The Real Reason You're Procrastinating—And What To Do About It

I've been meaning to write a post about procrastination, but I just haven't had the time to get to it.

Thank you! I'll be here all week.

Look, procrastination is not a behavior of which I’m proud. Like Dunkin Donuts and doom scrolling, it is an evil I know I shouldn’t indulge in, but I do it anyway, against all common sense.

But, thankfully, I’m not alone. I was relieved to learn the results of a poll I conducted asking listeners of my podcast Write About Now to reveal the biggest obstacle to achieving your goals.

Procrastination was tied for first place with Fear of Failure (another one of my go-to time sucks).

Another gratifying fact about procrastination that I learned recently is that it has been the scourge of humanity for thousands of years. Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato suffered from it. They just had a different word for it—akrasia, which sounds more like a skin disease than an annoying behavior.

What is procrastination?

Procrastinating is delaying or postponing a task you know needs to be done. Nobody makes us procrastinate. It is a voluntary choice we make even though the result is often regret, anxiety, and even self-loathing.

So why do we do this to ourselves? And what can we do to reverse the bothersome trend?

First, to understand the real reasons we procrastinate, let's debunk the #1 myth about why we do it in the first place: Because we're disorganized.

Not true.

"Procrastination is not a time management issue. It's an emotional management issue," stresses Petr Ludwig, author of The End of Procrastination: How to Stop Postponing and Lead a Fulfilled Life, during my interview with him on the Write About Now Podcast.

In other words, he believes we procrastinate because of how we feel about ourselves, not because we're bad at making to-do lists.

Why we procrastinate

He gives three main reasons for procrastinating: lack of intrinsic motivation, lack of willpower, and fear of failure. So let’s unpack these for a second.

Lack of motivation

Many of us feel a lack of purpose at work and if life. In a post-pandemic world amidst a global economic crisis and political turmoil, feeling inspired about the world can be challenging — much less your job.

"We are not motivated at work because we don't believe in what we are doing," explains Ludwig. "If you are working on a project and you lack purpose, it's truly difficult to stay motivated."

The result is escaping from the stress and effort of a particular task by doing something you know you shouldn't do. As the great American writer Mark Twain once joked, "Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well."

Lack of willpower

When faced with big demands or stressful situations, our willpower often diminishes, making it more challenging to resist the lure of social media, video games, and other procrastination tools.

Fear of failure

Another reason we procrastinate is because we're anxious, often irrationally, that the result of our work might not be well received. "We are often so scared of failure that we are unable to start," says Ludwig.

So how do we stop procrastinating?

It takes practice and some basic changes in how you approach your life, but there is a tried-and-true remedy for procrastination. And, once again, it doesn’t have to do with getting an organization app on your phone.

As I noted earlier, procrastination points to a larger problem that you lack overall purpose in your life, so it may be time to get it back. Ludwig encourages you to think about the activities that you truly enjoy doing in your life and the tasks that make you feel the most fulfilled.

"At work, ask yourself what your strengths are and how you can deploy those strengths on a daily basis," he advises. "Those are small steps that can improve your daily life because the more intrinsic motivation you have, the more often you are in what is called a state of flow. You enjoy the process. Time stops for you."

This state of flow, he says, is the exact opposite of procrastination because when you're doing something meaningful, you're more likely to have positive emotions.

Enjoy the path, not the destination

Ludwig encourages people to focus more on the journey than the end goal.

"The process is the best solution for fighting procrastination because when you enjoy the process, you love what you are doing and won't postpone it.

Break big tasks into smaller tasks

Sometimes just the overwhelming nature of a task you dread doing can be paralyzing.

Overcoming this paralysis often involves breaking down the task into smaller, more manageable steps, making it feel less overwhelming and more attainable.

This is what Ludwig describes as emotional management. "Your very intense negative emotion towards the task goes down, and your willpower kicks in," says Ludwig. "Stronger willpower also leads to greater satisfaction because when we manage to prioritize better, the centers of rewards in our brains are activated, dopamine is released, and we experience positive emotions."

Cut yourself some slack

Next time you catch yourself procrastinating, practice a little compassion instead of beating yourself up about it. "Self-forgiveness" is a helpful strategy in fighting procrastination, says Ludwig.

He points to a study done at Carlton University in 2009, in which 119 first-year students were asked to complete measures of procrastination and self-forgiveness immediately before two midterm exams. Results revealed that the students who forgave themselves for procrastinating in prepping for the first exam were less likely to procrastinate in studying for the second exam.

"Sometimes it's just about forgiving ourselves and starting again," Ludwig says.

When I asked Petr if he procrastinated writing his book, he seemed stunned at the stupidity of the question.

“Of course!” he said. “If you are procrastinating and writing a book about procrastination, it's twice as painful. But at the end of the day, I had to sit and write and deploy all my strategies on myself. I had to ask myself: What is the reason behind writing a book? It's not money, obviously, because if you spend two years of writing a book, you cannot say that you do it for money. You have to have a higher purpose. So in my case, it was truly to help as many people as possible. To fight their procrastination and to improve their lives.”

Amen to that, brother.