Hey, friends. Here’s the video version of a free post I made today about procrastination.

Maybe you were a crammer in school. Or you finished your papers with just minutes to spare before they were due. I understand the satisfaction of finishing a project at the last moment, of leveraging the drive of urgency to finally at long last get the darn thing done. I’ve been there.

Your life will improve if you find ways to stop procrastinating. It’s so much more effective, productive, and satisfying to just the things you have to do.

There are countless books and features about the habits of highly effective CEOs. They wake up early, or they work out, they delegate, whatever.

The most effective people you know are effective because… they’re effective.

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Quick sidebar: I’m a Peloton guy. There’s a Peloton instructor who talks about how people always ask her how they can go faster on the bike. And her advice is, the only way to go faster is to go faster. Because the trick is, you can already go faster, it just sucks at first until you get good at it. You have to force yourself to go faster, for increasing amounts of time, to make going faster suck less.

If you’re a habitual procrastinator, you won’t necessarily kick the habit in one day. But you can do better, almost immediately, if you make the decision to get more done sooner.

I’m not getting into the added stress or weight on your mind or mental anguish of delaying work you know you have to do; if you’re living with it already, you know that pain. I’d like to convince you that retraining yourself isn’t nearly as hard as you think.

There are many reasons why people procrastinate. Ignore why you do it. Instead, figure out how easy you can make it to dive in and actually start doing the work. For me, that means knowing exactly what I need to do. (If there’s a lot to do, just pick one thing.)

I put the work that must be done on my calendar. It’s so easy to fill up your day with meetings, and then in-between meetings to get lost in your inbox, or to dive into any task, even if it’s not the important one.

Put the important task on your calendar. As I write this, today’s calendar included several hours of meetings, but also a 30-minute block to send out a contract, a 60-minute block to get work done for a client, a 45-minute block to write and record a silly song about my name, and 30 minutes to write and publish this very post.

I know myself. I know that sometimes when Current Lex sees calendar assignments left by Past Lex, it’s possible to ignore them. So I also play mind games with myself: I can’t eat lunch until I get the contract out. I can’t listen to music until I finish this post. I will only start dealing with my swelling inbox after I get the client work done.

Setting personal deadlines — embracing a mentality like I’ve only carved out this block of time to do this work, and the rest of my calendar is spoken for — can perhaps recreate the feeling of urgency that drives last-minute procrastination. But it does so without nearly the same level of stress. It’s so wonderfully nice to get things done and cross them off your list. Lightening your mental load is a gift.

The trick to stop procrastinating is to force yourself do to the work. It sounds obvious — because it is obvious. Set yourself up so it’s easier to do by knowing what’s important and giving yourself time to do it. Your future self will thank you.