Overcoming Overwhelm - The Procrastination Playbook

For the past few months I’ve been doing a deep dive into Procrastination, trying to find the cognitive strategies that people who have no trouble with procrastination use to overcome their procrastination.
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This deep dive has involved:

• Introspecting on my own cognitive strategies’

• Reading the self help literature and mining cognitive strategies

• Scouring the scientific literature for reviews and meta studies related to overcoming procrastination, and mining the cognitive strategies.

• Interviewing people who have trouble with procrastination, and people who have overcome it, and modelling their cognitive strategies.

I then took these ~18 cognitive strategies, split them into 7 lessons, and spent ~50 hours taking people individually through the lessons and seeing what worked, what didn’t and what was missing.

This resulted in me doing another round of research, adding a whole new set of cognitive strategies, (for a grand total of 25 cognitive strategies taught over the course of 10 lessons) and testing for another round of ~50 hours to again test these cognitive strategies with 1-on-1 lessons to see what worked for people.

This resulted in the Procrastination playbook, a full accounting of these 25 strategies along with a course designed to make them automatic parts of who you are. 

The first of these 10 lessons is here, and details how to overcome overwhelm, and next action ambiguity.