1.Roadmen, today I want to talk about something that haunts almost…

Roadmen, today I want to talk about something that haunts almost every one of us. Procrastination and how to overcome it. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another Roadman Cycling Podcast. Today I want to talk to you about the topic of procrastination. Actually, you know what, maybe I'll leave it to later on. That was just such a bad procrastination joke. Roadman, as you know, if you're a regular listener, this podcast comes out every single day and you probably assume that I'm this super organized and from a big part I am this super organized action taker but honestly I struggle with procrastination at times exactly the same way you do. So today I want to talk about three very tangible strategies to defeat this old enemy. Before I jump into that let me give you a gentle slash not so gentle prod to head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch. Guys, I'm going to keep beating the patreon drum because I've been here before I've mentioned in the past the A1 show we used to have we'd hundreds of thousands of viewers every month on the A1 show and it seemed like it was going to be around forever and it wasn't around forever because we failed to monetize it we failed to make it sustainable and so when the new shiny object came along it invariably undermined and derailed the A1 show never to be resurrected. So I just don't want the same to happen with this podcast. I wanted to reach that level of financial sustainability as early as possible so I can guarantee I'm going to keep bringing you these amazing guests and I'm going to keep hitting the research hard and bringing you these cool topics that I know makes such a difference to me when I'm researching topics and hopefully such a difference to you when you're listening to them. So the link is in the bio for that. If you've already subscribed and Patreon, please pass it on and encourage friends that listen to the podcast to subscribe. I know I had one touching message on Instagram where guys already subscribed to Patreon and he said he sent it out to his buddies in a cycling club, giving them a gentle prod to subscribe because he knows they all listen. So do the same. Guys I'm not going to lie, this podcast is on procrastination. It was literally been hanging over me all day. I recorded the podcast. Typically I try and get them out to you guys at 6am on a Tuesday, so I recorded on a Monday and it's been hanging over me all day and it initially was meant to be a different topic but what happened was I went out for a walk because I just couldn't get going with this podcast. I went out for a walk and I just thought about why am I procrastinating? What are the reasons I procrastinating? And as I walked with the dog, it became clearer in my head that, you know what, if I'm struggling with procrastinating, right now I'm having this internal dialogue. As to why I'm procrastinating, and I'm talking in my head about strategies to overcome this, this is something I need to share. This trumps what I was going to do. This trumps the podcast on different cycling sessions because we can do that again. But this podcast, because you could be procrastinating about training right now, you could be procrastinating about a work project, a family project right now, and all of that, cycling, it's a game where we need to, we need to carve out time for cycling. And we need to be little time ninjas. We need to figure out slots of time. There are 60 minutes I can try and there. There's two hours I can try and there moving around the work family and social pieces. So when you procrastinate in one area, it has bleed over into other areas of your life, meaning we're going to end up skipping training because invariably if you're meant to do something home, if you're meant to do something in work, you're going to get an external pressure, comment, get that stuff done, and cycling will often get squeezed out. So I know for many clients and for me for a long time, that's the case. And stuff like this podcast bleeds over for me. So you're going to have, when you're procrastinating, like me today, you're going to have this list. So I had, my main thing to get done today was a podcast. And so when I look at my to-do list, My to do list was record a podcast. Now I know when I've been in a pinch, when I've been traveling away, where I've had some family stuff come up, that I've batched a bunch of podcasts in one day. I've recorded four or five episodes in the past in a single day. So I know that I am more than capable of recording one single episode in one day.

2.Isn't a super challenging task for me

This isn't a super challenging task for me. And that in itself causes a lot of problems which I'm gonna get into in a minute. But what actually ends up happening is other non-important items jump up the list and make their way onto your to-do list. I'll give you an example. Today, the only thing I want to do list was to clean record this podcast, but yes, I ended up cleaning my bike. I cleaned my bike two days ago and had been dry every day since. I didn't need to clean my bike, but now my bike is immaculate. My bookshelf is way more organized than it was this morning and there was no need for my my bookshelf to be organized. I've even added filters into my inbox because I got an email in and I was like, ah, that's weird. That should have been in my marketing folder. Why is that come straight into my inbox? So I went about recategorizing, relabeling and setting up filters for all my stuff in my inbox. None of this stuff needed to get done. This all got done because I procrastinate on the podcast. So today's podcast, I'm going to give you three strategies for overcoming this procrastination. The biggest and most pressing need to overcome procrastination is it's like a teeth, it steals joy from those other moments in your life. I had last week as the guest interview, I had Lauren's 10th down, it's a brilliant episode if you haven't listened, go back and listen to it, it's class, it's one of my favorite guest interviews that I've done. But Lauren's has this concept of live slow, ride fast and The idea would live slow when you're not on the bike, that everything becomes quite purposeful and mindful. Like if you're making a coffee, you're not just walking in the espresso, you're taking time to appreciate where the beans have come from. You're taking time to grind out the coffee, you're taking time to appreciate the taste, the person who picked the coffee, the person who packed it, how it got to your table. The same with food when you're cooking, you're not just bugging stuff in the microwave, you're cooking with an appreciation of where the food came from and now it's nourishing you and it's nourishing your family and this whole concept of live slow, this can't be achieved with procrastination. And the more I talked about this today, I had basically an empty day, well, you know, cleaning bikes, organizing shelves and inboxes, basically an empty day. But I did not enjoy it because at the back of my head at every moment, I had this nagging voice gone, you should be on the podcast, you should be researching the podcast, you should be starting to take notes for the podcast, You should be recording, you should be editing it, you should be doing the artwork, you should be figuring out your intro outro. I could not enjoy one moment of my day because it is nagging voice and then the harsher critic the nagging voice is like you're a failure. You know, the the daily podcast is never going to happen. Like it's too ambitious. Why don't you roll back to once a week and you end up having, I almost describe it as like a schizophrenic dialogue on myself and the only way I can describe this is I've spoken on a podcast I have a daily call shower every morning. Actually I probably have a two or three times a day but every morning I wake up and I have a call shower and every morning did I go to have a call shower. This voice in my head speaks to me. These could be the ramblings of a psychotic madman by the way here like maybe you're listening to this and all I don't identify with this at all. You're You're the complete lunatic, but I'm putting myself out here and I'm being vulnerable and I'm exposing myself potentially as a psychotic lunatic. Now I hear cars screeching outside. That could be the men in the white coat coming to section me. You never hear about people being sectioned anymore, but that was a big thing back in the day. Okay, my rant is taking me in a different direction there, but this schizophrenic dialogue that I have every morning when I say to myself, okay, call, share our time. of this other voice and it goes, nah you shouldn't have a cold shower today, but don't worry about it today. Look, it's cold outside, you're going, you're doing a long endurance ride, the last thing you need is to be cold, going out into an endurance ride, you can pick up an infection. And then my head goes, no, you're doing a cold shower. And I have this dialogue back and forth, one voice telling me, the main voice I should be listening to saying, no, you need to do a cold shower, you do a cold shower every morning, it's time to get into the cold shower. And the other voice giving me these reasons as to why I shouldn't do the cold shower. This same schizophrenic dialogue happens to me around procrastination where I know I need to record a podcast episode but somehow this other voice gets control and it's like, maybe you should clean your bike.

3.That's important right now. Clean your bike

Yeah, that's important right now. Clean your bike. It's not important but I listen to it. So here's how you defeat the crazy schizophrenic voice in your head. The first way to do it is to understand that at the opposite side of procrastination, after What is the polar opposite? It's flow. And we all understand flow, maybe not the actual word flow, but we've all been in flow at times. Flow is the at least who effortlessly runs the marathon while thinking it's only took a minute or two of time when in fact it's been hours. It's when you're having a game of snooker and you don't remember anything else only that game. When you're on the bike and it's the only thing that's important is that climb your bread. It could be a work project when you've immersed yourself into an hour's take pass like minutes or when you're at the dinner table with loved ones and you're laughing and you're drinking wine and you're chatting and hours go by and you're like oh my god is that the time I can't believe it that's flow this state where nothing else matters it's a state of pure focus flow follows focus and if you think about we have this continuum and on one end of the continuum we have boredom and at the other end of the the continuum we have overwhelm. So in order for us to find focus, we need to position ourselves slightly at the overwhelm end of the continuum, but not so overwhelmed or not so difficult a task that we just get completely bombarded and overwhelmed and refuse to do it. So if a task is to explain this another way, if a task is too easy, if it's too boring, human often is on the left of the continuum, we won't do it because we go, ah, it's too boring. I can't bring myself to do it. If the task is too difficult at the far end of the continuum, we just don't know where to get started and it's too overwhelming to get started. So we need to get tasks that stretch us without boring us, without overwhelm us. They're kind of right in the middle, but slightly to the right of that continuum. If difficult to explain this in an audio form, I could show this in a really easily in a YouTube video with like a line and another line to the right of center. But we need to frame a challenge in a way where it's not boring and it's not overwhelming because this is gonna push us into that flow state because it's gonna keep us focused. So focus, flow follows focus. The second way that we can overcome this procrastination enemy as I like to call it is add things to the to-do list that build the urgency. So for me, if I put on my to-do list for today, podcast, and that's my to-do list, which it was for today. Now other shit gets put on the list by that schizophrenic voice and it's like yeah clean the shelves, clean your bike, whatever that other crap is. But if I put on my to do list for today, podcast and then a bunch of other stuff that I know is important for me to get to that goal like record a new outro for the podcast. We're starting to push this new eight week challenge which is absolutely amazing by the way. You'll hear it at the outro today's podcast. outro, research the podcast topic, edit the podcast topic, upload the podcast topic, create the artwork for the podcast topic. All of a sudden, now you're looking and going, okay, well, I have four errors or five errors available to get these tasks done. Now, there's four or five hours work in this. And all of a sudden, the task just about or exceeds a lot of time for it. So you have to focus, you have to get the head down. Do you remember that old saying that a task will expand to the amount of time you allocated a task. And this is the reason why sometimes in college you get a project and you leave it till two days before the deadline. Because in your heart of heart you know this is a two day project. If I hustle this is a two day project. So you leave it right until the end and the procrastination is all the shit that you put in before it. But the problem with that is we don't mindfully back to the live slow. We don't mindfully enjoy that stuff because it's not a guilt-free rest period because we're thinking, oh, we should really start this because what if it's more difficult than I taught? So by adding extra things into your to-do list to pack out that sort of, you know, window of availability, that's going to create an urgency which is going to get you taken action. Like, do you remember the saying if you want something done, ask a busy man and I first heard this same when I was racing full time in France and I would literally have all day on a rest day to just get my laundry done and it'd be nine o'clock at night on a Monday and I still hadn't got my laundry for the week done and I'd be like what the hell I literally had a 30 minute task to accomplish in 12 hours but back to our point one on that continuum it's too far to the left it's too boring it's too easy it's too monotonous so it this actually takes both point A and point B You see the way I just went from using 1.1 to AVC.

4.We're just fluid like that on this show

We're just fluid like that on this show. We just keep it fresh. So the first point was it's boring and that's what I didn't do it. And then secondly, it's the to-do list. All I had to do on that day was do washing. There's no urgency built into that. So the last bit, it's just it's breaking tasks down, I think, is super important. super important. So if you take a task like building a website and I just add in build a website that actually goes to the far side of my continuum that's too overwhelming. So if you break tasks down into constituent parts where it's like source images for the website, create paragraph for introduction on the website, write headlines for page one of the website. All of a sudden this starts becoming super, super tangible. And now we can go, okay, all these points are kind of building on each other because this point of breaking tasks down into their constituent components when they're too complex goes back to that continuum I described in point one where if something is too hard, if it's too challenging, we just get overwhelmed. When we break stuff down into parts, we avoid that overwhelm and it also gives us that urgency because now building a website. I think JK Rowling has some cool saying and it's it's basically I'm gonna have to paraphrase this because I don't have it in front of me But it's the idea that the longest task the longer a task takes longest to accomplish because it has never been started and That's end up that's what ends up happening with this stuff like my podcast ends up becoming this huge task Because I just never got it started and when we have a task like build a website That becomes this monumentous task because we don't break it down and because we don't break it down We don't get it started Guys I went around in circles a lot in this procrastination Podcast today, but some of the stuff on it really really helps me and I know it helped me today to get this podcast done and When I went there walking the dog I was reflecting on this stuff and it's stuff that I previously Used before with a lot of success and I do journal and I have to just travel back to some of my journals and said, okay, here's a point in my life where I was really procrastinating. Let's have a look at what I was writing. Let's have a look at the steps that I used to overcome procrastination. And it was understanding that continuum from boredom to overwhelm really helped me a lot. And then the idea of urgency, adding extra things into the to the list and then breaking down the complex tasks. All of that really, really helped me, roadman. So I hope it helps you. If you have stuff on the long finger like subscribing to the patreon I'll give you that gentle nudge once more to go and do that and roadmen enjoy your day and I'll chat to you again tomorrow. Okay stop what you're doing it's Anthony again I want to talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey I'm laying down a challenge for you it's called the eight-week challenge so for eight weeks I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself whatever that is. For eight weeks I want to take you under my wing and I want to personally build for you customize training plan on our analytics platform. This plan is going to be laser focused on your goal and I'm going to navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments so don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling and I went off and taught I was a really big businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted get into cycling but I knew after a bit to try it on a loan it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system it needs a 360 overhaul. So for the first time ever I want to share with you this exact system I use to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like I'm gonna give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I use, the cookbooks and recipes I used and even the motivational audio's by listening to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is this video, go to www.roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time, it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty also.