Cancer Of Procrastination

Enhanced 1% Rule

One day you fought your regrets and decided to uninstall the social media apps that were wasting your time and start focusing on the work instead. That day you successfully invested your time in something useful. As the days passed, you were still struggling to stay away from social media apps, but it happened to be your only goal now. In this struggle, you completely forgot your main goal of focusing on the work or at least you're now procrastinating from doing your work even though you're not into social media anymore.
What's this that's stopping you from doing so? This is fear of doing work. You're either afraid of the work because you think it's difficult or you don't know where to start. You can also be afraid of deadline. Just because you think you cannot complete the work (eg. Studying for exams) on time, you just don't start working on it. As the time goes by, your regret of not working increases.
This fear wasn't in you in your childhood, it's something you unlocked after getting older. You got introduced with it when you started taking your life seriously. You set your priorities.
You set your goals.
And when something didn't go well, failures, regrets, and fear came in.
Fear of doing work acts like fear of losing, but you just don't realize.
James Clear in his book Atomic Habits gave the idea "try to become better by 1 percent everyday". This idea is so effective on its own, and it has been quoted by bunch of successful people in different words. The 1 percent rule opened a door of something to me that I call extended 1 percent rule. While I was struggling to become better 1 percent a day, I felt a weird fear of starting the work because I didn't know from where to start. So I came up with the idea of extended 1 percent rule where a person needs to promise himself of only doing 1% of the work each day or in a each try.
Whenever you feel like not doing something because you feel completely stuck, just forget about doing it, and care about removing the distractions first.
In the case of writing an article, finding yourself a paper or making a new file of Google docs, giving it a title and bookmarking it, so you can immediately start writing whenever you can, is something that can be considered extended 1% rule.

Let me tell you something more weird. Sometimes you're not afraid of doing something, you're just so excited about it that you want to start it perfectly. And that endless loop of perfectionism gives you obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) - feeling the urge to repeat over and over - that you end up getting stuck in Imposter Syndrome - not experiencing success internally - We'll be discussing Imposter Syndrome separately in details, since there are some other reasons that can bring us to it. We've already discussed some of those things like expecting a lot from yourself. But we didn't mention the term at that point.

Now, let's continue with the writing example. Sometimes you'll have removed the distractions by making your Google docs ready to accept your words and bookmarking its link to your browser to have easy access. But still you may be facing something called Writer's Block. By the way, Writer's block is a myth, and it has nothing to do with psychological condition at all. But let's keep this topic a side, since we're not discussing creative writing right now. The reason behind talking about writer's block is to have a closer look to the thing exactly happening to the writer that's stopping him from interesting generating ideas. Besides the lack of new knowledge (which is of course not our topic), there are again some distractions. And, if you've ever tried finding out the solution to it, it's always Brian storming, trying to write at least anything even so simple just to get started, and removing all other distractions. Surprisingly, that's what we're calling Enhanced 1% Rule.