How can we overcome procrastination?

Last week I had an important speech to finish, yet I struggled to write the first line. With the deadline approaching, I found myself absorbed in matching pairs of socks in the laundry room. I then went into a Marie Kondo YouTube spiral, attempting to learn how to fold the toe of each sock inward about an inch from the top. It required effort and focus— which could have been going into the speech.

Odd-job cleaning is my default procrastination method when I’m putting off an important task.

Here’s what I thought as I tried to make the socks stand upright, just like MarieKondo does: “This doesn’t feel like laziness but some complex delay mechanism."

So, what is procrastination, and why does the act of deferral play such an important role in our lives?

The action of postponing something

“The voluntary delay of an intended action despite knowing that one will probably be worse off for the delay” is how research psychologists have typically defined procrastination. The research highlights why procrastination is about delaying for no good or discernible practical reason. That’s why we can feel guilt when we procrastinate.

“Procrastinate” is derived from the past participle of Latin verb procrastinare — “to put off until tomorrow.” When the word first began appearing in English in the mid-16th century, it took on layers of guilt and anxiety. “Procrastination is the thief of time,” the English poet Edward Young wrote in 1742. But is procrastination really about time management — or emotional management?

Short-term mood repair

For Dr. Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology, understanding how procrastination affects our well-being is his life-long passion. More than 20 years ago, he stopped studying what people were doing and started to focus on what people said they were going to do…but never did.

In 2013, Pychyl conducted a fascinating study with his colleague Fuschia Sirois that found that, “as a form of self-regulation failure, procrastination has a great deal to do with short-term mood repair and emotional regulation […] over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.”

At its core, procrastination isn't about putting something on the backburner for another day; it’s wrestling with the emotions we associate with a specific task.

“It’s all about our feelings,” Pychyl says. “Procrastination is the misregulation of emotion. We think that by putting things off, we’re going to feel better.” But we don’t. The task doesn’t go away. We just feel more stressed that we have less time to do it (and a bit guilty about the time we’ve wasted).

Avoidance mechanism

Seeing procrastination through the lens of emotion, not time or productivity, made me rethink its role in our lives. It’s a coping mechanism.

Underneath the deferral act (in my case, folding socks), we’re trying to cope with emotion — whether that’s frustration, boredom, anxiety, jealousy, fatigue, fear, or insecurity. Procrastination is a form of emotional avoidance.

I haven’t been on a stage in front of a live audience for almost two years now. When recording virtually, I can’t even see people’s faces or reactions. It’s been draining at times, but safe. It’s not surprising that I was feeling anxious about writing a speech to deliver to an in-person audience. My mind was racing: Can I still do this? What if I freeze in front of people? What if people think I have nothing new to say?

No wonder I retreated to Marie Kondo’ing my socks!

Sometimes we procrastinate because the task itself isn’t enjoyable — filing tax returns or cleaning out the bins come to mind. But it can also be the result of complex feelings related to the task. That’s why when we tell ourselves, “Oh, just stop procrastinating and get on with it,” it generally doesn’t work.

Managing our feelings and overcoming procrastination

Treat procrastination as emotional management, not a time management, problem.

Nir Eyal. author of Indistractable, has a great tip he calls “Surfing the Urge.” It’s cultivating curiosity around the uncomfortable feelings of procrastination. Eyal suggests that you:

1. Notice when you are putting something off.
2. Ask yourself what you are feeling — boredom, tiredness, or anxiety?
3. Label the feeling, e.g. “I’m frightened I can’t talk in front of a live audience.”
4. Sit with the discomfort and resist walking toward the distraction.
5. Like a wave, the feeling will rise, crest, and then eventually subside.

Procrastination is so tempting because it’s momentarily rewarding. I felt satisfaction in the laundry room, matching all my family’s stray socks. Tim Urban, in one of my favourite TED talks and posts on procrastination of all time, calls this “The Instant Gratification Monkey” — rewards that are easy and fun but are only about the present. The trick to overcoming procrastination is to find a far better reward than avoidance.

Sounds simple but it requires practice to stop something easy to start something our brain is telling us is difficult or scary. I find the most helpful way to stop procrastinating is to ask a simple question: What’s the one action I need to take to get started?

And then I try to imagine how satisfied I’ll feel when the task is done.

Warmly,

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