#234: Your To-Do List Is The Villain
Arnold's Pump Club
Arnold's Pump Club
4.9 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
For years, Arnold carried a notepad everywhere. And the man who built the Arnold Classic alongside him said it was the very thing holding him back.
In this episode, Arnold tells the story of a two-minute phone call and a piece of advice from his friend Jim Lorimer that sounded like a joke at first. It led him to a realization that stings: half the things he wrote down never actually got done. The list wasn't keeping him organized. It was quietly wearing him out.
From there, Arnold breaks down what really is procrastination and why it has almost nothing to do with laziness or running out of time. He shares the uncomfortable truth about "getting ready to start," the trap that looks exactly like productivity.
Then he goes back to a teenager in a small Austrian town, staring up at a goal so big it should have frozen him, and the one small thing he did instead, every single day.
"The Arnold Method To Defeating Procrastination." Two moves. That's all this takes. Arnold lays out both and how to make them a part of your life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to another episode of Arnold's Pump Club. Today, I'm going to take you back in time. |
| 0:06.5 | Not all the way back to my childhood, but after my bodybuilding days to when I was developing |
| 0:12.0 | as a young entrepreneur, all those years ago, my friend Jim Lorimer told me the simplest lesson |
| 0:19.1 | I know about beating procrastination. Jim and I built the |
| 0:23.2 | Arnold Classic together in Columbus, Ohio, working side by side for decades, and we lost him a few years |
| 0:30.4 | ago. And I still think about him. He was one of the most effective people I ever met, which is why |
| 0:36.8 | what he told me surprised me so much. |
| 0:39.4 | We were in a meeting one day when we realized we needed to call someone at one of the sports |
| 0:44.2 | federations. I reached for my notepad to write it down. Jim looked at me and said, |
| 0:49.9 | don't write it down. Just do it. I thought he was joking. But he was not. |
| 0:55.7 | We picked up the phone right there and finished it in two minutes. |
| 0:59.7 | When I thought about it, later the bigger lesson hit me. |
| 1:03.1 | I thought about that notepad I was going to use to write down what I had to get done. |
| 1:08.5 | Half the things I scribbled on that noteped never happened. |
| 1:11.4 | It shocked me because the noteped felt he was helping, but I was just making myself feel |
| 1:16.4 | productive by writing them down. That's when I realized the list wasn't helping me. The list was |
| 1:21.9 | the problem. So I adopted Jim's rule. If something is fast, I don't write it down. I do it. |
| 1:27.8 | Here's what I want you to learn. |
| 1:29.8 | A list of small things you keep meaning to get to is not organization. |
| 1:33.8 | It is stress. |
| 1:35.8 | Every, I'll do it later, is a little weight. |
| 1:37.8 | You pick up and carry around. |
... |
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