Am I Lazy or Overstimulated? | Monday Advice

Cal Newport· Host0:00

Does this sound familiar to you? You have some sort of significant project that you need to complete, like maybe your passport is expired and, and you have to figure out how to renew it, or you volunteered to update the text on your organization's website and you're not quite sure how to get started, and you find yourself day after day unable to make progress. It goes on your list, and it stays there untouched. Now, to the outside world, it might look like you're lazy in the sense that you know that there's something you need to do and you're simply not doing it. But you know inside that things are not so simple. You're not just sitting around playing video games. You're, you're constantly in motion on your devices. You're sending and receiving messages. You're checking in on the news. You're tumbling down potentially productive rabbit holes. And your days are filled with this little P productivity, but not the big P productive accomplishments that actually matter. Well, I struggle with this sometimes, and I'm convinced that technology has made the situation much more common and much more worse. But what exactly is happening in our addled brains when we find ourselves procrastinating on important projects like this? And once we understand what that is, how might we fix it? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to tackle these questions. So here's my plan. I recently came across a Reddit post from the, uh, R/Habits subreddit that originally got me thinking about this topic. The title of this post was