Procrastination Is Not a Character Flaw: What Psychology Knows About the Tasks We Put Off

People who put things off usually think of themselves as undisciplined. Research sees it differently. Procrastination has been studied thoroughly over the last twenty years, and the picture that emerges is less moral and considerably more useful: putting things off is a problem of emotion regulation, not of willpower. And it has a few levers you can actually pull.

What gets put off

In 2007 Piers Steel compiled, in a large meta-analysis, what predicts procrastination. Four factors stand out: how unpleasant a task is, how far away its consequences lie, how little you trust yourself to manage it, and how impulsive you are in general.

Aversiveness is the strongest factor. Tasks are not postponed because they are big, but because they feel bad: boring, frustrating, loaded with anxiety, unclear. The tax return is not too much work. It is unpleasant, and its benefit lies weeks away, while the relief of not starting it is immediate.

Steel sums this up in a formula, the Temporal Motivation Theory: motivation rises with the expectation of success and the value of the outcome; it falls with the delay until the reward and with your own impulsiveness. The formula is rough, but it shows where to intervene: expectation up, value visible, delay short.

Why it feels good in the short term

Timothy Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois took it one step further in 2013. Their thesis: procrastination is short-term mood repair. Whoever postpones an unpleasant task trades a bad feeling now for a worse feeling later, and the brain takes the trade because "now" weighs more than "later".

That explains why good intentions achieve so little. The intention is formed in the evening, with a clear head. The decision to start the task falls the next morning, with the unpleasant feeling right in front of you. Two different people are deciding there, and the second one has the worse hand.

Five interventions that work

From the research, a handful of measures can be derived that have repeatedly shown an effect. None of them requires more discipline.

1. Make the first step concrete. Since the 1990s Peter Gollwitzer has shown that if-then plans, so-called implementation intentions, clearly raise follow-through: not "I'll do the tax return" but "When I sit at my desk on Tuesday at 8pm, I open the folder with the receipts". The plan takes the power away from the in-the-moment decision. You no longer have to want, only to execute.

2. Break the task down until the first step is laughably small. Aversiveness attaches to the image of the whole task. "Tax return" is a mountain. "Get the receipts out of the drawer" is ten minutes. The trick is not to outwit yourself but to shrink the image the feeling is aimed at. Once started, most people keep going, and that is not an anecdote but the Zeigarnik effect: what has been started wants to be finished.

3. See only one task. A list with forty entries offers forty excuses. Every easy task is a legitimate escape from the hard one. If you see only the one task that is up now, the escape is cut off. That is why focus views work in tools and list views rarely do.

4. Forgive yourself. It sounds soft but is one of the most robust findings: Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett showed in 2010 that students who forgave themselves for putting off exam preparation procrastinated less on the next exam. Guilt makes the task even more unpleasant, and the unpleasant gets postponed. The circle closes unless you break it.

5. Bring the reward closer. The delay in Steel's formula can be shortened. Intermediate goals with a visible result, a box that can be ticked, feedback after every step. That is why ticking off a task is satisfying: it is the reward the task itself would only deliver in weeks.

What tools get wrong

Many apps reinforce the problem instead of solving it. They rate tasks by effort and comfort and thereby push exactly the tasks that feel good to the top, and the unpleasant ones down. That is procrastination as a sort function.

An order that helps with starting has to do the opposite: weight importance and deadlines, not penalise the unpleasant, and translate the big task into a first step that does not hurt. Then what sits on top in the morning is not the mountain, but the drawer with the receipts. And anyone can manage that.

To take away

Putting things off is a response to a feeling, not to a task. Shrink the feeling instead of condemning yourself for it and you get further: a concrete first step, a fixed time, only one task in view, and the kindness you would show a friend.