Procrastination Tips That Don’t Work For Perfectionists Leave a comment
Procrastination is a topic that’s close to home for many perfectionists. If you’ve tried following procrastination tips to help you stop procrastinating – and they haven’t worked – this episode is for you.
In this episode, I’m sharing 3 common procrastination tips that don’t work for perfectionists, why they don’t work and what to do instead. If you’re a perfectionist building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.
READY FOR MORE?
If you’re tired of procrastinating on important tasks and projects, sign up for my free 3-part planning series for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’ll teach you how to plan properly as a perfectionist with Power Planning so you can finally follow through with your plans – even when you don’t feel motivated. Get instant access now at samlaurabrown.com/planningseries.
Perfectionists Getting Shit Done is opening for one week on 8 April 2026. If you’re ready for coaching, accountability and support to help you take consistent action and grow your business – join the waitlist for PGSD at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.
I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.
Sam Laura Brown – Custom Introduction
Okay, so I really wanted to share today’s episode with you because when it comes to procrastination, which is one of the core things that we support perfectionist entrepreneurs with inside PGSD, when it comes to procrastination, we can just feel so bad. We could just feel so frustrated, exasperated with ourselves. We can feel ashamed that we’re procrastinating when we know what to do and we know deep down that we are the person who’s capable of doing it.
But because of perfectionist thinking, we don’t do the things and then we feel bad that we don’t do the things and then we beat ourselves up for not doing the things and it can just get really, really painful. So what I want to do for this episode, what I wanted to share is why the advice about how to stop procrastinating, why that doesn’t work for perfectionists. And specifically in this episode, I’m sharing an episode that talks about three tips that don’t work for perfectionists.
And this is an episode that I recorded quite a while ago, as in years ago, and I just listened back to it and it’s still all relevant. And so I just wanted to share it because I have been talking to so many of you that are struggling with procrastination on, there’s a project you want to get done so you can actually build your business and it just feels massive. You feel like you’ve lost your passion for it, your desire to do it.
It’s just become such a big deal in your mind that it feels overwhelming and you hate that you’re putting it off and it’s just constantly in your brain, in your mental load that you want to do that thing but you’re not doing it, you want to do it but you’re not doing it. And so I want to share with you about why, as a perfectionist, a lot of the advice that is out there about how to stop procrastination, it doesn’t work for a perfectionist and it’s just not practical. It doesn’t get to the actual root of why we procrastinate.
And so there’s lots of band-aid fixes and surface level things that can help temporarily but long term, if you want to be the kind of person who can show up and do things when you said you’d do them for yourself, even when there’s no deadline, even when there’s no one else involved, a lot of us perfectionists, we have a fear of letting others down that has us be able to follow through on things for other people but then when it’s ourselves, unless there’s a hard deadline, we just don’t do it at all. That is, if that is you, you are who we support inside PGSD and this episode is going to help you to really understand why you might still be procrastinating even though you’ve been trying really hard not to be a procrastinator. So stay tuned for this episode and I want to mention a couple things.
Number one, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done is opening for enrollment on Wednesday the 8th of April, that’s just a couple of days away and will be open for one week only. So if you have been procrastinating and you are just sick and tired of procrastinating on the things you know that will build your business, I want to invite you inside PGSE. You want to be inside PGSD because we are experts in taking procrastinators and turning procrastinators into people who are showing up, following through with their plans, being on top of things, being in control of how they’re using their time and what gets done and this is partly because that was me.
I had to have that transformation myself. I was a chronic procrastinator and my business suffered because of it and it was all due to the perfectionist thinking and when I had practical tools to help that like power planning, I was able to grow my business and get it to where it is today. So I want to invite you inside and I just mentioned about power planning, I want to invite you today now to be able to sign up for something free that will be able to help you with this.
So I have a three-part video series that you can get instant access to that will help you get started with power planning today. Power planning is a very simple, very effective three-step planning method that I developed because I had all these struggles with procrastination and I needed to figure out how to get myself to actually follow through on the things that I otherwise would procrastinate on because I knew I was smart, I had potential but I wasn’t actually doing the things I knew I needed to do. So I needed not just concepts and ideas like I really needed a practical tool to help me organize my time in a way that I could actually follow through on and to help me break down big projects into something tangible and that didn’t feel like such a big deal and to help release that pressure and to give me time off so my brain could have a break and then I didn’t have to burn out all the time, I used to burn out all the time, I’d procrastinate until the last minute, put in a big effort and then burn out and I don’t do that anymore and power planning is a massive reason why.
So I want to invite you to sign up today for the planning series so you can get started with power planning. So if you go to samlaurabrown.com/planningseries, I will leave the link for you below in the show notes but if you go there enter your name and email address and you will get instant access to the three-part video series where I teach you what power planning is, why it works and how to get started. So I hope you enjoy that planning series, go and sign up and it’s going to be so helpful and I hope you enjoy today’s episode.
Sam Laura Brown
Hi and welcome to episode 161 of the Perfectionism Project. My name is Sam Laura Brown and I’m here to help you beat procrastination, overcome perfectionism and become your best self. Today I want to talk to you about three procrastination tips that don’t work for perfectionists.
There’s obviously a lot of advice out there on how to beat procrastination and I have found when I’ve been taking some of this advice myself or seeing others apply it that it doesn’t actually help to create long-term change. And I’ve spoken about how to actually beat procrastination on other podcast episodes and we really dive deep into it in our membership community, perfectionists getting shit done. But today I just want to point out to you some of the advice that you might hear a lot about how to stop procrastination and why, in my opinion, that advice doesn’t actually work.
It doesn’t actually help you beat that habit for the long term and I’m really interested in helping you create long-term sustainable change rather than having you beat procrastination for a couple of days and then finding yourself right back in that habit. So the first procrastination tip I want to talk about is blocking the internet and deleting social media apps. These are things you can do just because you want to but if it’s a procrastination strategy, you’re trying to stop procrastinating by doing these things and I don’t think it’s actually the most powerful place to focus because when you are blocking the internet and deleting social media apps, it just helps you manage your urge to procrastinate but it doesn’t actually help you to eliminate that urge altogether.
Which means that if you are deleting the apps so that you don’t go on them, then you are going to continue having that urge to go on them most likely and so it means the next time you do have that opportunity, you are going to want to go on it. You will still have those urges coming up and because you’re not really processing them properly, you are going to find yourself just going back into the old habits that you have had with social media browsing and with internet browsing and I’ve spoken about this at different times on the podcast because I have tried doing this and I have also used, there’s an app you can get called Forest on your phone. I think that’s what it’s called where it basically grows a digital tree on your phone screen while the timer is running so you can set it for say two hours and this stops you from looking at anything else on your phone because if you close that app to go and look at anything else, your tree will die.
And so it’s just like a little motivator to not pick up your phone and mindlessly look through things and it can be helpful and it can be a supporting strategy but I’ve actually found when it comes to beating procrastination, what’s worked much better for me has been to not delete the apps and to not use an app like Forest or any of those other internet blocking apps.
I think part of the reason this is the case is because when you have those apps installed or when you need to delete social media apps from your phone, that is reinforcing your identity around being a procrastinator because if someone isn’t a procrastinator, they don’t need to do those things but if you are doing those things, it’s kind of saying to yourself, I’m a procrastinator and I can’t control myself. The only way I can control myself is if it’s physically impossible to go and do the thing that I want to do but in terms of the urge to procrastinate, it’s really important to be aware that you will continue to have the urge to procrastinate after you have, after you’re focusing on your work, while you’re doing your work, that urge to procrastinate will come up because your brain is used to you answering that urge so it will keep providing that urge to you so that you can do something to avoid the discomfort that you normally procrastinate to avoid.
I think this is something that isn’t talked about often enough that focusing on your work and beating procrastination doesn’t actually feel good because you need to deal with feeling restless and feeling bored and feeling challenged and feeling vulnerable because we procrastinate so we can avoid all of those uncomfortable feelings and ironically enough, we feel a lot of negative emotion from the act of procrastinating itself, guilt and stress and overwhelm from procrastination so it’s not like it feels worse to stop procrastinating but it’s a flavour of negative emotion and to actually beat procrastination you need to learn how that urge will come up and to not resist it and not react to it as in actually act on the urge but to just let it be there, let it be okay that it’s there and it’s like basically inviting that urge in being like okay you can be here but I’m just not going to be giving you much attention instead of no don’t come in don’t come in don’t come in don’t come in which is how we usually deal with the urges that we don’t want to feel like if you think about you wanting to maybe eat something and then you have an urge to go and eat it often we just resist that no I’m not going to eat it like we try and really resist it and what we resist persist but if you can let that urge be there that urge to procrastinate let it be okay that your brain is telling you go and scroll through instagram, go and look in the fridge, go and do all these other things, go and do basically anything else you can that’s not this then the more you actually invite that urge to be there the less power it will have over you and eventually that urge to procrastinate will begin to go away because your brain will learn hey she doesn’t actually react to this so there’s no point doing it.
I like to think of this in a sense of growing up with brothers they were really pestering me I’m sure I pestered a lot too but whenever they were if I reacted they loved it and they kept doing it more and more but if I just kept my cool I let them pester me but I didn’t react to it eventually it got really boring for them and so I really think it’s the same with an urge that if you can let it happen without reacting to it without believing it shouldn’t be happening just being like okay that’s there but I’m just going to let myself feel really shitty and continue what I’m doing that’s when that urge to procrastinate will begin to diminish and you won’t need to even have any of the blocking internet apps or anything like that.
So I think that advice is given with good intentions but it’s kind of just like putting a band-aid over the actual issue which is that you’re not willing to feel negative emotion and so often what will happen if someone is deleting their apps or blocking the internet to stop them from procrastinating usually they’ll find after a couple of days they’ll either find a way back onto the internet or they would just give up on it completely but you will probably find another way to procrastinate and to avoid your emotions and often for perfectionists that will be busy work we love feeling productive without having to feel vulnerable so often we do things that don’t really need to be done but we can justify doing them and that way we get to be in that productivity zone without having to feel really uncomfortable.
So just be aware that if you are deleting apps for the purpose of stopping procrastination then it’s very likely you will begin to procrastinate in some other way it will probably just be a bit more subtle so yes don’t go on the internet and don’t go on any social media if you don’t want to but in terms of a strategy to beat procrastination I don’t recommend blocking the internet and deleting the social media apps and I know that this is kind of like with healthy eating and people will say just get all of the food you don’t want to eat out of the house but for some people this works and it will work on a more temporary basis because then when they go out to dinner they’re like oh my god I just have to go and eat everything but if you can learn to be in the house with that other food and to have control of yourself enough to not eat it that’s so much more powerful it’s kind of this balance of like yes you want to set up your environment for success but at the same time you don’t want to create this identity that you don’t have any control over yourself and that the only way you can control yourself is if your environment is perfect because most times in our life our environment will not be perfect.
So if you can really train yourself to act the way you want to act even when you’re not in a perfect circumstance there really is nothing more empowering than that and it’s a skill to learn and it takes practice to do that so it’s really important that you’re not expecting to go straight there to where you can control everything that you do I think it’s a lifelong journey but I find personally for me at least that that approach has actually helped me beat procrastination way more than when I was blocking apps or deleting apps and wanting to manage my urge to procrastinate instead of actually learning how to sit with that uncomfortable feeling and also changing my identity around being a procrastinator and as I said that when you are deleting those apps and doing all of that that you are really perpetuating that identity that you can’t control yourself and that you are a procrastinator.
And I talked about this on a recent episode called once a procrastinator always a procrastinator so if you really see yourself as someone who is a procrastinator you have an identity around that’s who you are then I highly recommend checking out that episode but in far as a alternative goes I would recommend using a distractions list this is where you create a list of all of the things you want to distract yourself with as it happens so I often do this while I’m working though I find actually I don’t need to do it as much anymore but I would have next to me especially when I started doing this my journal with a pen and every time I wanted to do something that wasn’t what I had planned to do I would write down what it was and often it was things that didn’t need to be done like going and looking in the fridge or checking instagram or checking my email.
So I would just write it down and that meant as well that it helped to eliminate the excuse of oh well I have to do this right now or I’ll forget later I would write it all out and then later when the time came I’d be like okay I have this period of time where if anything was on my distractions list that I actually need to do I’m gonna do it now 99 times out of 100 I don’t need to do anything on that list because as soon as it’s allowed to do those things then they’re not appealing anymore a lot of the things that we use to procrastinate are no longer appealing when we give ourselves full permission to do those things guilt-free so now typically what I do is I really only keep track of those things that I’m like oh I need to go do that and I don’t want to forget that I need to do that.
So I’m not writing down or check instagram because a lot of those urges have completely gone but it’s really interesting I find that if I then am checking my phone more often if there’s something urgent that’s going on in the business then that habit and those urges come back so quickly and social media is designed to be like a slot machine like a pokies machine that it’s our brain is wanting to be on there and it’s quote-unquote addictive in the sense that our brain just loves it so much.
So I have noticed that I have been able to completely eliminate all the urges to check instagram and my email and I’ve just been doing those things once in a day but if there’s something going on maybe like a promotion where I need to be checking email more often then I find my brain’s like oh yes we’ve still got this habit there let’s get back into it and then I have to go into a period of being more intentional again but then eventually those urges to check will go away whereas I found when I was just blocking those apps and deleting them that that urge was never really going away because I’d never decided that I was the kind of person who didn’t check on my apps constantly.
So using a distractions list is the alternative to that one and it can just be a really great exercise in self-awareness and it helps to eliminate that excuse of I have to do this now or I’ll forget about it and just be aware of yourself if you are deleting social media apps if you then find yourself procrastinating in a different way and it might be a lot more sneaky and subtle but if you are not doing the needle movers then that really is productive procrastination, the second procrastination tip that I want to talk about is changing your environment.
So this is actually a quote that I found on a well-known website that was giving this advice and this is basically just a summary of some of the advice I had about changing your environment as a strategy to beat procrastination they said different environments have a different impact on our productivity so if you’re procrastinating you should look into changing your workspace one thing to note is that an environment that makes us feel inspired may lose its effect after a period of time if that’s the case then it’s time to change things around I definitely believe this at some point and I actually talked about this quite a bit in episode 160 on how to be more productive when working from home because I definitely believed that changing my environment was a strategy to beat procrastination that worked but what really happens is that we think differently when our environment changes and I just thought it was so interesting that they said change your environment but that new environment the impacts of that will wear off.
It’s not like it wears off the only thing that changes is the way that we’re thinking when we move into a new environment a lot of us will have really aspirational thoughts like I’m going to be so productive and like this is a new me this is a new beginning and when it’s got that novelty to it whereas over time the novelty begins to disappear and we think about things differently we tend to then go back into our normal thought pattern and then this article was saying okay change your environment again to get yourself into that desired thought pattern but if you can think about okay what thoughts what I think in the new environment and then train yourself to think those thoughts in your current environment that really is where the power lies because this kind of advice really teaches us or makes us believe that we’re at effect that our circumstances and surroundings control us which basically means that unless we have a perfect circumstance or surrounding that we’re not going to be able to beat procrastination and actually be productive.
And we’re very helpless when we actually believe that because it’s so challenging to be in a perfect environment that’s always novel and exciting and inspiring so I prefer to change environment simply because I want to not because it will make me more productive or because it will help me stop procrastination so I’m not saying don’t change environment I think it can be a fun thing to do but just make sure you don’t tell yourself that it’s so you can be more productive no you can be more productive wherever you are and you’re changing environment just because you want to.
So really have a think about this one if you have been doing this or believing this and if you have then I highly recommend episode 160 because I go into a whole heap of different things around productivity in that episode but I just find this advice about changing your circumstances to be really disempowering because often you can’t change your circumstances and if you have to change your circumstances to be more productive then you are going to endlessly be trying to change them and you will be endlessly disappointed because you’re bringing your same brain with you it’s the same as when you think oh I’ll be happier when I change jobs it wears off the magic of that new job also wears off because you brought your same brain with you and while you might temporarily have different thoughts in your new environment because there’s that novelty and it’s something new and it also feels like a new beginning beginning after a while your habitual thought patterns will come back and you will if you have the habit of noticing the things you don’t like about your job you will begin finding those things in the new job and then you might think oh well no it really is my boss you should meet my boss it’s it’s just him or her that’s causing the problem or like it’s the colleagues or it’s the office space and it’s just not work I’m inspired about and I’m just going to change jobs and that’ll make me happy.
And the reason we believe this is because as well when we do change situations our thoughts often change but it’s our thoughts that make us feel better not the new situation so it really seems like there’s evidence for okay just change your situation but I think that so many people end up never feeling satisfied in their careers because the power is always out there that they need to find the perfect office space with the perfect colleagues and the perfect boss and the perfect work to do and then they’ll be happy but if you can learn to really enjoy what you’re doing with who you’re with in whatever environment it is that’s where your power is and then you change jobs just because you want to.
I’ve had a lot of people say okay well now I finally learned how to love my job that I used to hate does that mean I should just stay here forever no change because you want to not because you have to or not because it’s going to provide you with happiness it’s the same with deleting social media delete it because you want to not because you have to.
The third tip I want to talk about is one that almost always comes up if you google how to stop procrastinating it will be something along the lines of accept that perfection is unnecessary and I find this advice really interesting and somewhat frustrating because it kind of just goes to this intellectual level of understanding and it’s really important I know you’ve probably had me talk about on the podcast before to recognize that the reason we want things to be perfect isn’t just because we like things being perfect for the sake of it it’s because perfectionism is a strategy to avoid shame and judgment we want everything to be just so so that we don’t have to feel shitty and accepting that perfection is unnecessary usually isn’t going to help because our need to avoid shame is so much stronger and it’s this subconscious need that often we don’t even realize it took me a long time to realize that was why I wanted everything to be perfect and why I procrastinated and overthought everything it was because I was trying to avoid the shame and the judgment and all of that.
So I appreciate that perfectionism is mentioned but at the same time and this is the reason I’m so passionate about the work that I do and I’m so passionate about pgsd our membership community because a lot of advice around perfectionism is super fluffy it’s about just remember nobody’s perfect just accept that perfection isn’t actually possible just remember that it doesn’t matter what other people think like yeah we know it we get it like I think all of us intellectually understand yes we are good enough yes it doesn’t matter what other people think yes perfection is unnecessary and yet we still have that urge to make everything perfect.
So the alternative to this advice is to really acknowledge that the reason you want things to be perfect is about something deeper than just having this belief that you like things being perfect or some people would say I just like being efficient and doing things right the first time or things like that there’s a lot of great excuses that we use for this mindset and for justifying that kind of behavior but I think that this advice has good intentions and it is definitely that perfectionism really makes us procrastinate which a lot of people don’t realize but we want things to be perfect so we can avoid the shame and judgment and blame but because it’s so hard to make something perfect we are always waiting for the perfect time we’re waiting to feel motivated we’re waiting for more confidence we’re waiting for more money we’re always waiting because the standards are so impossibly high that we feel like we’ll never even get close so what’s the point and we go into all nothing mode we overthink everything and so perfectionists really are procrastinators.
But a lot of times procrastinators think oh no I procrastinate way too much to be a perfectionist which is very interesting we just as a society have this view of perfectionism that it’s really just something that you say in a job interview when you’re asked what your weaknesses are and also that it’s just this annoying intellectual issue that we have of believing things could be perfect and if we just really understood that nobody’s perfect then we’d be able to let it go but because it goes much deeper it’s this much more primitive desire to avoid shame we actually need to do a lot of work to rewire the way that we think and to really create a growth mindset I really believe that instead of accepting that perfection is unnecessary the answer to that the best alternative is to create a growth mindset and we dive deep into that in our membership community as well and there’s a whole heap of things we do to create a growth mindset in there but I really want to mention that here that creating a growth mindset really I think is one of the best strategies to beat procrastination.
Because when you have a growth mindset everything is no longer so personal failing a test no longer means something about you and your worth and your intelligence it’s just feedback and as perfectionists we intellectually get that failure is feedback but we don’t live like that’s true because we try everything we can to avoid failure including giving up we give up rather than failing someone in a growth mindset doesn’t they would rather fail than give up because failing gives them information and because that information doesn’t say anything about them personally or their worth they are happy to receive that information and take it on but when we have our identity wrapped up with what we do which is when we’re in the fixed mindset that perfectionist mindset then failure feels like a huge kick in the guts and we would rather just not try so that we never have to be met with any evidence that we’re not good enough because we already believe we’re not good enough we’re already hustling to try and feel good enough if we just achieve that goal then we might finally feel better and it doesn’t work.
So we keep hustling harder and harder and harder if you can relate to that it’s really important to recognize that there’s some deeper work to do and I again think this advice is given with good intention but it’s really about understanding why is it that you want everything to be perfect. What is perfection protecting you from it is just a very ineffective strategy to avoid shame but really thinking about what is it protecting you from and to be able to be procrastination you need to be willing to feel vulnerable if you’re in a growth mindset it won’t feel as vulnerable because what you’re doing isn’t attached to your self-worth but if you’re in a fixed mindset and you’re wanting to stop procrastination you will really need to be willing to feel vulnerable and to feel like your intelligence is at risk and your potential is at risk and everything’s at risk it’s that emotional risk which is what vulnerability really is.
You’ll need to be willing to feel uncomfortable to actually beat procrastination I just wanted to really record this episode for you to tell you about some of the advice that you might have tried that might not be working and to also let you know that if you have found it really challenging to stop procrastination there is nothing wrong with you your brain is procrastinating or getting you to procrastinate to protect you.
It’s trying to keep you alive it’s trying to keep you safe and comfortable and warm and that’s the okay it’s doing its job so it’s so important on this journey to beat procrastination and to train yourself to do things at the first opportunity and to get into a growth mindset that you recognize that that is a part of your brain that is like beating procrastination is a horrible idea why would you ever do that and you need to use the prefrontal cortex the part of your brain that can create decisions and do all the planning to actually override that more primitive part of your brain that’s saying why the hell would you want to beat procrastination?
Procrastination is keeping us safe it’s allowing us to continue to feel smart because we never have to actually fail fully if we fail we can blame procrastination there’s so many reasons we procrastinate I haven’t gone into them in this episode but if you can really just be kind to yourself on this journey have compassion if it’s been hard for you your brain is doing its job but there are also different strategies that you can implement and different things you can do and we share them and go into them in our community together but I hope this has helped you I hope you are having a beautiful day and I will talk to you in the next episode. Bye.
Outro
I hope you found today’s episode incredibly helpful. So I want to invite you to sign up for my three-part planning series. It’s just a short video series that will teach you how to get started with power planning so that you can stop procrastinating and start following through on the tasks and the projects that are going to build your business.
And you can do that without burning yourself out. So samlaurabrown.com/planningseries is where to go to get instant access today.
