The Cycle of Procrastination, Grind, and Burnout
We’ve all faced burnout on some level before, let’s be honest. When we have a goal in mind, it’s common to get trapped in a vicious cycle of procrastination, grind, and burnout. Typically, we’ll start off energized by this new goal or project in mind. But we end up procrastinating because of intimidating nature of work and so we take a break before even getting started. With the deadline impeding, we then feel behind and feel like we need to make up for lost time and grind. All around us, we’re told to power through. After grinding through and overextending ourselves, we get tired again and boom: burnout. It’s a nonstop cycle of feeling shitty 24/7.
Most recently, I set out a goal to write and finish my e-book. I was so excited to share all my learnings and create something that will help out a large audience. The task however seemed so daunting, I avoided working on it completely the first month. Come February I felt so behind, I decided to focus and write non-stop for 2 days in a row. I powered through and spent every waking minute of it but burned out to the point of exhaustion. My brain just shut down and I was back in that cycle of pushing the task off again.
Same thing happened as I was training for the marathon this year. I started strong and built up momentum as well as consistency throughout the weeks. With the non-stop travels, I began to lose my momentum and my drive to continue training. Now I’m back trying to catch-up for the time missed and pushing myself to the point of exhaustion. This time, I was physically burning myself out.
What if we were to think about our goals in a different way? What if we instead of completing our goals as soon as possible and forcing a burn out, we took our time to achieve them? I know this may sound counter-intuitive but there are always things that happen that are outside of our control.
Take today for example, I had intended to finish editing my e-book yet I woke up receiving an email from Airbnb that my property has been unlisted. That unexpected event put a dampener on my plans and it took me the next 2.5 hours to work through the issue. Life has a way of coming in the way of our goals, progress, and intentions.
My suggestion is this: what if we were to set limits to our goals on a daily basis? Not just minimum limits but also upper limits. For example:
Goal | Lower Limit | Upper Limit
Train for a marathon | Run a min of 1 mile | Run a maximum of 8 miles
Write an e-book | Write a min of 2 pages | Write a max of 10 pages
Waking up early | Wake up before 8am | Wake up at 6am
I’ve been experimenting with this method for the last week and it’s honestly been a life changer in terms of how I look at my progress. I used to put so much pressure on myself in terms of reaching my max limit that I never took a moment to understand and appreciate putting it even the least amount of effort that still makes progress. The trick is to have a low enough bound on your goals that still keeps us motivated and shows progress.
Let me know if you end up trying this out and how it’s helped you out!