Ugh, that dreaded task has been glaring at you from your to-do list for over a week now. There it is, in black and white, reminding you of your laziness and guilt.

You stare at it. Blink a few times. Scratch your chin. You should really get it done today.

Some movement at the corner of your eye catches your attention. Ah, Kaitlyn’s coming over to your desk for a quick chat! You snap your laptop shut. The task can wait for now.

Later (or maybe even tomorrow), you’ll surely feel more motivated to get started.

Except you won’t.

As Timothy A. Pychyl PhD, an expert on procrastination and the winner of numerous teaching awards, writes in his book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change, “The tomorrow in which ‘I’ll really feel like it’ is always a day away. It never becomes today.”

But why is procrastination so tough to beat? And what can you do to just get on with it and stop wasting your time?

That’s what we’re about to find out.

1) What Is Procrastination?
2) Why We Procrastinate & What to Do About It

• We want to feel good – sooner rather than later

• We think we’ll “feel more like it” tomorrow

• We don’t use our willpower strategically

What Is Procrastination?

The first thing you need to know is that “all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination,” as Pychyl points out.

For example, if your child suddenly gets sick and your plans change as a result, you’re not procrastinating. And if an unexpected and urgent task pops up on your to-do list, causing you to reorganize your priorities for the day ahead, you’re not procrastinating.

According to Pychyl, “Procrastination is the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him or herself. Procrastination is a needless voluntary delay.”

In other words, it’s when you put on a Netflix show even though you know you should use that time to do more important things. And while you’re watching the TV show on your laptop screen, you’re plagued by feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, and fear, which means you’re not even enjoying yourself.

You’re just delaying the inevitable and making the process harder on yourself in the meantime.

But why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Well, Pychyl may have an idea or two.

Why We Procrastinate & What to Do About It

“Procrastination is a habitual response to tasks or situations, and like all habits it is an internalized, nonconscious process,” Pychyl says. “It is what we do without really thinking about it.”

Though you may not realize why you’re procrastinating on a conscious level, there are a number of reasons we’re all so reluctant to take action.

Here are three of them, as per Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.

1) We want to feel good – sooner rather than later

At its core, procrastination is a form of self-regulation failure. Pychyl explains that while there are a multitude of factors that contribute to this, the most important one is that we simply “give in to feel good” far too easily.

Imagine you’re about to work on a task you’ve been dreading for some time. The moment you decide to get started, an avalanche of negative feelings buries you whole, from frustration and anxiety to boredom and disgust. These are very uncomfortable emotions, and our go-to response is to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Enter… procrastination! It’s the exit door right in front of you. You’ve just got to walk through it. Easy.

And it feels good, too: “The moment we put off the task until tomorrow, we feel relief from the negative emotions. And, as you may have learned in a basic psychology course, behaviors that are rewarded get repeated. We are reinforcing our procrastination, and it becomes a problem," says Pychyl.

Strategies for change:

• Recognize your negative emotions: Knowledge is power, as Pychyl puts it. The first step is to recognize that this task makes you feel awful and that you want to run away from your discomfort.

• Stay put: Remember that if you turn away from these emotions in order to make yourself feel better, it’s over. Stay put and deal with the sense of unease.

• Use an implementation intention: Labeled by Peter Gollwitzer, an implementation intention “supports a goal intention by setting out in advance when, where, and how we will achieve this goal.” It’s essentially a pre-decision on how you will act in specific situations, and you can use it as your rulebook when necessary.  

Example: “IF I feel negative emotions when I face the task at hand, THEN I will stay put and not stop, put off a task, or run away.”

2) We think we’ll “feel more like it” tomorrow

“Research, particularly studies by Dan Gilbert (Harvard University) and Tim Wilson (University of Virginia), indicates that we are not very good forecasters,” Pychyl claims. He explains that forecasting our future mood is known as “affective forecasting” and that we generally have a bias when predicting our future feelings.

Why?

One, we tend to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our emotions and thoughts in the future (a phenomenon known as “focalism”). 

Two, we assign the present too much importance when predicting the future (“presentism”), which means the current moment always looms larger than what the future may bring – making us postpone tasks just to feel good now.

Pychyl offers an excellent example: If you go grocery shopping after a meal, you are likely to underestimate how much food you will need in a week and buy less (because you’re not hungry right now).

When you decide to put off something until tomorrow, you are not only increasing your positive feelings in the present moment, but you’re also imagining your productive future self engaged in this task, glamorizing the idea of it and – yes, that’s right – feeling even better in the here and now.

Once tomorrow rolls around, however, you are stuck in the present moment once more. And you want to procrastinate. Again.

Strategies for change:

• Time travel: Imagine the future as if it were today. The future is not a distant land where anything is possible and everything is perfect, after all – it is just as messy and complicated as now. Place yourself in the shoes of your future self to reduce some of your bias during affective forecasting.

• Expect to be wrong and deal with it: When you decide to act upon something at a later date and imagine your future self all motivated and excited, recognize that this is a flaw in your affective forecasting and realize you might be wrong. While you may feel more motivated tomorrow, chances are that you’ll feel exactly the same.

• Dress for the weather: When meteorological forecasting goes wrong, it might suddenly start raining just before you head out on a hike. The fact that it’s raining doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go hiking. It only means you should wear a raincoat. The same applies to motivation. Pychyl highlights that you don’t need to feel motivated in order to take action. It helps, but it is not a necessity, just like sunshine is not necessary for walking up a mountain. In fact, action is what often fuels motivation.

3) We don’t use our willpower strategically

Did you know that willpower is a limited resource? If you use it to maintain self-control in the face of temptation, let’s say, you may have a harder time motivating yourself to achieve a task later on.

In his book, Pychyl mentions studies that have proven this exact point: if people exhaust their self-regulatory strength on the first task, their performance drops in quality during the second one.

“The key thing about these findings is that they indicate that self-regulatory depletion may be reducing motivation,” Pychyl summarizes. “Given that depleted self-regulatory strength may leave us feeling like we won’t succeed, ‘we’re too tired to try,’ it may be that the reduced expectancy of success undermines our willingness to exert effort. It’s not that we are so impaired that we cannot respond. It’s that we ‘don’t feel like it.’”

Strategies for change:

• Take one small step: Although willpower is limited, we often have more of it than we realize. Unless you feel genuinely tired, try taking one single step – make a tiny start on the task in question, for example. Tell yourself that you don’t need to complete it all today. All you have to do is get started. Oftentimes, getting started is actually the toughest part, and once you do, you might end up working for hours on end.

• Exercise your self-discipline muscle: According to research mentioned in the book, only two weeks of self-regulatory exercises can improve our self-regulatory stamina. Willpower is like a muscle – it can be increased through regular practice. The more you exercise your self-discipline, the less likely you are to procrastinate.

• Get enough sleep and be strategic: Sleep and rest apparently help restore our ability to self-regulate. It’s important to get seven to eight hours of sleep per night in order to function optimally. On a similar note, our willpower tends to decrease as the day goes on, which means it may be harder to take on difficult tasks that require a lot of willpower in the evening. Be strategic about what you do and when.

Conclusion

Procrastination is not necessarily laziness. It’s a nonconscious response that befalls all humans at some point or another. The good news is that it is absolutely possible to beat procrastination – as long as you have the right tools, that is.

And what better tool than a short, concise, and actionable book written by a procrastination expert? If you want to learn more, from using technology to our advantage to removing distractions or overcoming excuses and rationalizations, do give Solving the Procrastination Puzzle a try.

And before you go, one more thing! Pychyl stresses that it’s imperative we are kind to ourselves during this process: “We all face setbacks, disappointing moments, and frustrations with our apparent lack of progress. Your attitude toward these setbacks and yourself will be extremely important to your continued progress. Be kind but firm with yourself, and be willing to forgive yourself when you do not live up to your own expectations.”

You will fail. And that’s okay. What matters is that you try again. And again.
And again.

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