Procrastination: Why We Do It, and How to Move Forward
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well (Mark Twain)
In this blog post I outline some techniques that can help ease procrastination, as well as look at key emotional issues that may lie behind it.
Quick Read Summary
Putting things off isn’t always bad, but when it becomes avoidance it can harm our wellbeing and goals. Practical techniques - like breaking tasks into smaller steps, using the 5-minute rule, or the Pomodoro method - can help reduce feeling overwhelemed. But procrastination often has deeper emotional roots, such as perfectionism, low self-esteem, fear of failure, or even fear of success. Learning to accept imperfection, recognise the value of rest, and reframe failure as part of growth can make tasks easier to face. Where underlying emotions feel stuck, therapy can provide the support needed to move forward.
Putting things off is not always Procrastination
Procrastination ‘is the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so’ (Procrastination - Wikipedia). But if we accept this definition, putting things off is not always procrastination. Putting things off can be good. Mark Twain’s humorous quip is onto something important.
Procrastination can make things worse. Parking penalties that double in size if not paid within the first couple of weeks springs to my mind. As does intending to revise for an exam or prepare for an interview that could improve career prospects, yet just not doing so. Having the strong conviction that taking a health screening test is in your best interest, but not getting around to it, is another one. Procrastination can even stubbornly strike in relation to things we love doing, such as creative projects, or sporting activities.
If you’re reading this, you probably have a few examples of your own.
Procrastination as Emotional Avoidance
As a starting point, let’s assume that procrastination is not something entirely irrational. Let’s say it is helping us to avoid some discomfort. The discomfort maybe boredom or anxiety, and even a feeling of being overwhelmed. More on the emotional dimension below. First, let’s look at some techniques that can help ease anxiety and discomfort around tasks. This in turn can reduce procrastination.
Five Behavioural Techniques that can Help
These include:
1. Bite-Size the Task: Break the task into more manageable chunks. Reducing the time needed to spend on the task at any one time can reduce anxiety and boredom.
2. The 5-Minute Rule: Don’t promise to get a lot of the task done in one go, just promise to spend five minutes doing it. Like the previous technique, it can help to get over the initial barrier to getting started. The time-limit offers even more of a guarantee that it’s not going to be a lot at once. You can make this the 10 minute, 15, 30, or even 120 minute rule. Whichever works for you.
3. Remove Distractions: Distractibility can increase procrastination as more enjoyable things to do pop up. Get some distance from your phone and other people if this helps. Perhaps this is obvious. But sometimes it’s useful to remind ourselves of the obvious!
4. Prioritise and Schedule your Tasks: This can help ease paralysis – where you end up doing nothing because it all feels too much and impossible. Having a schedule reassures you that you have made time for the other things you need to get done, and so you can focus on the task in hand without panic. It’s worth asking yourself though, is my schedule realistic?
Are you in fact expecting continual and voluminous peak performance that borders on assuming that you are super-human?
5. The Pomodoro Technique: This combines principles of both the 5-minute rule, the bite-sizing, and the prioritising and scheduling strategies all in one. When researching for a piece of work, I’m often strongly motivated. I just want to get on with it – my interest and enthusiasm driving me forward. But when it comes to certain aspects, like writing up, or editing, I can really struggle. When I start to grind to a halt, I’ve found the Pomodoro Technique helpful. The structure, including regular compulsory breaks, helps me to stay focussed and not be overwhelmed by anxiety and boredom. For more information see: The Pomodoro Technique: What It Is & How It Boosts Productivity - LifeHack
When Behavioural Techniques are Not Enough
These behavioural interventions may at times be enough to help ease or resolve the problem. Just doing it, can bring a flood of positive emotion that breaks the habit of procrastination. At other times they may work to some extent, but they may also evoke some difficult emotions, which can turn into you dragging your feet again. It’s worth noticing these emotions and any sensations you experience. Sit with them. Describe them to yourself. This then makes them available to you for reflection.
So, what issues might drive procrastination?
Emotional Roots of Procrastination
Two key issues, often closely interwoven, that can underlie procrastination are perfectionism and diminished self-esteem.
If you have a tendency to expect things you do to be perfect or near perfect, this can feed procrastination. Unless you’re super-human, you’re setting the bar so high, that you’re defeated before you’ve even started.
It’s worth considering if perfectionism is creeping into your scheduling, and how much you expect yourself to be able to get done.
Perfectionism can go hand-in-hand with diminished self-esteem. Wanting to be perfect can be an attempt to make good low-self-esteem. I must do this perfectively in order to compensate for not feeling good enough. It can become a vicious circle, as the more I fail at being perfect, the more my self-esteem is diminished, and the more my self-esteem is diminished, the more I need to compensate by trying to be perfect. This dynamic can also be at play within depression, which can itself be a contributing factor in procrastination.
It may be quiet or loud messages from other people, perhaps from your past – for example schoolteachers, family or peer group that you’ve absorbed and are influencing how you feel about doing some tasks. Perhaps you ended up feeling that failing at something was a huge deal. Not starting or completing a task doesn’t bring success, but it avoids the possibility of a visible failure. It allows me to imagine I would succeed if I were to do it, without facing the possibility of failure. Perhaps more counterintuitively, a fear of success may be feeding procrastination. At some level I may be anxious about being seen as a ‘show off’ or as ‘too big for my boots’. Procrastination may in this sense even be fuelled by a fear of loss: the perceived loss of the respect of others.
Perfectionism Jars with Life
Perfectionism really goes against the grain of fundamental aspects of life:
Finite Time, Energy and Resources
We all have limited time in a day (and in life), and therefore there’s a limit to what we can get done.
On top of this, do you tend to quickly take for granted what you’ve achieved? What started out as s struggle can soon feel like an easy task. It’s easy once you know how, as the saying goes.
To counter this, it can be helpful to take a moment every so often to appraise what you’ve achieved. Recall the struggle you went through. Try also to remind yourself of the importance of rest. Schedule rest. Give yourself permission to take proper breaks. This can be easier said than done. Social and economic circumstances and responsibilities can at times make finding space to rest difficult. But if it feels impossible, then it may be worth exploring your boundaries and shoring up your capacity to say no to people.
Think Incubation
What is sometimes referred to as the incubation stage during the creative or problem-solving process, is an essential period of rest in which your mind works on a task subconsciously.
The ‘aha’, illumination stage follows on from this. In this sense some procrastination (or at least putting things off) is essential to doing things well!
Learning is Through Trial and Error
Learning and progress often occur fundamentally through a process of trial and error. Even when we learn through observing how others do something, we then see how best to apply it for ourselves through a process of trial and error.
The poet David Smith captures the importance of this in his poem ‘trial and error’:
The surest way to get to the good stuff in life,
Is by trial and error,
And not standing too long in front of a mirror.
The surest way to get to the bad stuff in life,
Is not to give time to trial and error,
And standing too long in front of a mirror.
Cognitively Reframe Tasks to Include Failure
The writer Ada Limon said that ‘all writing is basically failure’. She frames writing as an iterative process, involving the accepting of mistakes and the making of revisions. It’s this kind of framing that has helped me get past my own anxiety and to post this blog. Despite working hard on it, I can only post it with imperfections and incompleteness.
What could ever be perfect, no matter how much time, or how much ‘trial and error’ has gone into it? Even world esteemed artefacts are not perfect. For instance, some art critics do not like the Mona Lisa. From at least some perspective, whatever we do is not going to be perfect. The fact is that your best performance is not going to be perfect. It’s also fact that a lot of the time, you are not going to complete tasks to the best of your ability. If you follow any sport, what players do you know who play at their best all of the time? Which of your colleagues or friends are always on their best form?
So, it can be helpful to avoid looking at your activity through the frame of perfectionism.
Try to cognitively reframe your approach to the task: recognise that failure is both necessary and inevitable. Failure is something shared by everyone. It is part of the human condition.
This may help you to be more tolerant of failure – of the process of trial and error. This is likely to make you more able to get on with tasks, and also probably perform them better. As the writer Samuel Beckett said, 'fail, fail again, fail better'.
But this may not be the end of the story.
When our Emotions Say Something Different to What We Think
We often know something cognitively, but we can be in a very different place emotionally.
I might cognitively know that I am worthy and skilled, and that failure is not the end of the world. But emotionally, I may feel that I am useless.
Consequently, I may be inclined to see any failure as proof of this, and go into a withdrawal, by either not starting the task at all, or giving up on it quickly. Shame and fear are common emotions in this kind of scenario. Therapists sometimes refer to this as an emotional scheme.
Whilst cognitively reframing can change thought patterns, only feelings can change primary emotions like shame and fear. This is best done in relation to other people.
Good personal relationships can help with this. But the alliance within therapy tends to be a more effective way of addressing both cognitive and emotional schemes underlaying procrastination.
This is because the therapist has a facilitative expertise, works hard to notice such patterns of relating, and because the focus is more exclusively on the client and their best interests.
Final Thoughts
Procrastination can have a debilitating impact on your life, But be mindful that putting things off and resting are also crucial. It’s a matter of balance and context. Think incubation. Some behavioural techniques, as well as cognitive reframing may help ease or resolve procrastination. Great if that’s so. But if you’re still left with problem procrastination, or another problem emerges to replace it, it may be that you need to more directly address the underlying emotional dynamic.
If you have any questions and/or are interested in working with me on the problem of procrastination, and any other issues you are experiencing, please feel free to get in touch here. I offer a free 20-minute chat/ consultation.
