The dreaded behaviour that is procrastination can be a minor problem, but also a serious problem when it gets out of control. It can quickly erode our quality of life, all for a tomorrow that never comes. Thus, I’ve put together this guide on what procrastination is and how we can all learn to overcome it. I hope you find it useful.
What Is Procrastination
First, let me get this out of the way. Procrastination isn’t the same as being lazy. When we procrastinate, we’re putting off a task until another time or in favour of another task, whereas being lazy means we’re just not willing to do the task (Burton, 2024).
According to me, and Klingsieck (2013), procrastination is a very well-known human phenomenon that has a negative impact on our performance and subjective wellbeing. It’s such a common issue that most people, at some point in their lives, will procrastinate (Krause and Freund, 2014).
Although procrastination is a well-known human phenomenon, it’s still not fully understood why this form of self-regulatory failure exists, let alone to this level (Steel, 2007). Yet, here we are as a species engaging in procrastination like it’s an Olympic sport. There’s also the complicating factor that we can procrastinate more or less depending on the context, so it’s not always a universal self-regulatory failure (Krause and Freund, 2014).
One of, if not the earliest descriptions of procrastination came from Hesiod’s writing from around 800 BC, Greece (Steel, 2007). This makes it one of the earliest possible citations for procrastination, and now I’m going to cite it here in my article.
Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.
Hesiod: Works and Days
Why Is Procrastination Bad?
Although on a subjective level, procrastination can affect our quality of life, that alone wouldn’t make it bad, bad. If you leave work until the last minute, yes, it’s stressful, but if the work gets done, most people don’t see a problem with having this as their habit. However, added stress, worry, and feelings of guilt add up.
But the big issue is that procrastination can stop us from seeking help when we need it, especially for health and mental health needs. According to Rozental and Carlbring (2014), procrastination leads to fewer mental health-seeking behaviours and leads to longer treatment delays, which exacerbates those mental health concerns. I waited years before seeking help for my psychosis.
The Psychology Behind Procrastination
There are several psychological factors that contribute to procrastination, affecting how we make choices regarding the tasks on our plate (Steel, 2007). The following is an outline of the more well-known factors.
Fear of failure
The fear of failure seems to be a factor I encounter a lot, especially when it comes to work. The fear of not meeting expectations or making mistakes can be paralysing, which then leads to task avoidance behaviours.
Perfectionism
A big part of a fear of failure is perfectionism. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do the best you can at a task. But if that pursuit of perfection leads to excessive planning, analysis, and the delaying of actually doing the work, then this would be a harmful pursuit of perfection. Plus, true perfection is impossible.
Self-doubt
Self-doubt can develop for many reasons, such as being a by-product of people-pleasing, abuse, or a poor review (either imagined or real). That loss of belief in ourselves and our abilities can fuel procrastination.
In fact, a fear of failure, perfectionism, and self-doubts are examples of the most common cognitions that may interfere with our ability to engage in a task (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014).
Task aversiveness
Task aversiveness, or a lack of task appeal, is a big factor in procrastination. The more unappealing a task or situation is, the more likely we’ll try to avoid it (Steel, 2007). For me, that’s housework. I’ve got very long legs, so everything involves bending over, even if only slightly, and it’s always murder on my back. Thus, I avoid household chores like they were covid in early 2020.
Lack of motivation
A lack of motivation is pretty much the sister to a task lacking appeal. A lack of intrinsic motivation can make it harder to start on any task, and given the fickle nature of motivation, it’s really easy to lack motivation to start something you can easily do tomorrow.
Poor time management
Another common factor is that we lack effective time management skills, which can lead to us feeling overwhelmed and disorganised. We don’t like to feel this kind of discomfort, so procrastination helps us alleviate that discomfort.
Low self-esteem
Poor self-esteem can affect our quality of life in several ways. For example, issues such as having negative self-beliefs can hinder productivity, as we may doubt our ability to complete the task successfully.
Timing of rewards and punishments
According to Steel (2007), it’s been understood for a long time that the further away an event is, the less impact it has on our decisions. For example, at university, you may know you have a dissertation to complete by the end of the year.
However, the reward or punishment associated with that and the deadline are so far away that it can make it difficult not to procrastinate. It feels like we have a lifetime to complete it, so we keep putting off starting on it. Even though we probably know that we’d do a better job of it if we started right away.
Difficulty focusing
It’s easy to be tempted by distractions, whether it’s social media or excessive multitasking. This can become exponentially harder when you have a learning difficulty, such as ADHD or dyslexia.
Strategies For Overcoming Procrastination
Identify your reasons for procrastinating
This might sound like a given, but it can often be difficult to work out. Grab a notebook or your journal and start reflecting on why you procrastinate. A good place to start might be when you first noticed yourself doing this. Consider if a fear of failure, perfectionism, or lack of motivation is a factor in your procrastinating. Figuring out the cause can provide insight into how to overcome that cause.
Time blocking
One of the most effective strategies is to allocate specific time blocks for different tasks to create a structured schedule. If you can make this schedule a routine, then all the better. These time blocks can work as environmental factors which help us engage in the tasks assigned to that time block (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014). This can be further helped by allocating specific locations for tasks, where appropriate, such as doing our homework in our office or local library.
The benefit of time blocking is that it sets a clear distinction of what that time is to be used for, removing any ambiguity that can be used to let procrastination slip back in. So add this time block to your calendar and self-nudge with a calendar reminder notification for it as well.
Pomodoro technique
Because it can be difficult to start a task, let alone stay on task, a method that has proven quite useful is the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique is about working in focused 25-minute intervals, followed by a short break of five minutes. Just enough time to make a drink or watch a funny video or two so you can access a microjoy. After four cycles of this, you can then take a 15-30 minute break, which might be a good time to grab something to eat so you can keep your energy up.
Animedoro technique
A common problem for people who procrastinate is the lack of reward working on such a task can bring. We can gain motivation if there’s a preferred reward for working on or completing a task. Thus, according to Rozental and Carlbring (2014), if we make gaining a reward contingent on starting to work on or completing a task, we’ll be more motivated to do so. This is what has been coined as learned industriousness (Eisenberger, 1992).
This is where the Animedoro technique comes into play. Although it can also work with the Pomodoro technique as well. However, I feel the Animedoro technique has a more enticing reward system. Unlike the Pomodoro technique, 25 minutes of work and a 5-minute break cycle, with the Animedoro technique, you do 40-60 minutes of work and take a 20-minute break. This should give you more than enough time to watch a single episode of anime. Of course, you don’t have to use that break time to watch anime, but the creator of this approach and myself are big anime fans.
Dopamine menu
Boredom, worry, and unpleasantness are several experiences reported by those who procrastinate (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014). Thus, another way to tap into our learned industriousness (Eisenberger, 1992) is to borrow an intervention from people who experience ADHD. This intervention is the dopamine menu. This is kind of like a reward system, but also a method to tap into your dopamine pathways so you can use the brain’s reward system to get shit done.
One such entry into your dopamine menu is reserved for helping you stay motivated by providing continuous reinforcement. For example, working while playing music in the background, so the music can help you feel energised. You can also allow yourself a little singalong and a dance from time to time.
For more on how to create a dopamine menu, check out my article on the subject by clicking here.
Avoid multitasking
It can be tempting to try multitasking, but all we’re really doing is switching our focus from one task to another in rapid succession, rather than true multitasking. This has negative consequences on the tasks we’re trying to multitask with. Thus, focusing on one task at a time is better at maintaining productivity.
Prioritisation
Another way to help avoid procrastination is to identify and create a list of tasks by how important they are or by their priority. This will make it harder not to work on the most important or high-priority tasks first. Think of how to do a to-do list and then order it by the task’s importance/priority.
Routines
Routines are a great way to reduce mental fatigue (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014) because they help reduce time spent thinking about what we need to do. Decision fatigue is a real problem and is a great way to let procrastination get in the way.
Break down tasks
We can easily feel overwhelmed by a task that just seems like a huge mountain to climb, but if we break it down into a series of molehills, then we’ll steadily make progress. For example, rather than just having ‘do chores’ on your to-do list, try breaking them down into individual tasks, such as putting the laundry on, emptying the dishwater, hovering the hallway, etc. Not only will this help us avoid feeling overwhelmed, but it’ll also give us a sense of achievement as we complete each task.
Set realistic goals
Often, when it comes to the things we have to do, the lack of goal-setting can be an avenue for procrastination to seep in. Setting achievable goals is also a good way to avoid feeling overwhelmed, and to tap into a brain’s reward pathways as we get a sense of achievement for achieving each goal. Combine this with breaking larger tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks, and sorting the tasks by priority, and you’ve got a winning formula.
Goal-setting as a way to overcome or reduce procrastination is supported by a large amount of research (Steel, 2007). Furthermore, although goal-setting can be a great way to tackle procrastination, vague goals lead to vague effort, and thus room for procrastination (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014).
Just like setting aside a block of time specific for your task helps you avoid procrastination, rather than having a vague idea of when you’ll do something, being specific about your goals helps you lock in what you’re to do. SMART goals can be very good for this. Thus, goal-setting is great for our motivation and our productivity.
Minimise distractions
Procrastination can bide its time until it can find the right moment to consume us, and such times can be the distractions we encounter throughout the day. One way to overcome this might be to create a mode on your phone that’ll limit your notifications, because once we check what the notification is about, it’s easy to get lost in our phones.
Another thing that you might want to do at the same time is to set a daily limit for how much you use your social media accounts. That way, you’ll be less likely to doomscroll through social media if you know you only have a finite time limit each day.
When working from home, you might want to minimise potential distractions. It’s these kinds of efforts to minimise distractions that can help us stay on task and limit their effects on starting a given task (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014).
Reward yourself
Creating healthy and semi-healthy rewards can be a great way to get you to start and complete tasks, as a lot of tasks don’t come with a sense of reward for completing them. So make your own. For a while, I gave myself the reward of getting a new tattoo every time I got eight blog articles ahead in my schedule.
Challenge negative thoughts
Often we have negative thoughts that cause us to procrastinate. If that sounds like something you experience, then learn to identify these thoughts and then challenge them. Putting your thoughts on trial and reframing are too easy-to-use thought challenges that can help you challenge these negative thoughts.
Seek accountability
Sometimes all we need is a little accountability. So if you have tasks to complete and you’ve created goals for those tasks, then share them and your progress with a friend or someone else. Sharing that information can give us enough accountability to get us working on our tasks and goals.
Embrace imperfection
It’s important to remember that perfection is impossible, and unless you’re designing a rocket for NASA, there’s not much use for seeking perfection. Thus, accept that perfection is not required and that good enough is always good enough.
Practice self-compassion
No matter what you try to overcome your procrastination with, always remember to treat yourself with kindness. Mistakes will happen, and you’ll lapse into old procrastination behaviours here and there, but that’s ok. Just try to learn from your experiences and keep trying to improve.
Cost/Benefit
Taking a left out of the motivational interviewing playbook. It can be useful to tackle your procrastination by doing a cost/benefit analysis of this behaviour (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014). This way you can see how helpful or harmful continuing with this will be to you and your quality of life.
Single-tasking
Try to engage in single-tasking, where you focus all your effort on one task before moving on to another (Microsoft, 2023), and before you know it, you’ll be ticking off the tasks like a master.
Just 10 minutes
Whatever the task might be, stick to working on it for 10 minutes, setting yourself a 10-minute timer. This can be a useful way to circumvent a lack of motivation to start a task, using a form of exposure therapy approach, so that you can activate your completion bias. Thus, triggering motivation.
Basically, we’re exposing ourselves to the minimal amount of effort we’re willing to exert, so we can get past the threshold that our procrastination is causing us (Rozental and Carlbring, 2014). Then, once you’ve done that (10 minutes) evaluate whether you’re going to continue. If you don’t want to continue, then this might be worth exploring by journaling.
Complacency
Complacency is such a huge issue that even the scientists working with the demon core suffered from it, resulting in avoidable deaths. Be mindful of letting bad habits take over as you become too complacent.
Competency
It’s always a good idea to work on maintaining existing skills and strengths, work to improve existing ones, and work on acquiring new ones as well. This is because if we lack confidence in what we’re to do, then we’re more likely to procrastinate (Steel, 2007). When we feel we’re capable of achieving what we set out to do, then we’re far more motivated to do it.
We can build confidence in several ways. Some of those ways might be to shadow someone at work who has more experience than you, seek training to develop skills that might be missing, and keeping a list of our achievements so we can reflect on them.
It can also be useful to take a silver lining approach (cognitive reappraisal) to review past situations where we might have an unfavourable view. This can be useful because there might have been overlooked positive takeaways that could help develop competence. For example, you might have thought you’d failed at something when really the reason things didn’t work out had nothing to do with you, but something outside of your control.
Energy levels
Factoring in energy levels is especially important for people like me with an invisible disability, but even people without a disability should be mindful of the amount of spoons they have. That will help avoid burnout.
As Rozental and Carlbring (2014) put it, a lack of energy can lead to a decrease in self-control, which in turn leads to procrastination. After all, if you’re already feeling tired, it’s going to be far harder to convince yourself to do stuff that will require more energy from you, whether mental or physical. What’s more, if you’re the kind of person who leaves things to the last minute, then not considering what your energy levels will be when you eventually start that task will bite you in the arse.
Seek professional help
If you’re still struggling with your procrastinating, then consider therapy so that a therapist can help you understand the root causes of your procrastination, helping you develop effective coping strategies better tailored to your needs.
Summary
Procrastination happens to the best of us, and it appears this has been an issue we’ve been facing as a species since the dawn of time. But we don’t have to let it keep winning. Many time management strategies can be used to help tackle this issue, so engage in some trial and error and find out what works best for you.
Remember, overcoming procrastination is a gradual process. Be patient with yourself, celebrate small victories, and don’t be afraid to seek help when needed. By understanding the underlying causes and implementing effective strategies, you can take control of your time and achieve your goals.
As always, leave your feedback in the comments section below. Also, please share your experiences with procrastination in the comments section below. Don’t forget, if you want to stay up-to-date with my blog, you can sign up for my newsletter below. Alternatively, click the red bell icon in the bottom right corner to get push notifications for new articles.
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References
Burton, N. (2024, June). Are you a procrastinator or just a lazybones?. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/hide-and-seek/201505/whats-the-difference-between-procrastination-and-laziness.
Eisenberger, R. (1992). Learned industriousness. Psychological Review, 99(2), 248. Retrieved from https://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Learned-Industriousness.pdf.
Klingsieck, K. B. (2013). Procrastination. European Psychologist. Retrieved from https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/1016-9040/a000138.
Krause, K., & Freund, A. M. (2014). How to beat procrastination. European Psychologist. Retrieved from https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/88949/1/KKrause_AMFreund_R2_06032013.pdf#page=4.23.
Microsoft. (2023, November). What is single-tasking (and is it better than multi-tasking)?. Microsoft 365. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/organization/what-is-single-tasking-and-is-it-better-than-multi-tasking.
Rozental, A., & Carlbring, P. (2014). Understanding and treating procrastination: A review of a common self-regulatory failure. Psychology, 5(13), 1488. Retrieved from https://www.scirp.org/html/3-6901262_49793.htm.
Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65. Retrieved from https://www.dannhearing.com/website/cmsAdmin/uploads/2018-01-02-Procrastination.pdf.
I needed to see this post! Procrastination has definitely been a problem for me. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve yet to meet someone who hasn’t had issues with it at some point. Thanks for commenting
Thank you for sharing your tips. I did not know that there are various techniques to overcome procrastination. I sometimes have procrastination habit when it comes to doing things I don’t like. Hehehe.
Thanks for commenting
These tricks are pure gold! Procrastination has been a huge hurdle, but I’m excited to try some of these out. I’m reminded to reward myself. It is one I had in place but have not kept in place. Thanks for the motivation!
You’ll have to let me know how they work out for you. Thanks for commenting
For me completing a task starts with removing distractions, finding the most interesting thing about the project to fuel my interest, and making a to-do list. The rest follows by maintaining consistency. I think you have covered every type of work issues and tips that can help us improve work and personal growth. Thanks for sharing this helpful post. You are so inspiring!
Thanks for sharing what works for you
THANK YOU!!!!! I have been procrastinating like an absolute trooper this week. I’m not entirely sure why, and this post was sooooo helpful.
I’d never thought about why I procrastinate before, and I don’t think I’d have identified it without you nailing it there in black and white. I am definitely in the ‘perfection’ camp, and I’m pretty sure that’s why I’ve been putting some things off this week, because I’ve been struggling with the idea that it won’t be perfect – and that’s before I even started!
Just identifying it has made me feel like I want to crack on!
I love all the tips you’ve given. I need to try and get into the headspace of ‘better done that perfect’ a bit more.
Here’s to a more productive week next week!
Thank you as always for such helpful and useful and thought provoking posts.
Sally
Thanks for sharing. I used to be in the perfectionist camp, but now I think I’m closer to the fear of failure, which is why I try to act before I talk myself out of things nowadays
Great article! One trick that’s helped me combat procrastination is using a habit tracker app. It provides visual feedback and helps me stay consistent with my tasks. Do you find that using digital tools enhances the effectiveness of these strategies?
I rely on calendar notifications for a sizable amount of the stuff I need or want to get done. I don’t think I’d be able to cope without my phone providing that function for me
This is such an informative post! I love how you’ve balanced in-depth analysis with practical advice, and the examples you provided were incredibly helpful in clarifying key points. I can tell you’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, and I really appreciate how generously you’ve shared your knowledge.
Thanks for commenting
Great post as always! This one hits very close to home as an ADHD fear-of-failure perfectionist with a loose-structure WFH lifestyle. I definitely am my most productive self when I time-block, focus on a single task, and move my phone to a different room. Also, easier with the help of therapy and medication. It’s hard! But possible. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for sharing your experience and what works for you
I think I procrastinate when I want to do my best and worry that I can’t.
A common reason for procrastination