How to Beat Procrastination, Maintain Balance and Avoid Burnout

How do Olympic athletes train for the biggest event of their lives? What separates the top tennis players in the world from those that are merely world class? A big part of it is what they don’t do.

If you were competing in the next Olympics, how would you prepare? Remember, it’s the event of your life, the one you’ve been dreaming about and working towards your entire life. No matter what sport you compete in, do well enough and you could be a sports legend who’s financially set for life. Facing this situation, a lot of people would be tempted to train non-stop. This might be your only shot right? Might as well put everything you’ve got into it.

It turns out this is totally wrong. We know it’s wrong because Olympic athletes don’t train this way at all. Instead, they alternate between periods of intense training and deep relaxation. These scheduled periods of rest not only help them recover physically, but also provides the mental break that allows them to keep doing year after year of grueling, demanding, exhausting training regimes.

The world’s best tennis players use this exertion/relaxation cycle not only in their training regimes, but on a point-by-point basis as well. The best players each have their own routine in between each point. After winning or losing a point, they walk back to the baseline the same way, they focus their eyes on the same spots, they hold their heads and shoulders the same way, the control their breathing in the same practiced manner, they ask the ball boy for their towel. This whole routine is an exercise in relaxation. During this short 20 second interval between points, the best players lower their heart rates by as much as 20 beats per minute. That makes a big difference over the course of a 5 hour match.

Alright, wonderful, but how do we apply this if we’re not professional athletes?

Front-load your schedule. From micro to macro, do more in the beginning. This allows you to build in time for rest towards the end. This means that, on any given day, you do much more work between 7am and 12pm than you do after lunch. Step back a level, and this also means that you do much more work on Monday and Tuesday than you do on Thursday and Friday. On a bigger scale, you want to be putting much more effort into a project or venture at the beginning than at the end. This magic bullet solves three big problems.

Front-loading helps beat procrastination in a few ways. First, even procrastinators can string together short, intense bursts. In fact, they’re generally pretty good at this since they have years of practice hurriedly finishing projects seconds before the deadline. Front-loading implicitly requires that you create deadlines. Second, front-loading gives you ample time to relax. Because you’re finishing so much work before lunch and before Wednesday, you have lots of afternoon and weekend time to procrastinate or do whatever you want.

Similarly, front-loading helps you maintain a good work/life balance. If you work a flat 8-12 hours per day, 5-6 days a week, it’s hard to go out and meet up with friends. But, if you put in 14 hours on Monday, 14 hours on Tuesday and 8 hours on Wednesday, you basically have a 4 day weekend every week. Sure, you might have to show up to work those days, but there’s very little stress at that point since you’ve done almost all of your work, and leaving early should be no problem. Tons of time to go out and relax.

Finally, front-loading does wonders for avoiding burnout. If athletes trained the way I might naively train if picked for the Olympics, nobody could be a professional athlete for 5 years, let alone 10 or 15 or 20. Training non-stop, or thinking non-stop, or learning non-stop, or creating non-stop or doing anything non-stop, just doesn’t let you perform at a high level for very long. By front-loading your schedule, by building in time for deep relaxation, you can avoid burnout and get Olympic results.

For more about Olympic training and increasing your productivity, I can definitely recommend The Power of Full Engagement, which inspired this post.