When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.

If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.

Planning and preparation are useful until they become a form of procrastination.

Is this task enhancing my actions or substituting for them?

Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.

The difference between motion and action.

Motion:

-talk to a personal trainer<br/>-research your book idea<br/>-explore different types of meditation

Action:

-do 10 squats<br/>-write 1 sentence<br/>-meditate for 1 minute

Motion feels like progress. Action is progress.

Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.

The important thing to remember about procrastination is that the perception of difficulty can be just as important as the actual difficulty. In addition, every day you don’t do the task, it grows in your head, which makes the task seem more and more difficult.

Procrastination makes easy things hard and hard things harder.

Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed. Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work.

procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday

It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.” I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action.

To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now).