How To Combat Procrastination by Eliminating Dread Time

Dan Sullivan

How often do you find yourself procrastinating because you simply don’t like doing a certain activity? You know you have to do it, but you don’t want to do it now.

It’s something we all deal with, and I’ve coined the term “Dread Time” to describe this phenomenon. The scariest part is that the amount of time you spend dreading an activity is often far longer than the time it takes to actually do it!

What if you could eliminate that Dread Time and all the procrastination associated with it? How would your life look? What kind of time savings could you achieve if you never dreaded anything?

Let’s look at how to combat procrastination by eliminating Dread Time. The results may shock you.

The true value of saving time.

Before getting into Dread Time, we’ll look at what time savings can mean for your life and your business.

We’re currently helping people free up 1,000 hours of time from their existing commitments and obligations. We do this with a simple tactic: finding the “whos” to do the “hows” you don’t like doing and aren’t great at, with the goal of freeing up 1,000 hours and redirecting them to the future to use as you see fit.

Maybe you’ll use that time to take more vacations, build a new business, improve your current business, or focus on projects that have been on the back burner for the past few years.

If you can eliminate four hours per week with this simple tactic, that turns into 160 hours per year or the equivalent of four 40-hour work weeks. (This assumes that, like many of our program participants, you’re taking 12 weeks off per year.)

That’s a significant amount of time, but we’re still not looking at the full picture.

If you consider the fact that you’re likely to be an entrepreneur for the next, say, 25 years, then those four hours per week turn into 4,000 hours over the course of 25 years.

Imagine what you could do with 4,000 hours. You could build an entirely new business. You could implement every idea you’ve ever had for your business. (Or you could take a 100-week vacation.)

That is the true value of time savings.

But we still haven’t even talked about combatting procrastination and Dread Time. This is where you’ll be able to multiply your time savings to not only see incredible results and increased productivity, but better enjoy your time.


To learn how procrastination can permanently become a guide to your greatest achievements rather than the source of your greatest dread, download WhoNotHow today.


Learning how to combat procrastination to save exponentially more time.

We all have things we hate doing. It’s something nearly everyone can relate to—having something that you dread hanging over your head and procrastinating because you simply can’t stand the idea of doing it.

To make things even worse, this period of what I now refer to as “Dread Time” is almost always unproductive.

What do you do while you procrastinate? Most of us become paralyzed. We occupy ourselves with practically anything that will help us avoid that period of dread. It’s an incredibly unproductive use of our time.

Dread Time also typically ends up being far more time-intensive than the simple act of doing the activity. You may sit around dreading something for 10 hours, while it may only take one hour to actually get it done. Dread Time not only wastes your time and energy, it makes you feel deflated and undermines your confidence. You feel like you’re getting nothing done and it’s a miserable thing to deal with overall.

And the worst part? Dread Time is strictly going on in your brain! No one outside of your brain has any idea what you’re going through. So you end up torturing and scaring yourself into not being productive.

Learning how to combat procrastination and eliminate Dread Time allows you to save drastic amounts of time and can eliminate some of the most miserable points throughout your year. Just take it from me …

How I stumbled upon Dread Time.

Strategic Coach is now in its 120th quarter. And every quarter for those 30 years, I’ve designed at least half of a workshop with entirely new material. It’s something that I love doing and I’m good at, but I end up putting a lot of pressure on my team during this process because I’m a last-minute type of guy.

I’ve realized that I absolutely hate the last two weeks of this process. I hate the situation I put my team in, and as a result, I dread that two-week period. It keeps me up at night and it’s the most miserable two weeks out of my entire quarter.

This has been happening four times per year for 30 years. And I just discovered it! I just came to the realization that I truly dread this two-week period even though I enjoy the activity of creating these workshops.

So this quarter, for the first time ever, I’m getting it done early. This quarter, the deadline is going to be two weeks before the actual deadline. That way, there is no dreaded two-week period because it will all be done two weeks earlier.

How to implement this for yourself.

When you’re looking at how to remove Dread Time, every situation will be different. Everyone has their own way of working and their own way of organizing things.

To give another example, I worked with an accountant who, like most accountants, dreads the month of April. As a result, he decided to take the month off one year. Starting on April 1, he would be totally unavailable.

He told his clients that they needed to get everything in to him by January 31 if they wanted to file before April and avoid late penalties. Did he lose clients? Yes, of course. But he lost the clients that caused him the most grief and he removed the Dread Time from his life.

Now he no longer dreads April, as everything is done well in advance. In fact, he looks forward to April because he gets a month off!

If you’re looking to combat procrastination, start by finding what parts of your year, quarter, or week you dread. Why do you dread them? How can you rearrange or reorganize things to eliminate that Dread Time?

Remember that there is always someone out there who loves the activity you dread. If you define it right and get it out there, someone will love doing it for you.

Combatting procrastination doesn’t have to be hard. If you can get this right and eliminate Dread Time, you will multiply your productivity, save massive amounts of time, and make the time spent in your business more enjoyable. You’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you don’t dread anything.

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