Why Do We Procrastinate? The Psychology of Putting Things Off

A task that is boring, frightening, ambiguous, or bound up with what we think of ourselves produces a small pang of discomfort when we think about starting it. Switching to something else makes the pang go away at once, and the relief is a reward that teaches the brain to do it again. Timothy Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois, who have led the research on this, describe procrastination as the primacy of short-term mood repair: the person is not choosing pleasure over work so much as choosing to feel better now at the expense of feeling worse later. The delayed task then acquires more dread, since it has become the thing one is guilty about, and the cycle tightens.

This explains a finding that puzzled earlier researchers: procrastinators are not lazier than other people and often work very hard, but on the wrong things, and they report more stress and guilt, not less. It also explains why the tasks most put off are not the hardest but the most emotionally loaded, the email to a person one has let down, the tax return, the creative work one cares most about.

The second ingredient is that people do not feel the interests of their future selves as their own. Brain-imaging studies find that when people think about themselves in ten years, the activity looks more like thinking about a stranger than about themselves now, and the more that is true of a person, the more they procrastinate and the less they save. The one who will have to write the essay at midnight is, at three in the afternoon, somebody else. Hal Hershfield showed that people who were shown aged photographs of their own faces put more into their pensions; the same connection is what a deadline supplies by force, which is why so much work happens in the last hours before one.

Surveys find that about a fifth of adults are chronic procrastinators, and about half of students say it is a problem for them. It runs in families and has a measurable genetic component, shared with impulsiveness, and it is linked to a few traits and situations:

• •Low conscientiousness and high impulsiveness, the two personality traits most reliably associated with it
• •Perfectionism of the self-critical kind, where starting means risking a result that is not good enough
• •Fear of failure, and its cousin, the fear of finding out how good one actually is
• •Tasks with distant deadlines, vague requirements or no visible progress
• •Low mood and anxiety, which both make the pang of starting sharper
• •A phone within reach, which offers instant mood repair at zero cost

Because the problem is emotional, the effective remedies work on the feeling rather than the schedule. Self-forgiveness comes first: students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on one exam procrastinated less on the next, whereas guilt made it worse, since guilt is exactly the feeling that starting brings up. Making the first step tiny lowers the pang below the threshold at which avoidance kicks in; the rule is to work on the task for a few minutes with permission to stop, and most people do not stop. Concrete plans of the form when X happens I will do Y, which psychologists call implementation intentions, roughly double the rate of follow-through in trials, because they move the decision out of the moment of dread. Removing the escape routes, by putting the phone in another room or using software that blocks the browser, is more effective than willpower. And making the future self vivid, by imagining the specific evening on which the work will otherwise have to be done, closes some of the distance.

What does not help much is time management alone. A planner tells the procrastinator when to do the thing; it does not make the thing feel any better to start, and a plan that is not followed becomes one more source of guilt.

Not all delay is procrastination. Deliberately putting a decision off until more is known, or letting a problem sit while the mind works on it in the background, is often the right call, and the writer who takes a walk before a difficult paragraph is not avoiding it. The test is whether the delay is chosen for the task's sake or for one's own relief, and whether it costs anything. Procrastination in the technical sense is voluntary delay of an intended action despite expecting to be worse off for it, and the last clause is what makes it a problem worth solving rather than a habit to be tolerated.

Many procrastinators say they do their best work at the last minute, and the feeling is genuine: the deadline brings focus, and there is no time left for the dread that made starting hard. Research has not been kind to the belief, though. A well-known study in the late 1990s followed university students through a term and found that those who procrastinated were less stressed and healthier early on, while the deadline was distant, but became more stressed and more often ill as it approached, and on average received lower marks. The early relief was real; it was paid for later, with interest.

Part of the illusion comes from the planning fallacy, the widespread tendency to underestimate how long a task will take even when you know that similar tasks overran before. If you expect an essay to take three hours and it takes eight, starting the night before feels efficient right up until it fails. Another part is memory: you remember the times the late rush worked and forget the times it did not. A simple test is to compare what you produce under pressure with what you produce given time, and to note how often the last-minute version was the best you could manage rather than your best.

The Canadian psychologist Piers Steel pulled ideas from economics and psychology into what he called temporal motivation theory, often summarised as a single equation. Your motivation to do something equals how confident you are of succeeding, multiplied by how much the reward is worth to you, divided by your impulsiveness multiplied by how long you must wait for the reward. The top half of the fraction is about the task itself. The bottom half explains why exactly the same task can feel urgent on one day and entirely optional on another.

Suppose an essay is worth 8 points of satisfaction to you and you rate your chance of doing it well at 0.75, giving 6 on top. With an impulsiveness of 2 and the reward 20 days away, motivation is 6 divided by 40, or 0.15. A video worth just 1 point, certain and available almost at once, scores 1 divided by 2, or 0.5, and wins easily. Rerun the sum with the deadline one day away and the essay scores 3. The numbers are invented, but the shape is real: you can tip the balance by raising your confidence, adding small nearer rewards or setting yourself earlier mini deadlines.

A well-known experiment by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch, published in 2002, asked whether people can use deadlines to protect themselves from procrastination. Students on a course had to write three papers. Some got evenly spaced deadlines, some could hand everything in at the end, and some could set their own binding deadlines in advance, with penalties for lateness.

Many students chose to set earlier deadlines for themselves, showing they knew they might procrastinate. Those who did performed better than students with no deadlines, but not as well as those given evenly spaced deadlines by the teacher, because self-chosen deadlines were often not spaced well. The lesson is that commitment helps, and spreading deadlines out helps most.

Procrastination is the avoidance of the bad feeling a task produces rather than of the task itself, rewarded by immediate relief and made worse by a weak connection to one's future self; it is linked to impulsiveness, self-critical perfectionism and fear of failure, and it costs more stress than it saves. The remedies that work address the feeling: self-forgiveness, a tiny first step, concrete if-then plans, blocked escape routes and a vivid picture of the self who will otherwise pay.