Where these expectations come from, you know, there's many flavors of perfectionism and the one that we're most concerned with is something called socially prescribed perfectionism or perfectionist that concerns.

And you can know when you have those because you have the voice of another in your head, you know, that you're living up to other people's standards.

And that, if we take a look at measures of socially prescribed perfectionism and measures of procrastination, you're positively correlated.

In other words, the more socially prescribed perfectionists we are, the more we're going to procrastinate.

Hi, this is Dene. I'm the founder of Simple Families. Simple Families is an online community for parents who are seeking a simpler, more intentional life.

In this show, we focus on minimalism with kids, positive parenting, family wellness, and decreasing the mental load.

My perspectives are based in my firsthand experience raising kids, but also rooted in my PhD in child development.

So you're going to hear conversations that are based in research, but more importantly, real life. Thanks for joining us.

Hello, hello, that voice you heard in the intro is Dr. Timothy Petrol.

Tim is joining me today to explore the topic of procrastination, something that he has spent decades researching and speaking about.

Procrastination is a topic in which I have long been curious. In a world where everything seems important, it's hard to prioritize what we should do first.

And it's easy to put all the things we don't really want to do at the end of that list.

And often it feels like we can be our own worst enemy. Why do we procrastinate things that are good for us?

Things that sometimes don't even take a lot of time and energy.

I learned so much from Tim in his book, but one of the things that really stands out to me is the connection between procrastination and mindfulness.

In order to actually get the things done, the things that we don't really want to do, the things we're avoiding doing, we have to be mindful.

We have to be aware of the reasons we're avoiding them to begin with.

We have to be aware of the obstacles that are getting in the way.

And when we put things off for later, it's not always procrastination. There are other types of delay as well.

Lots of these delays are necessary, especially when it comes to family life and raising kids.

Tim is a professor of psychology at Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada.

He's been researching and writing about procrastination since 1995.

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