Podcasts · Tales From The Lane
Episode 136: Productive Procrastination: Are You Using Productivity to Avoid the Hard Stuff?
· 41 min · S3 E136
Episode Episode 136: Productive Procrastination: Are You Using Productivity to Avoid the Hard Stuff?
What if your productivity is actually keeping you stuck?
You're busy all day. You're checking things off your to-do list, completing projects, organizing your life, and getting things done.
But when you look at the goals that matter most to you, you're barely making progress.
Sound familiar?
In this episode of Tales from The Lane, I'm exploring a particularly sneaky form of procrastination: using productive, worthwhile tasks to avoid the work that feels uncertain, uncomfortable, or challenging.
The conversation was inspired by a coaching client who was making tremendous progress on projects around her house while struggling to find time for her business-growth goals and exercise routine. And it raised an interesting question: Was she simply prioritizing her home, or was some of that productivity also a way of avoiding the work that carried more uncertainty and risk?
Drawing on Steven Pressfield's concept of Resistance from The War of Art, we'll look at why accomplished people often gravitate toward familiar, low-risk tasks, and how to recognize when busyness has become an avoidance strategy.
Then I'll share five practical ways to make progress when you're juggling several important areas of your life.
In this episode:
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What resistance is and why it appears when we're pursuing meaningful goals
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How procrastination can disguise itself as preparation, research, organizing, and productivity
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Why easy tasks feel so rewarding, even when they aren't our highest priorities
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The difference between completing tasks and making meaningful progress
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How to gamify your goals so no important area of your life gets neglected
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Why tackling your highest-resistance task first can change your entire day
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How to use accountability to improve follow-through
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When to focus on one project at a time instead of juggling several
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How to make intimidating projects smaller and easier to begin
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The question to ask when you keep avoiding something important
This week's challenge: Identify one goal you've been neglecting. Ask yourself what you're actually resisting, then choose one strategy from this episode and put it into practice.
Because there's a difference between ending the day feeling productive and ending the day knowing you've made progress on something that matters.
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