The report is due in three days. So far you've cleared your inbox, watered the plants and reorganised the spice drawer.
Two professors followed a class of their own students through a term and tracked who put their work off. Early on, the procrastinators were doing better. They felt less stressed and reported fewer aches and sniffles than the students who got stuck in straight away. By the end of term it had flipped. The procrastinators were more stressed, more often ill, and their grades were lower on every assignment.
That's the trade your brain makes every time you put something off. It buys you a better mood now and sends the bill to a later version of you. Calling it laziness misses what's going on. Procrastination is a way of managing a feeling.
It's a mood problem
"Procrastinate" comes from the Latin crastinus, belonging to tomorrow: putting things in tomorrow's hands. English has had the word since 1548, and the habit is far older. Around 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod warned farmers: "Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after… a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin." The Greeks also had a word for knowing the better course and taking the worse one anyway: akrasia.
It reaches beyond our species too. Pigeons offered a small job now or a bigger job later, with the same single reward at the end, often took the bigger job later.
You put a task off because of how it makes you feel. Boring, hard, confusing, or a test of whether you're good enough: the task brings a small wave of discomfort, and avoiding it makes the wave go away. Put plainly, procrastination puts how you feel now ahead of your future self.
When 691 findings on procrastination were pooled, the strongest predictors were the ones you'd expect from that: how unpleasant the task feels, how far off the deadline is, how little you trust yourself to do it well, and how impulsive you are. Being anxious or rebellious mattered surprisingly little. Piers Steel, who pooled those findings, explains them in .
The clearest proof came from a clever test. Upset people were given practice time before a test and frittered it away on puzzles and games. Then some of them were told a pill had frozen their mood, so it would stay put whatever they did. Those people got on with the practice. Once putting things off had nothing to offer their mood, they stopped.
Your brain also lies to you about time. Students writing an honours thesis expected to finish in about 34 days. On average it took them 55, and only about three in ten finished by the date they'd predicted. Even their worst-case guesses were too rosy. "Later" feels fine because the task looks smaller from a distance than it is.
So a better calendar rarely fixes it. The calendar was never the problem.
What the delay costs
The bill is real, though the link is modest. In more than 3,500 Swedish university students, those who procrastinated more had higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress nine months later, along with poorer sleep, more loneliness, more pain in the arms and shoulders, and more money trouble. The links held after allowing for how the students were doing at the start.
It follows you to bed, too. People who put off going to bed, with nothing keeping them up, got less sleep and felt more tired the next day.
Your pay feels it as well. In a survey of 22,053 people, those who procrastinated more earned less, stayed in jobs for shorter stretches, and were more likely to be out of work or working fewer hours than they wanted.
Why telling yourself off makes it worse
A missed start usually brings a lecture: lazy, useless, here we go again. That lecture is another bad feeling, and bad feelings are exactly what procrastination exists to escape. People who procrastinated more were less kind to themselves and more stressed, and that missing kindness explained part of the stress.
Forgiveness works better. Students who forgave themselves for putting off revision for their first exam put off less before the second one, and did better on it.
Eight ways to start
Shrink the first step. "Write the report" is a cliff. "Open the document and write the heading" is a step. Make the first action so small it barely registers as the task. BJ Fogg's is built on this idea. Your brain likes ticking things off when they're easy enough: in one test, people asked to carry a bucket to the end of an alley picked up the nearer one and carried it further, just to get the first part done. A tiny first step uses that urge.
The productivity method Getting Things Done, from David Allen, has a rule for the smallest jobs: if it takes under two minutes, do it now.
Short, fixed blocks keep you going once you've started. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Francesco Cirillo used as a student in the late 1980s to split his work into 25-minute stretches. In a test with 87 students, those given set breaks, including a Pomodoro-style 24 minutes on and 6 off, felt less tired, more focused and more motivated than students who took breaks when they felt like it, and got as much done.
Decide when and where. Plans in the form "when this happens, I'll do that" made people noticeably more likely to follow through. "When I sit down after lunch, I'll write the first paragraph" leaves nothing to negotiate in the moment. It also quiets your head. Unfinished tasks keep popping into your thoughts and get in the way of other work, and making a specific plan for one was enough to stop that.
Picture who pays. The person who'll face the deadline is you, a few days older, and your brain treats that person a bit like someone else. When people thought about themselves ten years on, a brain area that responds to "me" reacted less, and the bigger that drop, the more they preferred money now over more money later. People shown aged-up pictures of their own faces were more willing to wait for a bigger reward than grab a smaller one now. Before you put it off, picture yourself the night before the deadline, and do one thing for that person.
Silence the exits. Your phone is the nearest escape hatch, and a single buzz is enough. A notification alone, left unanswered, disrupted a demanding task about as much as taking a call or sending a text. Turn notifications off and put the phone in another room while you start. With his publisher's deadline closing in, Victor Hugo is said to have put away his good clothes to keep himself indoors, wrapped himself in a grey shawl, and finished The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in January 1831.
Douglas Adams knew the pull. "I love deadlines," he wrote. "I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Weeks before So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was due, he had 25 pages, so his editor moved into a hotel suite with him and kept an eye on him until it was finished. Adams suggested his own epitaph: "He finally met his deadline."
Pair it with something you enjoy. When people could only listen to a gripping audiobook at the gym, they went to the gym about half as often again as people with free access, at first. The effect faded after a few weeks, so refresh the treat.
Name the feeling. When you notice yourself drifting away, say what the task makes you feel: bored, unsure, afraid it'll fall short. Putting a feeling into words takes some of its sting away, and the task gets smaller with it.
Use a fresh start. People are more likely to begin something new just after a landmark: the start of a week or month, a birthday, a new term. Searches for "diet" and gym visits both rose after them. If you've been stuck, pick the next landmark and start there.
Forgive yesterday. If you put it off again, let it go and plan the next small step.
If you're going to put things off anyway, make it useful. The philosopher John Perry noticed he got plenty done as long as it was a way of dodging something more important, and called it structured procrastination. His 1996 essay won him a 2011 Ig Nobel Prize, the award for work that makes people laugh, then think.
Pick the task you've been avoiding longest. Write down its first two-minute step and when you'll do it today.
If it runs your life, it can change. In a test with 150 adults, an online self-help programme built on cognitive behavioural methods cut procrastination moderately compared with a waiting list, and the version with a coach checking in helped most: between 31% and 40% of that group changed in a meaningful way.
A habit that has been with you all your life and touches everything, from bills to birthdays, deserves an attention assessment: in a small group of students, procrastination went with the attention problems seen in ADHD.
If you're young, take heart: older age groups put things off less. In 2,527 Germans aged 14 to 95, procrastination was highest between 14 and 29.
Start smaller than you think
Procrastination is your brain trying to make you feel better, and it works for about an afternoon. The fix is to make starting feel less bad: smaller steps, a set time, a thought for the person who pays, the phone out of reach, a small treat, a named feeling, a landmark to begin on and a fresh start after a slip.
Seneca wrote to a friend nearly two thousand years ago: "Lay hold of today's task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow's. While we are postponing, life speeds by."
Open the file. Write the heading. That counts. The spice drawer can wait.
Is the voice in your head calling you lazy? How to Silence Your Inner Critic When It Won't Shut Up — what the inner critic is and how to answer it.
Still polishing the plan? Why Your 'High Standards' Are Holding Back Your Career — the kind of high standard that makes you put things off.
Know someone who's been "about to start" for weeks? Send them this, and ask them for the first two-minute step.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. If your mood has been low for weeks or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, reach out for help today.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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