we are of our mind’s habits and how we are managing them), updating beliefs about our capabilities, our areas of improvement, and things that are healthy to avoid or accept. Our modern society has created polarized attitudes about “success” that lack nuance, glorifying “winning” and vilifying “losing”. As a result, our mental instincts kinda suck in the modern world:
👎🏼 When we focus TOO much on “negative” (mistakes, failure, loss)…
We become over-defined by it. When this is rigid enough, we habitually discount or minimize our value and successes and assume the worst. We filter out feedback that is encouraging or teaches us that we are more capable of something than our mind tells us. This is the mind’s way of relentlessly reminding you of what not to do and what to do better. If taken “literally”, this perpetuates a distorted and limited sense of self and reality, leaving us STUCK and UNAWARE.
If this is you, you need to start slowing down to sit with your thoughts and feelings after a win (no matter how big or small). Don’t just rush to the next thing. If you get a compliment or positive feedback, don't just reject it. Accept the discomfort in deliberately acknowledging the success or compliment (in the service of the value of breaking detrimental habits of the mind). When you “fail”, acknowledge the urge to selectively filter out what did go well. This is like a firmware update: you are downloading new attitudes and perceptions about yourself and your ability for the future. It’s not just about “feeling good” about progress, it’s really about regularly waking up to these supportive, balanced perspectives. This helps clear your path and maintain momentum on your goals (especially when things feel more difficult or there is a loss of motivation).
👍🏼 When we focus on TOO much on “positive” (perfection, success, winning)…
We fail to learn our blindspots and deprive ourselves of necessary feedback to actually grow or change. This form of denial “feels good” because we don’t have to sit with feelings of guilt or shame that could actually be very necessary in guiding us. This is the mind’s way of protecting us from painful yet necessary feelings (numb in self-satisfaction), leaving us STUCK and UNAWARE.
If this is you, acknowledge the win while also acknowledging the urge to turn away from or minimize/defend any “negative” (mistakes, failures, losses). Do not act on the urge to selectively filter out things that make you look bad: take pride in humbly balancing your perspective in the service of your values around growth. This feedback can then be turned into a “SMART” goal (start over above)!
Mental Blocks & Attention Deficit
⚠️
📆 Create a daily schedule:
• Accommodate extra time for preparation, rest, travel/commute, recovery, meals
• Under-schedule yourself rather than over-scheduling➗ Break large tasks into smaller parts:
• If you keep “staring at how large the mountain is”, it will feel impossible and this will become a major barrier and distraction to just committing to the next few steps.
• The Pomodoro (Tomato Kitchen Timer) Technique above can help chip away at larger task, especially when they are broken up or spaced out in 25-minute increments.😩 Anticipate and willingly accept discomfort when completing tasks:
• Remember: our minds have evolved to help keep us alive and comfortable, detecting any stress as a threat to our comfort/survival (even for things that are truly meaningful or valued). Feeling an urge to resist and avoid is a natural response: there is no need to always try to suppress it (doing this too much becomes an unhelpful, consuming distraction).
• Notice when you are feeling discomfort, label it, describe where it shows up in your body, and make space for that feeling to come, stay, and go on its own time. Breathe in for 5 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, and slowly breathe out for 8 seconds. The goal is not to get to “0% bad feelings”, rather it’s to regulate difficult feelings to a realistic level where we are more able to get back to doing things that serve our values and goals.⏩ Focus on the outcome of completing a task:
• Consider how you might feel when you complete a task, especially when it moves you closer to your personal values and goals. Do not just get caught up in zooming in on how “awful” it is in this moment.
• Avoid letting your mind over-estimate how difficult a task will be; at the same time, avoiding letting your mind underestimate just how much better you will feel or how much this will actually help you.🧖🏻 Create a distraction-free space to complete tasks:
• Keep the space clean, tidy, and organized (avoid clutter, unnecessary screens).
• Keep what you need to complete the task in front of you.
• If phones or devices are the primary distraction, either put them away or move them further away (including charging docks/stands that station the device where you ned to focus) or at least use Focus Modes or Do Not Disturb Mode.😅 Know your avoidant/procrastination behaviors:
• While these are typically associated with mindless unproductive behaviors, we can often fool ourselves through more socially acceptable behavior or behaviors that are very productive and aligned with values in a different situation/context
• “Going for an hour walk, donating to charity, volunteering” = GREAT for health, mental health, and community… TERRIBLE when I have an important project due in 2 hours!
• “Typing up my exercise plan, buying clothes for the gym, looking up healthy recipes” = GREAT for planning and preparation… TERRIBLE when I swore I would start being more active again 8 months ago!📋 Have a plan for distractions:
• Identify and list your common distractions
• For each distraction, write a plan for what you will do instead when you notice the distraction
• Use and practice grounding to stay aware, focused, and committed to the objective or task! While your mind might give you the thought that this “extra work” will only take away from you doing the task, this is the 10% that makes the rest of the 90% so much more effective. Being distracted is literally the lack of awareness of where our attention has wandered off to. Recognizing that we have wandered off is how we start to get refocused. This skill can be strengthened with regular practice.😬 Reward yourself for completing tasks:
• An effective reward is something that you don’t have often or regularly.
• Caution around rewards that move you away from your values, goals, and needs (e.g., over-consumption or spending = temporary pleasure, long-term problems and suffering).
• AVOID giving yourself reward or break if you have not done a reasonable but effortful amount of work.
Feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or distracted about what you should be doing? Get back to the basics of grounding before you keep trying to force yourself to be productive (pretty much guarantees more anxiety > more procrastination > more anxiety > more procrastination).