2 Minutes, 1 Hack: The Best Way to Overcome Procrastination

00:00:00 - Jenny GK
I don't know the reason. I stayed here all season with nothing to show but this brand new tattoo.

00:00:17 - Caitlin Kindred
Rest in peace, Jimmy Buffett. Yeah.

00:00:19 - Jenny GK
If you haven't had a margarita yet, in honor of the parrot heads, go ahead and do it.

00:00:24 - Caitlin Kindred
Oh. Oh, gosh. We're so glad you're here. Not to downer, but I did like that.

00:00:33 - Jenny GK
You know who else died recently?

00:00:35 - Caitlin Kindred
This show. No.

00:00:36 - Jenny GK
Wow. Bob Barker.

00:00:39 - Caitlin Kindred
Yes.

00:00:40 - Jenny GK
And the joke that's floating around the Internet and my sister sent out to the family group text was he went closest to a dollar without going over.

00:00:49 - Caitlin Kindred
I saw that it was a tweet. It was like, my man's got as close as he got to $1 and didn't go over. It was so wrong of me to laugh, but it was hysterical. Chicken soup. Bob Barker. And the couch is really all anyone really needed to feel better back in the day.

00:01:07 - Jenny GK
Yeah.

00:01:08 - Caitlin Kindred
Well, today we have a cram episode, so this is going to be a shorty, but a goodie. So we're talking about how you can fix your procrastination problems in just two minutes. Yes.

00:01:18 - Jenny GK
Check.

00:01:19 - Caitlin Kindred
This is worth listening to. So let's go ahead and get started.

00:01:24 - Jenny GK
Okay. So she did it in the conservatory with the candlestick. It's Caitlin.

00:01:31 - Caitlin Kindred
Oh, my God. I was like, she did it. This is a G rated show. But I am a middle school teacher, so my mind immediately goes to like, oh, did it. So inappropriate. Well, that's Jennyny. She's my adorable naive stairway to heaven.

00:01:54 - Jenny GK
These just get wackier and wackier.

00:01:56 - Caitlin Kindred
They're so mean. I can't steal directly from the show, so I got to change it up a little bit. I mean, maybe I should just steal directly from the show. There are so many good ones.

00:02:07 - Jenny GK
No, it's fine. They're also stairway to Heaven is funny.

00:02:11 - Caitlin Kindred
Stairway to heaven. Well, and I was a little bit inspired by the episode about song lyrics. Just a little bit. Oh, sure.

00:02:17 - Jenny GK
Yeah.

00:02:17 - Caitlin Kindred
But also, why naive? Why but naive?

00:02:23 - Jenny GK
It does describe me pretty well.

00:02:25 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah. Okay.

00:02:27 - Jenny GK
I'm not super great at knowing or noticing, and we'll hear about that later when we talk about our gem of the week.

00:02:35 - Caitlin Kindred
Oh, great.

00:02:36 - Jenny GK
Well, let's get to our circle time, then.

00:02:38 - Caitlin Kindred
What you got going on?

00:02:40 - Jenny GK
I'm back on the tank. I've had a lot of obsessions over the last week, but this one is more updated, and this one I have to be obsessed with right now. We got some new fish. We got four new clownfish to replace the couple that had died a few weeks ago. We got some fire gobies that are just like these little white fish with red flames on them.

00:03:01 - Caitlin Kindred
That's awesome.

00:03:02 - Jenny GK
They're really cool. We also got ick, which is a parasite that grows on tangs. So our blue tang, our dory fish, his name is Oscar. He's got some dots on him, oddly enough. The cure for this, there's medication that you put in the tank and also garlic because the garlic, when they eat enough of it, seeps through their skin and makes the parasites not want to eat them anymore.

00:03:30 - Caitlin Kindred
So is this like one of those situations where you measure garlic with your heart and you just dump it in there?

00:03:37 - Jenny GK
Well, you can use garlic extract. Or the fish store guy, he was like, you can just use that jarlic and just take the liquid out of it and use it. That's fine.

00:03:47 - Caitlin Kindred
Oh, my gosh.

00:03:48 - Jenny GK
Yeah.

00:03:48 - Caitlin Kindred
That's amazing.

00:03:49 - Jenny GK
Funny, though, it made me remember when I was in college, I over ate garlic one night, and the next day, my whole family was going to the movie theater, and my dad made me.

00:03:58 - Caitlin Kindred
Sit away from the rest of the.

00:03:59 - Jenny GK
Family because I smelled so bad.

00:04:01 - Caitlin Kindred
It just radiates through your pores. It's like a hangover when you had all that McCormick's as a kid, and you're just like, this is so bad, and it just comes out of your that's exactly it.

00:04:14 - Jenny GK
He was like, Jenny, go sit over there.

00:04:16 - Caitlin Kindred
It's so gross.

00:04:17 - Jenny GK
But the funniest thing about the tank is we got a new coral, okay? And the type of coral has a very fancy name, which I do not remember, but its abbreviation is TSA.

00:04:34 - Caitlin Kindred
Okay?

00:04:35 - Jenny GK
Abigail named this coral. Ready? TSA. Power trip.

00:04:45 - Caitlin Kindred
Here for it, here for it. Love it. Gosh. She's so clever. I love her. Oh, my gosh. She's just the best. Power trip. I can't. Yes, I can't. It's perfect. Mic drop. I'm out. I know nothing. I told the fish store guy, he.

00:05:04 - Jenny GK
Was like, oh, I'm using that.

00:05:05 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah, you have to. It's so good. It's so good. Oh, she's just the best. I love it. I can't even move on from it, it's so good. Okay, well, usually my obsessions are product related. I swear I'm not as superficial as I see, but this time it's completely different. I recently did an ancestry DNA kit. Everyone's family is all complicated and everything else. So I have a little bit of a complicated family, and it revolves around me in particular. And I just needed to know, right? So I went ahead and did this. And for those of you who don't know what I look like, I am short, red hair, green eyes, freckles everywhere, don't tan, nothing, right? And my hair is wildly curly. And when I went to Ireland and I was in Belfast, this man, this Irish man who took us on a tour, the Bombs and Bullets tour in Belfast looks at me and was like, you're Catholic. You're Irish Catholic. You can't get out of the car here, here, and here because this is a dangerous neighborhood for you. And then looks at my husband was like, you're Protestant. You can't get out of the car. In this neighborhood. In this neighborhood. Yeah. Very wild. Obviously. Clearly. Irish looking girl. Right?

00:06:29 - Jenny GK
Right.

00:06:30 - Caitlin Kindred
So I get my Ancestry DNA results back, and it turns out I'm 30% Italian, and I had no idea that I was that much Italian. But then I tell our friend friend of the show, Ariella, and she's like, oh, yeah, I have family who looks like you're from northern Italy. They all have red curly hair. What? This is so like, I realized that there's some privacy issues. Know? There's a whole thing about the Mormon Church owning Ancestry and all this other stuff. Oh, I didn't yes, they do. Yes, that is her investment.

00:07:10 - Jenny GK
Well, I know that churches are supposed to be nonprofit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that's an interesting thing for a church to own.

00:07:19 - Caitlin Kindred
We could talk about that. That's a whole thing.

00:07:24 - Jenny GK
I do not want to go down that rabbit hole, but I do want to say I'm surprised and a little intrigued.

00:07:30 - Caitlin Kindred
I'm not totally surprised, but again, we could go into that another time, but yes. So there's something you learned from our show this week that the Mormon Church has a major stake and ownership in ancestry. It's either Ancestry or 23, ANDME it's one of those DNA things, but whatever. And there's some issues with privacy, right? It's like, do we want someone else owning our DNA and all this other stuff. And then there's the whole, like, me being a true crime person and being like, well, what if they use my DNA to find a murderer? And then I'm like, Well, I didn't murder anyone, but what if they still think I did? I got my shovel. I know what to do with it. So there's a whole thing about it, but I'm so fascinated by it. And what I learned is that out of this, my mother is almost purely Irish. Like, her ancestors came over during the potato famine. And it's so funny because my dad's side of the family is very Irish as well, and they're very proud of that Irish history. But there's all kinds of these other little things sprinkled in his DNA, whereas my mom is, like, almost pure. It's wild. And it was a very interesting thing, and I can't stop reading into it, and I'm probably going to end up investing way too much money in Ancestry as I go, like, digging through all these things. But it's super cool, and I keep going back to it and just trying to figure out all these different parts of where I came from. It's really, really interesting.

00:09:12 - Jenny GK
I mean, my dad's family is like, super very Polish. John's family. Very polish.

00:09:24 - Caitlin Kindred
Right.

00:09:25 - Jenny GK
My mom's family owns a house in Canada named Tabe, which stands for there Will Always Be an England.

00:09:34 - Caitlin Kindred
Oh, wow.

00:09:35 - Jenny GK
Wouldn't that be interesting? Her maiden name is Shannon.

00:09:38 - Caitlin Kindred
That feels very Irish to like, there's.

00:09:41 - Jenny GK
There'S a couple of stories going on there.

00:09:44 - Caitlin Kindred
There's something it's really, really like the part of Italy is probably northern, but it's just, you know, like, where all the where it's less sunny, less Mediterranean, but it's just really interesting. And I cannot stop going back to it. I cannot. It's so, so fascinating to me.

00:10:09 - Jenny GK
Wow, that's amazing.

00:10:11 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah.

00:10:12 - Jenny GK
Okay, so gem of the week this time. My naivete definitely shows. We had tickets to see Oppenheimer at the earliest showing. It was like 1020 or something.

00:10:28 - Caitlin Kindred
Okay.

00:10:29 - Jenny GK
John wakes up the next morning or the morning of the show, which happened to be the next morning, if you know what I'm saying, and he feels rotten, like nauseous, headache, can't get enough fluids in him, wanting greasy pizza. You know what I'm saying?

00:10:50 - Caitlin Kindred
Yes.

00:10:51 - Jenny GK
And I said to him, I was like, we don't really need to go see this movie right now. It's at the IMAX. And he's like, no, it'll be fine. I'll eat something, I'll drink some Pedialyte, and I can just sit back in the movie and get over this hangover.

00:11:08 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah.

00:11:09 - Jenny GK
And I said, no, you're going to be so sick. It's an IMAX movie. I don't think we should go. And he said, Jenny, I'll be fine. I'll be fine.

00:11:20 - Caitlin Kindred
So we get to the theater again.

00:11:22 - Jenny GK
It'S like 10:00 in the morning, right?

00:11:24 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah.

00:11:25 - Jenny GK
Nobody's there.

00:11:26 - Caitlin Kindred
No.

00:11:27 - Jenny GK
We walk into the theater and I see the screen. It's a very large rectangular screen. And I said, oh, we must be in the wrong theater. This is not an IMAX. And he looks at me and says, Jenny, what do you think IMAX is? And then I said, oh, isn't it the one that wraps around you like a planetarium and the chairs move? And he said no. That's soaring at Disney World. IMAX just means big screen.

00:12:04 - Caitlin Kindred
But if you go into an IMAX theater, you do get the movement sort of thing happening sometimes. It's not a planetarium is what I.

00:12:11 - Jenny GK
Thought we were doing. Which is why I thought if you had a hangover, you wouldn't want to go.

00:12:17 - Caitlin Kindred
That's really funny.

00:12:19 - Jenny GK
He's like, wait a minute, aren't you almost 40? Why do you not know what an IMAX theater is?

00:12:25 - Caitlin Kindred
You know what's funny is? Have you ever been to the four X theaters or whatever they're called?

00:12:31 - Jenny GK
Oh, yeah, that's one where your chairs actually do move.

00:12:34 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah, no, I didn't know what that was. So I took Sam to see the Minions movie earlier, and I didn't know that that was what was going to happen. So we're both, like, bouncing around, losing our mind every time it happened. Sam was like, I can't do this. And he got up and stood up in front of the chair because he couldn't handle it anymore. And I was like, oh, I had no idea. But I had never done that before. The IMAX thing I have done, I probably wouldn't have made that mistake. But now, yeah, that's different.

00:13:05 - Jenny GK
I will say that I did some research. There is something called omnimax that is a like two thirds around the oh, okay.

00:13:17 - Caitlin Kindred
So then that would be understandable.

00:13:19 - Jenny GK
That you I was confused. Yeah, but it also shows how few movies I go to at the theater that I don't know what IMAX is.

00:13:27 - Caitlin Kindred
Well, yeah, I don't. The fact that we even go to movies at mean, in fairness, the last movies that we've seen were I did see Ninja Turtles. We saw the Spider Man Spider Verse movie in the theater, and we saw Mario in the theater. So clearly, these are all movies for me.

00:13:47 - Jenny GK
Well, and we saw Oppenheimer because it had just been recommended to us by so many people.

00:13:53 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah.

00:13:53 - Jenny GK
I was like, okay, I cannot miss this. I really need to see it. Also, you owe me a Barbie date.

00:13:59 - Caitlin Kindred
Yes.

00:14:00 - Jenny GK
And I will tell you, I have purchased an outfit including pink heels that have little fish that swim around in the heel.

00:14:09 - Caitlin Kindred
Stop it. No, they don't.

00:14:10 - Jenny GK
I don't have them because they weren't allowed to leave the country of China. I got an email from Sheen saying we're not allowed to ship these to the US.

00:14:23 - Caitlin Kindred
No. I thought they were plastic fish. I guess they're real. No. Oh, my gosh. Oh, that's hysterical. And I don't have my outfit, but I need to make it happen.

00:14:39 - Jenny GK
Well, don't worry about buying a fascinator. I happen to purchase two.

00:14:43 - Caitlin Kindred
Yes. That's amazing. I love it. So good. Okay, speaking of watching things oh, nice segue. You're welcome. That was a good one. My child is an interesting human, and I adore him. And he says and does funny things. And the most recent funny thing that is about watching is he goes, can we watch House Hunters? He likes to watch things like, is it cake?

00:15:19 - Jenny GK
Oh, yeah, we watch that a lot.

00:15:21 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah, he likes that one. But also when he goes, can we watch House Hunters? I laughed out loud for a while. It was so great. And then said, yes, of course I did. Of course I did. But the best part of it is when he starts saying things like, you can tell he's clearly paying attention because he'll be like, you have to choose house number two. And you're like, how old is he?

00:15:44 - Jenny GK
Seven or 70?

00:15:46 - Caitlin Kindred
No, he's clearly 37 and in the market.

00:15:51 - Jenny GK
Have you introduced him to Antiques Roadshow yet?

00:15:55 - Caitlin Kindred
No.

00:15:56 - Jenny GK
He will love that. That's a fake. It's not worth anything, honey.

00:16:02 - Caitlin Kindred
He's really good at is it cake? He can tell.

00:16:05 - Jenny GK
Okay.

00:16:06 - Caitlin Kindred
He's pretty good at it. And he'll tell you. He's like, well, that one has the button, and the button is not shiny. But this one, the button is shiny. So I think it's really interesting, but I'm just waiting for him to be like, she breeds small dogs. I'm a professional student. Our budget is $1.8 million. If it's the right property, I'll go up to 2 million. I'm just waiting for those sorts of comments to come out of his mouth. Right. It's so weird. But it's really funny that he's like, is there anything on? No. Can we watch house hunters?

00:16:38 - Jenny GK
I offer pro bono therapy to hamsters and she polishes spoons.

00:16:45 - Caitlin Kindred
But our budget is 3.2 million. Right? We would like four acres of land and a pool and a guest house.

00:16:57 - Jenny GK
Pool is attached to the pool. It's very important.

00:17:00 - Caitlin Kindred
Ridiculous. Ridiculous. Oh, man. All right, so we're going to jump right into the real talk. We're not taking a break today because it's supposed to be a cram sesh.

00:17:10 - Jenny GK
We have 90 seconds.

00:17:12 - Caitlin Kindred
I think we're going to run long, right? Exactly. I think we're going to go a little bit longer than we normally do. Okay, so here's the deal. You can end your procrastination issues in two minutes, and here's how you do it. If you can do a task in two minutes or less, you should just do it right now. Okay? Here's what I mean. When you procrastinate, the longer you put something off, the more you start to dread it and the harder it feels to accomplish it. We've all been there with things like that. For me in particular, it's making a phone call. If I have to do a phone call, I will push it off as far as I possibly can. Millennial. And then I.

00:17:49 - Jenny GK
Millennial. I'm so sorry.

00:17:51 - Caitlin Kindred
Absolutely.

00:17:52 - Jenny GK
I had a whiny generation stuck in my throat.

00:17:59 - Caitlin Kindred
We can't all be, like, old like you. Actually, I said to my boss earlier this week, I was like, I have.

00:18:08 - Jenny GK
Some phone calls to make. She was like, you mean emails to send? And I said, no, I'm just going.

00:18:12 - Caitlin Kindred
To call the family.

00:18:13 - Jenny GK
She was like, no, you're going to email them.

00:18:15 - Caitlin Kindred
Okay. Right?

00:18:16 - Jenny GK
I'll email.

00:18:17 - Caitlin Kindred
Okay, I'll email.

00:18:18 - Jenny GK
Yeah, it's fine.

00:18:19 - Caitlin Kindred
So funny. But more often than not, the task that you're thinking about is actually really simple. Example making a freaking phone call. And even if it's one you're completely just you feel so much better when it's done, so you might as well just do it, right? So here's my example of this. I recently went through piles and piles and piles and piles of Sam's art and schoolwork from first grade. Now, he has been in second grade for three weeks. So that tells you that I was just taking everything he had done and putting it in a doom pile. Right, and ignoring it and ignoring it. Ignoring it.

00:18:58 - Jenny GK
We have a doom bin, so at least it has a lid. I don't have to look at it.

00:19:02 - Caitlin Kindred
Oh, yeah, no, it has a lid on it. Yes, I had that. Go put that in your bin of schoolwork. We'll do it later. Exactly. So I have an app that I use to preserve certain pieces of the app is called Archive, A-R-T-K-I-V-E archive. I highly recommend it to any parent or even like, if you're a teacher who just wants to hang on to special things but you don't want the clutter, this is a great app for preserving things that matter to you in terms of created pieces, right. It took me 3 hours to go through this pile of stuff, to take the pictures, to put the caption on it, to associate a date with it, all of these things. If I had just taken two minutes every time I got a piece of work from him that I wanted to hang on to and taken the picture and put the date in there and said this is a picture that he drew of a Pokemon or whatever it is. I would not have been sitting there for 3 hours on a Saturday to get this.

00:20:16 - Jenny GK
This also sounds like one of those things where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole because you put it off. It probably took longer to do because you had to decipher the dates and try and figure things out.

00:20:29 - Caitlin Kindred
Yes.

00:20:30 - Jenny GK
Rather than be like, oh, I know today is April 4.

00:20:34 - Caitlin Kindred
Right. And I thankfully was smart enough to know that I'm not going to do this right now. So I at least wrote the date on most of the things, which helped.

00:20:44 - Jenny GK
But still, however, two minutes, like snap, snap.

00:20:47 - Caitlin Kindred
Right. And then I also would not have had this pile of paper sitting on my dining room table.

00:20:56 - Jenny GK
Okay?

00:20:56 - Caitlin Kindred
So let me tell you, literally months.

00:20:58 - Jenny GK
For me, I have even brought this to the five minute rule. Not to be confused with the five second rule.

00:21:05 - Caitlin Kindred
No, they're different things.

00:21:06 - Jenny GK
They're different things. But for me, it's the five minute rule. If it takes five minutes or less, I'm going to do it. And the one that I have to push myself for. And this sounds so lazy and I'm embarrassed to even say it, but you know what? If nothing else, this show is downward social comparison for our listeners. At least I'm not Jenny, right? I almost never have the ambition to put new sheets on the bed after I take the old ones off.

00:21:37 - Caitlin Kindred
So I will strip the bed to.

00:21:39 - Jenny GK
Do the laundry and then that night come to bed and say, oh, I forgot to put the sheets on. So I have put to myself, look, it takes five minutes to put new sheets on. I am going to strip the bed and put the new sheets on immediately. Now, that does say that I have the privilege to own more than one set of sheets. I understand that not everyone has that. Yes, but if you do own more than one set of sheets, go ahead and put them on as soon as you strip the bed.

00:22:09 - Caitlin Kindred
This is a thing that I have started doing also. And I always wash bedding on the same day of the week so that there's no, like it's a habit for me now. And I alternate between my room and Sam's room so that I always you.

00:22:23 - Jenny GK
Sound like Danny Tanner.

00:22:24 - Caitlin Kindred
I have to, otherwise I won't do just I know myself well enough to know that I won't do it. So, yes, highly recommend doing that. Immediately strip it down and immediately put those sheets back on it. It's so much more helpful. And I'm thinking about how much clutter all that paper was for me when I was going through all of this stuff. It made me cry.

00:22:45 - Jenny GK
Anxiety producing, when you look at a task like, right?

00:22:50 - Caitlin Kindred
It's so much harder. So if you can just take two minutes to just do it, and then you can put the artwork in the bin, and the recycling gnomes can take it and use it to decorate their gnome homes or something. Make it up. I don't care. I don't even do that.

00:23:07 - Jenny GK
I look at the kids and I'm like, okay, do you want to keep this one? You do? Okay, do you want to keep it as a picture, or do you need to keep it as paper? Oh, picture great.

00:23:17 - Caitlin Kindred
Paper.

00:23:17 - Jenny GK
Okay, well, it's going to go in.

00:23:18 - Caitlin Kindred
Your room, and then it changes, right? And then I also have a folder of things where I put the things that he wants to keep, and if I don't see it or hear about it for, like, a month, then it's gone. Anyway, beside the point. The point is, if you just take those two minutes to take the stupid picture of the artwork, you'll feel so much better. And my mom has this series of life rules and sayings, and one of her favorites is do not f thyself it, right?

00:23:48 - Jenny GK
I love it.

00:23:50 - Caitlin Kindred
She says the real word, but she says, do not f thyself, and it's one of her favorites. So if you take two minutes to get that task done right now, or five minutes, whatever, you are uneffing, right? Future you won't hate past you. One of my rules all the time is like, would future Caitlin hate current Caitlin for not doing this thing? Oh, my gosh, right?

00:24:15 - Jenny GK
What a great interpretation of the same rule. Be kind to your future self, right?

00:24:19 - Caitlin Kindred
Am I hurting my future self? Am I screwing my future self over? Yes. Okay, well, don't make me hate past me, right? So if you spend two minutes a day tidying your living room, then you won't need to do a huge cleanup on Sunday, right, before someone shows up at your house, which may or may not have been me yesterday, right? If you take care of dirty dishes for two minutes, then you won't be steering a dried up, crusty leftover food at the end of the day because you decided that something needed to soak, right. You'll just get it done. Right. If you spend two minutes a day sorting through your mail, you won't have a giant doom pile of mail like I usually do at the end of the week, or you won't miss something that you didn't intend to miss, right? Just spend those two minutes looking through whatever you need to look through and get it done. Or spend those two minutes doing folding a shirt or rehanging something up or putting something away. Just make your life easier for yourself in the future.

00:25:28 - Jenny GK
Remember floating around on the Internet a couple of months ago? There was this term toxic trait. Okay, my toxic trait is saying that I will buy gas in the morning.

00:25:40 - Caitlin Kindred
No.

00:25:40 - Jenny GK
Never. I know it takes more than two minutes, but I have told myself, you know what? You buy gas in the afternoon now.

00:25:47 - Caitlin Kindred
Yeah. Always buy your gas the night before. Don't ever do it in the morning. You won't do it, and you won't have time to do it. And you'll get mad at yourself. Don't do it.

00:26:00 - Jenny GK
So let me hear what you're saying. If it takes two minutes, do it now?

00:26:05 - Caitlin Kindred
Yes.

00:26:05 - Jenny GK
Don't put it off because it's going to take way more than two minutes. When you wait for it, or as you're waiting, you are building more and more anxiety, more and more doom hanging over you. I cannot do this.

00:26:19 - Caitlin Kindred
Right. And you'll procrastinate more yes. And you'll hate yourself later.

00:26:24 - Jenny GK
Be kind to your future self.

00:26:26 - Caitlin Kindred
Absolutely. Okay, so is this something that you can get done in two minutes or less? If the answer is yes, just channel your inner Nike. Just do it. Get it done. That was good. Hey. Oh. Just trust us. Your future self will thank you.

00:26:42 - Jenny GK
Okay, if it takes two minutes, or in my case, five, do it.

00:26:46 - Caitlin Kindred
Make good choices and listen to some Jimmy Buffett. Bye.

00:26:52 - Jenny GK
Salt. Salt. Where's the.