The Secret to Overcoming Procrastination Isn’t What You Might Think
I can’t remember the last time I did something before I absolutely had to. I don’t pay my bills until I get the second or third disconnection notice, and when my girlfriend and I took a vacation to Europe, I didn’t get my passport until the night before. Every six months I throw out the dirty dishes I’ve been putting off washing for half a year and buy new ones. At a recent writing job at a startup, my copy was due every two weeks; I’d do nothing for 13 days and then grind out 12,000 to 15,000 words in a brutal 20-hour marathon, during which I’d always, at some point, be nearly reduced to tears of despair, slumped at my desk, head in hands, swearing that I’d never, ever do this to myself again. (I always did it again, like clockwork, two weeks later.)
Procrastination is my own personal affliction; it’s also so common that it might be said to be universal. It’s not exclusive to losers, or even humans; pigeons procrastinate, and so do monkeys. Great men procrastinate. Leonardo da Vinci was once commissioned to complete a painting in seven months and took 25 years to finish it. Dying, he apologized for “leaving so much undone.” After Charles Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection and told friends it would completely overturn the scientific world, he took 22 years to actually put it to paper, spending the intervening decades on barnacle research about which, he wrote in his autobiography, “I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time.” The bigger the task, the more tempting it can be to wait until the last minute. In 2018, scientists started intensive efforts to save the northern white rhino—when there were only two left on the planet. I’m not criticizing; I understand. “Hey, should we start saving the northern white rhino? There’s only three or four left.” “Three or four? Man, what’s the rush?”
Procrastination is also becoming much more common; one study by Canadian professor Piers Steel found that the number of people who considered themselves chronic procrastinators had increased from 5 percent in 1978 to 26 percent in 2007. That figure has undoubtedly grown in the intervening years. Scientists have found that distractibility has a strong correlation with procrastination, and we’ve all become exponentially more distractible in the last decade and a half, if only because there are exponentially more distractions at our literal fingertips. This individual problem has become a collective one; after all, what is our boiling earth if not the result of us collectively saying, “Sure, we’ll stop burning oil—but not yet”?
But, for all that so many of us procrastinate, can anyone really explain why we do it? One theory lies in the word itself. While “procrastinate” is derived from the Latin procrastinare, which means “to put off until tomorrow,” it also shares etymology with the Greek term akrasia, which means acting against your better judgment. Technically speaking, procrastination is more than just delaying action; it’s a self-betrayal, a deviation. When we procrastinate, this etymology suggests, we are essentially misled by false desire, away from the path of proper action.
Squint a little and you can see this definition rests on the assumption that we are inclined, naturally and by default, toward proper action—“doing the right thing.” This is a widely accepted concept that’s spread from classical economic theory to much of the wider culture: that we are all innately rational actors who do what most benefits us. But what if we aren’t?
For the past couple of years, in an effort to trick myself into solving my little problem, I’ve redirected my procrastinatory impulse into looking for knowledge that will lead to a cure. Every time I stray from my work (OK, not every time), I force myself to eschew social media in favor of reading books, articles, and studies about how to overcome procrastination—a sort of meta-procrastination, a variation on “I have a book to finish, so of course I’ll clean my kitchen first.”
After a while, I had learned so much about procrastination that I was sure I could write a bestseller on overcoming procrastination. (I haven’t gotten around to writing it yet. Maybe next month.) But to my moderate chagrin, I’ve discovered that while everyone selling a book or course or app to help you blast through procrastination claims they’ve discovered the actual root cause of procrastination, and can often lay out a fairly convincing theory supported by varying amounts of evidence, a survey of the field reveals that there’s nothing even remotely resembling a consensus on what, exactly, my (our) problem is. Some believe it’s caused by a lack of confidence—that procrastinators fear, deep down, that they’ll screw things up, so their ego prevents them from beginning. (This was Sigmund Freud’s theory.) Others think the opposite, that it’s caused by overconfidence: that procrastinators don’t start their work until the last minute because they arrogantly overestimate their abilities. Then there are the “procrastinators are optimists” versus “procrastinators are pessimists” camps; according to the former theory, optimists believe their future selves will be more able and willing to tackle the task at hand, so they delegate to that more competent future self. The latter theory holds that pessimists overestimate how painful and unpleasant the work will be and are paralyzed with dread.
On a fundamental level, researchers can’t even agree if procrastination is doing something or doing nothing. To some, it’s what it appears to be, i.e., inaction, while others think it’s just the wrong sort of action, uncontrolled—that procrastinators are addicts, compulsively freebasing leisure with no thought of the morning after. There’s even a materialist wing of procrastination theory based on a 2018 study in which MRIs revealed that the amygdalas of procrastinators seemed to be fundamentally different from those of non-procrastinators—basically, you put off your work because you’re brain-damaged.
The theory that’s ascendant in today’s therapy-obsessed zeitgeist contends that procrastination is an emotional problem. (“Men will write 15,000 words in 20 hours instead of going to therapy.”) You feel bad, so instead of doing your work (which will make you feel even worse), you chase small immediate pleasures like scrolling on Instagram or watching YouTube videos, which makes you feel even worse because you’re still not working, leading you into a death spiral of avoidance.
Taken together, these theories call to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which each of them grasps a different part of the animal—the foot, the ear, the trunk—and comes up with a different description. But, as I went further down my procrasti-rabbit hole—the more I thought about procrastination instead of doing whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing—the more it seemed to me that there’s a fatal flaw at the heart of procrastination studies, that the elephant in the room isn’t actually procrastination, but something else entirely.
The main problem is that one of the foundational assumptions of how we define procrastination—that people are naturally inclined toward acting in their best interests—has been thoroughly debunked. Two Nobel prizes in the past decade have gone to men who’ve proven that we are not, in fact, rational actors at all: Richard Thaler, who demonstrated that people are predictably irrational, and Robert Shiller, who argued that markets, like investors, are not perfectly rational. This irrationality is apparent to anyone who’s ever worked in retail or gotten drunk in an airport Applebee’s, but it has somehow eluded, until recently, almost every economist in history. (No wonder their predictions are never right.) This is important because under the “rational actor” theory, every action that veers away from a theoretical utilitarian ideal has to be rationalized away as dysfunction—you’re looking at Twitter (X, sure) instead of doing your spreadsheets because your brain is damaged, or because your ego is locked into a defensive paralysis. It’s not possible that you might be doing exactly what you want, despite the fact that it’s a bad idea. You might say that you want pizza for dinner but, trust me, you actually want a salad. Desire doesn’t figure into this worldview, except as an adjunct to obligation—a conception that most adults recognize as comically wrong-headed. After all, no one ever procrastinates having sex, or eating ice cream.
A more realistic definition of procrastination is that it’s not a blockage of inherent reason, but a simple absence of desire. This seems both painfully obvious and vaguely revolutionary, and it’s not without its precedents. Socrates, according to Plato, argued that akrasia isn’t even a real thing, that it’s not possible to act against your better judgment because there is no better judgment. Actions have to be taken at face value, as de facto proof of motive. You’re not putting off your work—you’re choosing to fuck up.
Redefining procrastination like this makes a subtle but important distinction. Instead of seeing ourselves as rational actors who are mysteriously restrained—a quasi-medieval view of things that basically substitutes “an overactive amygdala” and “impostor syndrome” for “foul humours” and “evil spirits”—it opens a path to a more realistic definition of ourselves as fickle, irrational flakes who, like recalcitrant mules, must be cajoled, bribed, prodded, or bullied into action. (One of the only anti-procrastination strategies that ever worked for me was the trick—I can’t remember where I first came across it—of asking yourself, “How would someone handle this if they weren’t an absolute LOSER like you?” This would occasionally shame me into action.)
This also changes the complexion of anti-procrastination advice. Rather than being about surmounting intangible obstacles, the question becomes a much more straightforward one of how to prod yourself into doing things—or maybe not doing them. Some of the ancients, unencumbered by rickety notions of human rationality or the Protestant work ethic, had much different solutions for procrastination. The Epicureans advised that, if you found yourself putting something off, you should abandon it altogether. Admittedly, they didn’t have to work a 9-to-5, but maybe there’s something to the idea that if you find yourself chronically putting off your work, you should get a different job. It also forces us to confront the role—or absence—of desire in our lives. Consider how many of us live lives that mostly preclude the exercise of individual desire, except in microdoses of the most vicarious sort—looking at photos of food, or videos of other people having sex. That we would occasionally, or often, resist this bloodless pantomime seems reasonable. When we have access to so few real pleasures, the pleasure of refusal is irresistible. Fixing your procrastination might require fixing your life.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it isn’t really helpful as practical advice, which is probably why it doesn’t appear in the self-help books—which, in keeping with the spirit of the times, are more about making you feel good than actually helping you. Our day-to-day reality is that we all have things we must do in order to live—finish those spreadsheets so we get paid, write our high schooler’s college essay so they get into a good school, etc. How do we do them when we don’t want to?
My favorite anecdote about procrastination and motivation is from the life of Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, among many other books. In the late ’50s, Burgess was teaching in Borneo, drinking heavily, and hadn’t yet seriously embarked on his writing career. When he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a year to live, he moved back to England and, desperate to leave a legacy, wrote four books in less than a year, one of which was his masterpiece, Clockwork. (Happily, the diagnosis turned out to be false, and he lived until 1993. Rumor has it that the false diagnosis was arranged by someone in Borneo who wanted to get rid of Burgess—a cruel deception that might have been the best thing that ever happened to him.) As Burgess learned, and any true procrastinator knows, a look into the abyss is often the only surefire motivator. Getting things done might be less a matter of “feeling good” (a theory that seems pretty dumb when you spell it out like that) and more one of simple urgency. But desire can’t be purchased cheaply—an unfortunate fact for everyone pushing a quick-fix procrastination cure of breathing exercises or Pomodoro Technique timers. That we often have to tiptoe right to the edge of literal ruin just to finally, reluctantly accede to our best interests suggests just how deeply irrational we are, and how procrastination and desire are often intertwined with another universal impulse—that of self-destruction.
But while I’m no optimist (or maybe I am; I admit I occasionally find myself rationalizing that tomorrow’s self will be so much more willing and able to tackle today’s work), I feel that the will to act tends to manifest when it’s needed. The real agony of the procrastinator isn’t to create desire out of thin air, but to trust that it won’t come too late.
