"While we waste our time hesitating and postponing, life is slipping away." - Seneca
If there's one thing I was world-class at in 2023, and probably every adult year before that, it was procrastinating.
Procrastination is where you have trouble persuading yourself to do the things you know you should do.
Sometimes it's even things you actually want to do, like improving your poker game.
Rather than just getting on with important and meaningful poker study, you end up performing more trivial tasks like checking your emails or watching cat videos.
Today I want to share with you a great productivity technique that has helped me to beat procrastination for good.
Let's dive in...
Beating procrastination
"Just get started."
It sounds so simple...
And yet when it comes to aspects of poker study we don't want to do, it suddenly becomes very hard.
Enter... The 5-Minute Rule.
The steps are simple:
Choose an element of poker study you've been putting off
Commit to spending just five minutes on it
Set a timer to five minutes
Start the timer and get going
If you don't want to continue once the five minutes is up, that's ok, you can stop.
Five minutes of poker study still means progress.
However, once you get started, you'll likely find yourself studying for much longer.
It's totally normal to feel anxious about studying something new or something that you know will be difficult.
Allocating a short timeframe like this should make it less overwhelming.
The important thing to remember is that once the timer starts you get going straight away and fight through the initial resistance.
Summary
Time management techniques like this are so important because time is our single most valuable non-renewable resource.
We can always make more money, but we can never make more time.
If you're a recreational poker player with a full time job and other commitments, like a family, then you'll want to make your poker study and training time as efficient as possible.
The 5-Minute Rule will help you beat that initial resistance to getting started.
That's it for this week.
Go and spend five minutes right now on something you've been putting off for too long.
See you next time.
Whenever you're ready, here's how I can help you:
The Final Table: Play your best poker when the most is at stake. Detailed analysis of over 100 hand examples at different stages of play. Learn how to make great decisions every time and set yourself up for daily progress.
Poker On The Mind: Listen to my podcast with Dr Tricia Cardner as we discuss peak poker performance and tournament poker strategy.
Train & Play Like The Pros: Join the next cohort of my flagship program that will take you from amateur to training and playing like the pros in the next 8 weeks. There are only 12 spots for each cohort, and when they're gone, they're gone and I close enrolment until the next one.
Purposeful Practice for Poker: Gain a clear theoretical understanding of the science of purposeful practice and how you can apply it to your poker study & training. Includes specific exercises designed to create an infallible plan for poker improvement.
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