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David McRaney has worked as an editor, a photographer, a voiceover artist, a television host, a public speaker, a TV producer, and a journalist. David, being a deeply intelligent and thoughtful man, has focused his work on revealing the self-delusions and cognitive biases by which we live our lives. He has written a book called You Are Not So Smart and also runs a blog and podcast by the same name to help provide the world with his findings.
David joins me today to discuss this phenomenon of self-delusion, and how each of us sees the world differently. We talk about how our experiences can change the way we view the world, and his deep desire to better understand and know himself. We also touch on how we managed to write his last book while his house was hit by a tornado, and other challenges he faced while writing his books.
“You will find a place in your life where you can extract value from the chaos.”
This week on the School For Good Living Podcast:
• Our understanding of the world is always changing
• Writing through a tornado
• The powerful influence of PTSD
• How a mindset can help you lose weight
• The wrong way to influence people
• Always challenge your assumptions
Resources Mentioned:
• You Are Not So Smart
• goodliving.com
Connect With The Guest:
• DavidMcRaney.com
Subscribe and sign up for more!
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

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Procrastination – You Are Not So Smart

The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking. … Dav McRaney October 27, 2010 Articles …

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Source: youarenotsosmart.com

Date Published: 6/30/2021

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How to Outsmart Yourself: Predicting Procrastination and the …

A stellar article that’s been making the rounds recently is “On Procrastination” by Dav McRaney from the You Are Not So Smart blog (Tagline: “A …

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Source: mbird.com

Date Published: 12/20/2021

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THE MISCONCEPTION – Quote by David McRaney – Goodreads

Dav McRaney — ‘THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well. THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakn…

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Source: www.goodreads.com

Date Published: 7/15/2022

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Book Summary: You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney

“If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become ealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a …

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Source: www.samuelthomasdavies.com

Date Published: 8/5/2022

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Oneworld Publications – You Are Not So Smart: Procrastination

celebration of self-delusion, Dav McRaney explores in the assorted ways we mislead ourselves everyday. Based on the popular blog (youartnotsosmart.com),

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5 Great Articles about Procrastination – The Electric Typewriter

Procrastination by Dav McRaney – Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

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(Video) The Definition Of Procrastination & Why You Are Not So Smart

I came across this Veo today by Dav McRaney who is the Author of “You Are Not So Smart”. This is an amazing book and puts things into great perspective …

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Date Published: 11/23/2021

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Can’t Stop Procrastinating? Just Procrastinate Better – Big Think

Procrastination is often unfairly regarded as productivity’s evil twin, … Procrastination is, in the words of the great Dav McRaney, …

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주제에 대한 기사 평가 david mcraney procrastination

• Author: Brilliant Miller
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• Date Published: 2021. 7. 6.
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Why is procrastination also referred to as present bias?

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them.

Why procrastinate?

People often procrastinate because they’re afraid of failing at the tasks that they need to complete. This fear of failure can promote procrastination in various ways, such as by causing people to avoid finishing a task, or by causing them to avoid getting started on a task in the first place.

Is procrastination a challenge?

Procrastination is a challenge we have all faced at one point or another. For as long as humans have been around, we have been struggling with delaying, avoiding, and procrastinating on issues that matter to us.

Is procrastination a cognitive bias?

Present Bias a.k.a. Why we procrastinate, eat junk food, and don’t save for retirement. Those of us who struggle with procrastination are intimately acquainted with the Present Bias. The Present Bias describes our tendency to choose a smaller, immediate reward over a larger reward in the future.

Is procrastination a choice?

Another way to look at it: procrastination is your mind refusing to accept some truths that you may find uncomfortable: you have already made a choice. By not doing something, you’ve actually chosen (consciously, unconsciously or subconsciously) to not do it.

What is the root of procrastination?

Etymologically, “procrastination” is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare — to put off until tomorrow. But it’s more than just voluntarily delaying. Procrastination is also derived from the ancient Greek word akrasia — doing something against our better judgment.

What are the 4 types of procrastinators?

They say that there are four main types of avoidance archetypes, or procrastinators: the performer, the self-deprecator, the overbooker, and the novelty seeker.

What are 3 common types of procrastinators?

Is procrastination a mental illness?

Some people spend so much time procrastinating that they are unable to complete important daily tasks. They may have a strong desire to stop procrastinating but feel they cannot do so. Procrastination itself is not a mental health diagnosis.

What are the 5 steps to combat procrastination?

How do you cure procrastination?

What is present bias?

Present bias is the inclination to prefer a smaller present reward to a larger later reward, but reversing this preference when both rewards are equally delayed.

What is procrastination bias?

Procrastination Bias: When it comes to making decisions, your brain places higher value on reaping immediate rewards than it does on those that might be earned in the future. Scientists refer to this dilemma as a battle between your Present Self and your Future Self.

Why do we procrastinate present bias and optimism?

Experimental results refute the hypothesis that present bias is the sole source of dynamic inconsistency, but they are consistent with optimism. These findings offer an explanation for low takeup of commitment and suggest that personalized information on past choices can mitigate pro- crastination.

How do you handle present bias?

Procrastination

The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.

If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think.

Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to “Dead Man Walking” from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?

Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and it is the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.

A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Some were lowbrow like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Some were highbrow like “Schindler’s List” or “The Piano.” In other words, it was a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb. After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was. All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day. Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies like “The Mask” or action flicks like “Speed” when they knew they had to watch it forthwith.

Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third. When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, “Schindler’s List” was 13 times less likely to be chosen at all. The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good. As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys. Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.

You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights. One day you have the choice between running around the block or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger. The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year.

Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life.

You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents. You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote. You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Shouldn’t you wash clothes now so you don’t have to waste a Sunday cleaning every thing you own? Perhaps the stakes are higher than choosing to play Angry Birds instead of doing sit-ups. You might have a deadline for a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or a book. You’ll get around to it. You’ll start tomorrow. You’ll take the time to learn a foreign language, to learn how to play an instrument. There’s a growing list of books you will read one day. Before you do though, maybe you should check your email. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going, it won’t take long to go grab one. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.

You keep promising yourself this will be the year you do all these things. You know your life would improve if you would just buckle down and put forth the effort.

You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time – you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are over 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?

To explain, consider the power of marshmallows.

Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children. The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell after which the researcher would end the experiment. Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises. In the end, a third couldn’t resist.

What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition – thinking about thinking. Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high-school, college and into adulthood where they accumulated children, mortgages and jobs.

The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them. They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in. The younger the child, the worse they were at metacognition. Any parent can tell you little kids aren’t the best at self-control. Among the older age groups some were better at devising schemes for avoiding their own weak wills, and years later seem to have been able to use that power to squeeze more out of life.

“Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.” – Jonah Lehrer from his piece in the New Yorker, “Don’t”

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now or later. Later is murky place where anything could go wrong.

If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right?

Ok, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time. A being of pure logic would think, “more is more,” and pick the higher amount every time, but you aren’t a being of pure logic. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one which you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later – even if the later reward is far greater.

In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before. If you considered which would be more valuable in a month – continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop – you would pick the greater reward.

The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt. Old you, if there even is one, can deal with those things.

Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things don’t want to deal with, but you also over-commit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.

“The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.” – Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today

One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines. Let’s imagine you are in a class where you must complete three research papers in three weeks, and the instructor is willing to allow you to set your own due dates. You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two on the first week and one on the second. You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. It’s up to you, but once you pick you have to stick with your choice. If you miss your deadlines, you get a big fat zero.

How would you pick?

The most rational choice would be the last day for every paper. It gives you plenty of time to work hard on all three and turn in the best possible work. This seems like a wise choice, but you are not so smart. The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a 2002 study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Ariely. They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.

Which class had the better grades?

Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst.

Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade. Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers. The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated. Those people who weren’t honest with themselves about their own tendencies to put off their work or who were too confident didn’t have a chance to fool themselves.

Interestingly, these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it. – Dan Ariely, from his book “Predictably Irrational”

If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect some day far away.

You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is a you sometime in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires, a you in a different setting where an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.

The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food which future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

I wrote a whole book full of articles like this one: You Are Now Less Dumb

Watch the beautiful new trailer here.

Go deeper into understanding just how deluded you really are and learn how you can use that knowledge to be more humble, better connected, and less dumb in the sequel to the internationally bestselling You Are Not So Smart. Preorder now at: Amazon | B&N | BAM | Indiebound | iTunes

Sources:

Ariely, D., & Wertenbroch, K. (2002, May). Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment. Psychological Science 13(3), 219–224.

Ayduk, Ozlem N.; Rodolfo Mendoa-Denton, Walter Mischel, Geraldine Downey, Philip K. Peake, Monica L. Rodriguez (2000). “Regulating the interpersonal self: Strategic self-regulation for coping with rejection sensitivity”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79: 776–792.

Bloch, M., Cox, A., McGinty, J. C., & Quealy, K. (2010, January 8). A peek into Netflix queues. New York Times. Milkman, K. L., Rogers, T., & Bazerman, M. H. (2010, March).

Lehrer, J. (2009, May 18). DON’T! The secret of self-control. Retrieved 2010, from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

Mischel, Walter; Ebbe B. Ebbesen, Antonette Raskoff Zeiss (1972). “Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification.”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (2): 204–218.

Mischel, Walter; Yuichi Shoda, Monica L. Rodriguez (1989). “Delay of gratification in children.”. Science 244: 933–938.

Milkman, K. L., Rogers, T., & Bazerman, M. H. (2009, June). I’ll have the ice cream soon and the vegetables later: A study of online grocery purchases and order lead time. Marketing Letters 21(1), 17–35.

Read, D., Loewenstein, G., & Kalyanaraman, S. (1999, December). Highbrow films gather dust: Time-inconsistent preferences and online DVD rentals. Management Science 55(6), 1047–1059.

Schlam, Tanya R.; Nicole L. Wilson, Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, Ozlem Ayduk (2013). “Preschoolers’ delay of gratification predicts their body mass 30 years later”. The Journal of Pediatrics 162: 90–93.

Shoda, Yuichi; Mischel, Walter; Peake, Philip K. (1990). “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions”. Developmental Psychology 26 (6): 978–986.

Mixing virtue and vice: Combining the immediacy effect and the diversification heuristic. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12(4), 257.

Links:

How to Outsmart Yourself: Predicting Procrastination and the War Inside Your Brain

A stellar article that’s been making the rounds recently is “On Procrastination” by David McRaney from the You Are Not So Smart blog (Tagline: “A Celebration of Self Delusion”!). We’ve talked about the Netflix queue phenomenon on here before as evidence of the disconnect, or discrepancy, between who we’d like to be and who we actually are. But that’s just where McRaney begins – not to mention Christianity… There are some important insights here about the limits of self-knowledge, especially when it comes to our less impressive tendencies, and how those play out in everyday situations; that is, a lot of procrastination is the fruit of an inflated self-image/anthropology. The barrage of studies he cites is impressive, his conclusions pretty undeniable, and the whole thing very much worth your time (right NOW). Here are a few portions, written in the second person, to whet your appetite:

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good. As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys. Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.

You keep promising yourself this will be the year you do all these things. You know your life would improve if you would just buckle down and put forth the effort. You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time – you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are over 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now or later. Later is murky place where anything could go wrong.

If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness. Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect some day far away.

You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is a you sometime in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires, a you in a different setting where an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.

The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game. The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

Book Summary: You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney

Print | Hardcover | Audiobook

The Book in Three Sentences

We have no clue why you act the way we do, choose the things we choose or think the thoughts we think Our errors in thinking are caused by cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies We can better deal with these biases once we understand them

The Five Big Ideas

We think we know how the world works, but we really don’t We narratives to explain why we do what we do Cognitive biases are predictable patterns of thought and behavior that lead us to draw incorrect conclusions Heuristics are mental shortcuts we use to solve common problems Logical fallacies are like maths problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing it

You Are Not So Smart Summary

“There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose or think the thoughts you think.”

“From the greatest scientist to the most humble artisan, every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing it.”

“You are naturally hindered into thinking in certain ways and not others, and the world around you is the product of dealing with these biases, not overcoming them.”

“Cognitive biases are predictable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.”

“Heuristics are mental shortcuts you use to solve common problems. They speed up processing in the brain, but sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important.”

“Logical fallacies are like maths problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing it … They are arguments in your mind where you reach a conclusion without all the facts because you don’t care to hear them or have no idea how limited your information is.”

“Logical fallacies can also be the result of wishful thinking.”

1. Priming

Priming is when a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on. (Sam: Dan Ariely discusses priming at length in his book, Predictably Irrational .)

“Priming works best when you are on autopilot when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave.”

“You can’t self-prime, not directly. Priming has to be unconscious; more specifically, it has to happen within what psychologists refer to as the adaptive unconscious—a place largely inaccessible.”

Often, we are unaware of how unaware we are.

“Priming works only if you aren’t aware of it, and those who depend on priming to put food on the table work very hard to keep their influence hidden.”

“You are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances.”

2. Confabulation

Confabulation describes our tendency to ignore our motivations and create fictional narratives to explain our decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.

3. Confirmation Bias

“When the frequency illusion goes from a passive phenomenon to an active pursuit, that’s when you start to experience confirmation bias.”

Confirmation bias occurs when you perceive the world through a filter, thinking selectively.

Put simply, you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

“People like to be told what they already know.”

4. Hindsight Bias

We often look back on the things we’ve just learned and assume we knew them or believed them all along. This is known as hindsight bias.

“You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today.”

“Hindsight bias is a close relative of the availability heuristic.”

“The availability heuristic shows you make decisions and think thoughts based on the information you have at hand while ignoring all the other information that might be out there.”

“You do the same thing with Hindsight Bias, by thinking thoughts and making decisions based on what you know now, not what you used to know.”

5. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

“Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.”

“If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.”

“Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.”

“You commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame.”

6. Procrastination

“Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.”

“Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater.”

“One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines.”

“If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.”

“You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination.”

The trick to overcoming procrastination is to accept that the now-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future-you—a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

7. Normalcy Bias

“No matter what you encounter in life, your first analysis of any situation is to see it in the context of what is normal for you and then compare and contrast the new information against what you know usually happens … Because of this, you have a tendency to interpret strange and alarming situations as if they were just part of business as usual.”

“In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or a towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all.”

“Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before.”

8. Introspection

The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up. This is called the introspection illusion.

9. The Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic describes our tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with.

“The old adage ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ is the availability heuristic at work.”’

“It’s simply easier to believe something if you are presented with examples than it is to accept something presented in numbers or abstract facts.”

10. The Bystander Effect

The more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help. This is known as the bystander effect.

“Whether it is to donate blood, assist someone in changing a tire, drop money into a performer’s coffers, or stop a fight—people rush to help once they see another person leading by example.”

11. The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Here’s how McRaney describes the Dunning-Kruger Effect

The more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work. You start to see the complexity and nuance; you discover masters of your craft and compare yourself to them and see where you are lacking. On the other hand, the less skilled you are, the less practice you’ve put in, and the fewer experiences you have, the worse you are at comparing yourself to others on certain tasks. Your peers don’t call you out because they know as little as you do, or they don’t want to hurt your feelings.

“If you want to be great at something, you have to practice, and then you have to sample the work of people who have been doing it for their whole lives.”

12. Apophenia

“Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind. This is known a apophenia.”

13. Brand Loyalty

“You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self. This is called brand loyalty.”

14. The Argument from Authority

“When you see the opinions of some people as better than others on the merit of their status or training alone, you are arguing from authority.”

15. The Argument from Ignorance

The argument from ignorance is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary.

“You don’t know what the truth is, so you assume any explanation is as good as another.”

16. The Straw Man Fallacy

“When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending.”

“Any time someone begins an attack with ‘So you’re saying we should all just . . .’ or ‘Everyone knows . . . ,’ you can bet a straw man is coming.”

17. The Ad Hominem Fallacy

“When you assume someone is incorrect based on who that person is or what group he or she belongs to, you have committed the ad hominem fallacy.”

18. The Just-World Fallacy

“When you hear about a situation you hope never happens to you, you tend to blame the victim, not because you are a terrible person but because you want to believe you are smart enough to avoid the same fate.”

“It is common in fiction for the bad guys to lose and the good guys to win. This is how you would like to see the world—just and fair. In psychology, the tendency to believe that this is how the real world works is called the just-world fallacy.”

“You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.”

19. The Public Goods Game

“The public goods game suggests regulation through punishment discourages slackers.”

20. The Ultimatum Game

“When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status.”

21. Subjective Validation

“You are prone to believing vague statements and predications are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.”

“The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards.”

The Forer effect is part of a larger phenomenon psychologists refer to as subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.

22. Cult Indoctrination

“Cults are populated by people just like you.”

“The research on cults suggests you don’t usually join for any particular reason; you just sort of fall into them the way you fall into any social group.”

23. Groupthink

“The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.”

“For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment.”

“True groupthink depends on three conditions—a group of people who like one another, isolation, and a deadline for a crucial decision.”

“When groups get together to make a decision, an illusion of invulnerability can emerge in which everyone feels secure in the cohesion. You begin to rationalize other people’s ideas and don’t reconsider your own. You want to defend the group’s cohesion from all harm, so you suppress doubts, you don’t argue, you don’t offer alternatives—and since everyone is doing this, the leader of the group falsely assumes everyone is in agreement.”

24. Supernormal Releasers

A supernormal releaser is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.

25. The Affect Heuristic

“The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic.”

“The affect heuristic is one way you rapidly come to a conclusion about new information.”

“When first impressions linger and influence how you feel about second, third, and fourth impressions, you are being befuddled by the affect heuristic.”

26. Dunbar’s Number

“You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.”

27. Selling Out

“Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.”

“Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.”

28. Self-Serving Bias

“You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent and more skilled than you are.”

“When things are going your way, you attribute everything to your amazing skills, but once the tide turns, you look for external factors that prevented your genius from shining through.”

“You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.”

29. The Spotlight Effect

“People devote little attention to you unless prompted to.”

30. The Third Person

“For every outlet of information, there are some who see it as dangerous not because it affects them, but because it might affect the thoughts and opinions of an imaginary third party. This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.”

“The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.”

31. Catharsis

“Venting increases aggressive behavior over time”

“If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting.”

32. The Misinformation Effect

“Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influencers from the present.”

33. Conformity

“It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct.”

34. Extinction Burst

“Anytime you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.”

“Your brain didn’t evolve in an environment where there was an abundance of food, so whenever you find a high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium source, your natural inclination is to eat a lot of it and then go back to it over and over again. If you take away a reward like that, your brain throws a tantrum.”

“There are two kinds of conditioning—classical and operant. In classical conditioning, something that normally doesn’t have any influence becomes a trigger for a response. Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations become greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment.”

“When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your conditioned response starts to fade away.”

35. Social Loafing

“Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pulled together with others’.”

36. The Illusion of Transparency

“You know what you are feeling and thinking, and you tend to believe those thoughts and emotions are leaking out of your pores, visible to the world, perceivable to the outside.”

“When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted.”

37. Learned Helplessness

“If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.”

“If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act—you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.”

38. Embodied Cognition

“You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.”

39. The Anchoring Effect

“Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.”

“You depend on anchoring every day to predict the outcome of events, to estimate how much time something will take or how much money something will cost. When you need to choose between options, or estimate a value, you need footing to stand on.”

40. Attention

“Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness.”

“Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception.”

“Your perception is built out of what you attend to.”

“The problem with inattentional blindness is not that it happens so often, it’s that you don’t believe it happens.”

“The fraternal twin of inattentional blindness is change blindness. The brain can’t keep up with the total amount of information coming in from your eyes, and so your experience from moment to moment is edited for simplicity.”

“The more your attention is engaged, the less you expect something out of the ordinary and the less prone you are to see it even when lives could be at stake.”

41. Self-Handicapping

“You often creation conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.”

“Self-handicapping is a reality negotiation, an unconscious manipulation, of both your perceptions and those of others, that you use to protect your ego.”

“Self-handicapping behaviors are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.”

“Men use self-handicapping more than women to assuage their fears of failure.”

“Whenever you venture into uncharted waters with failure as a distinct possibility, your anxiety will be lowered every time you see a new way to blame possible failure on forces beyond your control.”

42. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

“Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.”

“The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction. This is called the Thomas Theorem.”

“What was once false becomes true, and in hindsight it seems as if it always was.”

“When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can’t stop worrying that you could become an example proving it.”

“If you want a better job, a better marriage, a better teacher, a better friend—you have to act as if the thing you want out of the other person is already headed your way.”

“A negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions.”

43. The Moment

“You are multiple selves, and happiness depends on satisfying all of them”

44. Consistency Bias

“Unless you consciously keep tabs on your progress, you assume the way you feel now is the way you have always felt.”

“One of the stranger facets of consistency bias is how it can be evoked on the spot.”

“Consistency bias is part of your overall desire to reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, the emotions you feel when noticing that you are of two minds on one issue.”

45. The Representativeness Heuristic

“You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type.”

“When it comes to strangers, your first instinct is to fit them into archetypes to quickly determine their value or threat.”

“The representativeness heuristic helps fuel several other cognitive missteps, like the conjunction fallacy.”

“The conjunction fallacy builds on your representativeness heuristic. The more things you hear about which match your mental models, the more likely they seem.”

“Representativeness heuristics are useful, but also dangerous. They can help you avoid danger and seek help, but they can also lead to generalizations and prejudices.”

46. Expectation

“Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.”

47. The Illusion of Control

“You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or too complex to predict.”

48. The Fundamental Attribution Error

“Other people’s behavior is more the result of the situation than their disposition.”

“When you are at a restaurant, you have a hard time seeing through to the personality of the server. You place blame and assume you are dealing with a slacker. Sometimes you are right, but often you are committing the fundamental attribution error.”

“When you don’t know much about a person, when you haven’t had a chance to get to know him or her, you have a tendency to turn the person into a character. You lean on archetypes and stereotypes culled from experience and fantasy. Even though you know better, you still do it.”

“According to psychologist Harold Kelly, when you conjure an attribution for someone else’s actions, you consider consistency.”

“When you can’t check for consistency, you blame people’s behavior on their personality.”

“You commit the fundamental attribution error by believing other people’s actions burgeon from the sort of people they are and have nothing to do with the setting.”

“When you interpret your loved one’s coldness as his or her indifference to your wants and needs instead of as a reaction to stress at work or problems ricocheting in your loved one’s own heart, you’ve committed the fundamental attribution error.”

“The fundamental attribution error leads to labels and assumptions about who people are, but remember first impressions are mostly incorrect.”

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Procrastination

The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.

If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think.

Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to “Dead Man Walking” from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?

Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and it is the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.

A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Some were lowbrow like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Some were highbrow like “Schindler’s List” or “The Piano.” In other words, it was a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb. After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was. All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day. Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies like “The Mask” or action flicks like “Speed” when they knew they had to watch it forthwith.

Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third. When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, “Schindler’s List” was 13 times less likely to be chosen at all. The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good. As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys. Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.

You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights. One day you have the choice between running around the block or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger. The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year.

Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life.

You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents. You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote. You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Shouldn’t you wash clothes now so you don’t have to waste a Sunday cleaning every thing you own? Perhaps the stakes are higher than choosing to play Angry Birds instead of doing sit-ups. You might have a deadline for a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or a book. You’ll get around to it. You’ll start tomorrow. You’ll take the time to learn a foreign language, to learn how to play an instrument. There’s a growing list of books you will read one day. Before you do though, maybe you should check your email. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going, it won’t take long to go grab one. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.

You keep promising yourself this will be the year you do all these things. You know your life would improve if you would just buckle down and put forth the effort.

You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time – you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are over 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?

To explain, consider the power of marshmallows.

Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children. The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell after which the researcher would end the experiment. Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises. In the end, a third couldn’t resist.

What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition – thinking about thinking. Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high-school, college and into adulthood where they accumulated children, mortgages and jobs.

The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them. They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in. The younger the child, the worse they were at metacognition. Any parent can tell you little kids aren’t the best at self-control. Among the older age groups some were better at devising schemes for avoiding their own weak wills, and years later seem to have been able to use that power to squeeze more out of life.

“Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.” – Jonah Lehrer from his piece in the New Yorker, “Don’t”

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now or later. Later is murky place where anything could go wrong.

If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right?

Ok, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time. A being of pure logic would think, “more is more,” and pick the higher amount every time, but you aren’t a being of pure logic. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one which you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later – even if the later reward is far greater.

In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before. If you considered which would be more valuable in a month – continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop – you would pick the greater reward.

The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt. Old you, if there even is one, can deal with those things.

Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things don’t want to deal with, but you also over-commit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.

“The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.” – Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today

One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines. Let’s imagine you are in a class where you must complete three research papers in three weeks, and the instructor is willing to allow you to set your own due dates. You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two on the first week and one on the second. You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. It’s up to you, but once you pick you have to stick with your choice. If you miss your deadlines, you get a big fat zero.

How would you pick?

The most rational choice would be the last day for every paper. It gives you plenty of time to work hard on all three and turn in the best possible work. This seems like a wise choice, but you are not so smart. The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a 2002 study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Ariely. They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.

Which class had the better grades?

Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst.

Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade. Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers. The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated. Those people who weren’t honest with themselves about their own tendencies to put off their work or who were too confident didn’t have a chance to fool themselves.

Interestingly, these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it. – Dan Ariely, from his book “Predictably Irrational”

If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect some day far away.

You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is a you sometime in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires, a you in a different setting where an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.

The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food which future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

I wrote a whole book full of articles like this one: You Are Now Less Dumb

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Go deeper into understanding just how deluded you really are and learn how you can use that knowledge to be more humble, better connected, and less dumb in the sequel to the internationally bestselling You Are Not So Smart. Preorder now at: Amazon | B&N | BAM | Indiebound | iTunes

Sources:

Ariely, D., & Wertenbroch, K. (2002, May). Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment. Psychological Science 13(3), 219–224.

Ayduk, Ozlem N.; Rodolfo Mendoa-Denton, Walter Mischel, Geraldine Downey, Philip K. Peake, Monica L. Rodriguez (2000). “Regulating the interpersonal self: Strategic self-regulation for coping with rejection sensitivity”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79: 776–792.

Bloch, M., Cox, A., McGinty, J. C., & Quealy, K. (2010, January 8). A peek into Netflix queues. New York Times. Milkman, K. L., Rogers, T., & Bazerman, M. H. (2010, March).

Lehrer, J. (2009, May 18). DON’T! The secret of self-control. Retrieved 2010, from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

Mischel, Walter; Ebbe B. Ebbesen, Antonette Raskoff Zeiss (1972). “Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification.”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (2): 204–218.

Mischel, Walter; Yuichi Shoda, Monica L. Rodriguez (1989). “Delay of gratification in children.”. Science 244: 933–938.

Milkman, K. L., Rogers, T., & Bazerman, M. H. (2009, June). I’ll have the ice cream soon and the vegetables later: A study of online grocery purchases and order lead time. Marketing Letters 21(1), 17–35.

Read, D., Loewenstein, G., & Kalyanaraman, S. (1999, December). Highbrow films gather dust: Time-inconsistent preferences and online DVD rentals. Management Science 55(6), 1047–1059.

Schlam, Tanya R.; Nicole L. Wilson, Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, Ozlem Ayduk (2013). “Preschoolers’ delay of gratification predicts their body mass 30 years later”. The Journal of Pediatrics 162: 90–93.

Shoda, Yuichi; Mischel, Walter; Peake, Philip K. (1990). “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions”. Developmental Psychology 26 (6): 978–986.

Mixing virtue and vice: Combining the immediacy effect and the diversification heuristic. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12(4), 257.

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Why People Procrastinate: The Psychology and Causes of Procrastination – Solving Procrastination

If you’re a procrastinator, then you’ve probably asked yourself at some point “why do I procrastinate so much?” or “why do I keep procrastinating even though I know that it’s bad for me?”. These are important questions, since understanding why you procrastinate is crucial if you want to figure out how to stop doing it.

The following article will give you the answers to those questions.

Specifically, you will learn about the psychological mechanism behind procrastination, and see a comprehensive list of the reasons why people procrastinate, based on decades of research on the topic. Furthermore, you will learn how this information can help you figure out why you procrastinate, and how you can use it in order to successfully overcome your procrastination.

Note that this article is extensive, since procrastination is a complex problem, that different people experience for different reasons. However, don’t let this discourage you; feel free to skim through this article, especially when it comes to the list of reasons why people procrastinate, and focus on the things that are the most relevant to you. Furthermore, if you prefer to just read a summarized version of this article, then simply scroll right on to the next section.

The short version

The main psychological mechanism behind our procrastination is as follows:

When we need to get something done, we rely primarily on our self-control in order to bring ourselves to do it.

Our self-control often receives support from our motivation, which helps us get things done in a timely manner.

In some cases, we experience certain demotivating factors, such as anxiety or fear of failure, which have an opposite effect than our motivation.

In addition, we sometimes experience certain hindering factors, such as exhaustion or outcomes that are far in the future, which interfere with our self-control and motivation.

When demotivating and hindering factors outweigh our self-control and motivation, we end up procrastinating, either indefinitely, or until we reach a point in time when the balance between them shifts in our favor.

When it comes to specific reasons why people procrastinate, in terms of demotivating and hindering factors, the following are among the most common:

Abstract goals.

Outcomes that are far in the future.

A disconnect from our future self.

Feeling overwhelmed.

Anxiety.

Task aversion.

Perfectionism.

Fear (e.g., of failure, evaluation, or negative feedback).

Perceived lack of control.

ADHD.

Depression.

Lack of motivation.

Lack of energy.

Sensation seeking.

To successfully deal with your procrastination, you need to figure out why you procrastinate and how your procrastination is preventing you from achieving your goals, so you can formulate a concrete plan of action, based on appropriate anti-procrastination techniques, that will help you deal with your reason for procrastination.

The rest of the article contains more relevant information about the psychology of procrastination, and explains in-depth each of the reasons why people procrastinate.

What is procrastination

Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily postponing decisions or actions. For example, if you need to write an essay, but end up wasting time on the internet even though you know you should be working, that means that you’re procrastinating.

Procrastination is often detrimental to people’s ability to successfully pursue their goals, which is evident, for example, in the fact that procrastination is associated with receiving worse grades at school and earning a lower salary at work. Furthermore, procrastination is also associated with a wide range of other issues, such as increased stress and worse physical and mental health.

Why people procrastinate

People often assume that procrastination is simply a matter of willpower, but in reality, the situation is far more complex than that.

When faced with a decision to make or a task to complete, we usually rely on our self-control in order to push ourselves to get things done. Furthermore, our motivation, which is based on the expectation of receiving some reward for our efforts, can support our self-control, and make it more likely that we will get things done in a timely manner.

However, there are also various demotivating factors that we can experience, which have an opposite effect than our motivation, meaning that they make us more likely to procrastinate. For example, anxiety, fear of failure, and other negative emotions can cause us to delay unnecessarily, as can being given a task that is unpleasant.

Furthermore, there are some hindering factors that interfere with our self-control and motivation, in a way that also makes us more susceptible to procrastination. For example, exhaustion, which occurs as a result of having to work hard all day, can make it more difficult for us to exert self-control if it’s already late at night. Similarly, a large gap between the time when we complete a task and the time at which we will receive the reward for completing it can cause us to discount the value of this reward, which means that its motivational value will be greatly reduced.

As long as our self-control and motivation outweigh the effects of demotivating factors, despite the hindering factors that interfere with them, we manage to get our work done in a timely manner. However, when all the negative factors outweigh our self-control and motivation, we end up procrastinating, by putting off our work either indefinitely, or until some future point in time when the balance shifts in our favor.

Overall, we procrastinate because our self-control and motivation, which might be hindered by factors such as exhaustion and rewards that are far in the future, are outweighed by demotivating factors, such as anxiety and fear of failure.

This causes us to fail to self-regulate our behavior, which means that we postpone things unnecessarily, even when we know we should be doing them, which is why procrastination often leads to a gap between how we intend to act and how we act in reality.

Note: there are some exceptions to this, in cases where procrastination is driven by some other factor, such as rebelliousness or the desire to add excitement to otherwise boring work. However, for the most part, the mechanism outlined above is the main one that explains why people procrastinate.

Reasons for procrastination

This section contains a comprehensive list of the specific reasons why people procrastinate, based primarily on the psychological mechanism which was outlined in the previous section.

If you’re wondering why you yourself procrastinate, look through this list, and try to figure out which of these causes of procrastination apply to you. Try to be reflective and honest with yourself while you do this, since figuring out the underlying causes of your procrastination is crucial if you want to be able to successfully overcome it.

Note that not everything here will apply to you, so feel free to skim through the list, and read primarily about reasons that you think could apply in your particular situation.

Abstract goals

People are more likely to procrastinate when their goals are vague or abstract, compared to when their goals are concrete and clearly defined.

For example, goals such as “get fit” or “start exercising” are relatively vague, and are therefore likely to lead to procrastination. Conversely, a goal such as “go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday right after work, and spend at least 30 minutes on the treadmill, running at high speed” is concrete, and is therefore much more likely to lead you to take action.

Furthermore, note that in addition to a lack of a clear definition, there are other factors that can make a goal feel abstract. For example, according to construal-level theory, goals that are perceived as highly improbable are also perceived as relatively abstract. This means that if a person finds it unlikely that they will attain a certain goal, this can cause them to view that goal as abstract, which in turn can increase the likelihood that they will procrastinate on it.

Outcomes that are far in the future

People often procrastinate on tasks that are associated with outcomes (e.g., punishments or rewards) that they will only experience a while after completing the task, since people tend to discount the value of outcomes that are far in the future. This phenomenon, which is based on the timing of outcomes, is known as temporal discounting or delay discounting.

For example, it’s easier to discount the value of attaining a good grade on an exam while that exam is still weeks away compared to when it’s only days away, which is one of the reasons why people wait until right before the deadline to complete necessary tasks.

Accordingly, people often display a present bias when they choose to engage in activities that reward them in the short-term, at the expense of working on tasks that would lead to better outcomes for them in the long term.

Note that the relationship between the time it takes to receive a reward and the perceived value of that reward is usually inconsistent, as the rate of discounting decreases over time. Essentially, this means that the farther into the future a reward is, the less the increase in time matters, when it comes to lowering that reward’s perceived value.

For example, while there is a big difference in how we value a reward that we can receive now compared to a reward we can receive in a week, there is a much smaller difference in how we value a reward we can receive in a year compared to a reward we can receive in a year plus a week. Similarly, while there is a big difference between receiving a reward in a day compared to in a year, there is less of a difference between receiving a reward in a year compared to receiving it in two years.

This phenomenon is called hyperbolic discounting, and it’s contrasted with exponential discounting, which is a time-consistent model of temporal discounting, where an increased delay before receiving a reward always has the same effect on its perceived value, regardless of how far in the future it is.

A disconnect from our future self

People sometimes procrastinate because they view their future self as being disconnected from their present-self, a phenomenon known as temporal self-discontinuity or temporal disjunction.

For example, someone might delay when it comes to eating healthy, even if their doctor told them that it’s important, because the harmful impact of their present diet will only start being a serious issue in a couple of years, which they view as someone else’s problem (i.e. as the problem of their future self).

This disconnect between the present and future selves can cause people to procrastinate in a variety of ways. For example, it can cause them to think that their present-self shouldn’t have to worry about the future, since their future self will be the one who has to handle any tasks that they postpone or deal with any consequences for failing to complete those tasks on time. Similarly, it can cause them to think that their present-self shouldn’t have to bother with getting things done now, if their future self will be the one who reaps the rewards of their actions.

A focus on future options

People sometimes avoid taking action in the present because they intend or hope to pursue a more attractive course of action in the future. This mindset can lead to long-term procrastination, and persist even in cases where the person who is procrastinating never ends up following through on their intended plan.

For example, a person might avoid starting to exercise on their own at home, because they plan to join a gym and start a detailed workout plan later, despite the fact that getting started now would still be beneficial and wouldn’t prevent them from switching to a more serious exercise plan in the future.

Optimism or pessimism

People sometimes procrastinate on tasks because they are overly optimistic about their ability to complete those tasks in the future. For example, a student might decide to postpone getting started on an assignment that is due a few weeks from now, because they feel that there will be plenty of time to get it done later.

In many cases, this form of optimism might occur as a result of underestimating the time it will take to complete the tasks in question; this phenomenon is known as the planning fallacy, and it can lead both procrastinators as well as non-procrastinators to assume that they will finish upcoming tasks earlier than they actually will.

Similarly, a person might decide, after struggling to get started on a task, to postpone it to the next day, because they believe that tomorrow they will be able to bring themself to work on it, even if they have postponed the same task in the exact same manner several times in the past. In many cases, this form of optimism involves an overestimation of future abilities, and it’s important to note that people who are prone to procrastination often promise to themselves that “things will be different next time”, when it comes to procrastinating on tasks.

However, pessimism can also lead people to procrastinate in some cases, such as when it causes them to believe that their attempts to complete a task are bound to result in failure, so there’s no point in starting in the first place.

Indecisiveness

People sometimes procrastinate because they are unable to make decisions in a timely manner. This can be an issue in various ways, such as when a person can’t decide which course of action to engage in, or when a person needs to make a certain decision before they can move ahead with their general plan of action.

For example, a person might delay starting to diet, because they can’t decide which diet plan to follow. Similarly, a person might delay getting started on their research paper, because they can’t decide which topic to write about.

There are various factors that generally make it more likely that someone will get stuck over-thinking the situation while trying to make a decision, a phenomenon which is sometimes referred to as analysis paralysis or choice paralysis. The main factors to consider, from a practical perspective, are the following:

The more options you have, the harder it will be for you to choose. Essentially, the more options you have to choose from, the harder it will be for you to evaluate them and decide which one is preferable.

Essentially, the more options you have to choose from, the harder it will be for you to evaluate them and decide which one is preferable. The more similar your options are to one another, the harder it will be for you to choose. Essentially, the more similar the available options are, and the closer they are in value, the harder it will be for you to decide which one is better, especially in cases where there isn’t a single option that is clearly preferable to the others.

Essentially, the more similar the available options are, and the closer they are in value, the harder it will be for you to decide which one is better, especially in cases where there isn’t a single option that is clearly preferable to the others. The more important the choice is, the harder it will be for you to choose. Essentially, the greater the consequences of making a decision, the harder it will be for you to finalize your decision, so that you are generally more likely to delay before making a major decision than you are before making a minor one.

In addition, it’s important to keep in mind that each time you have to make a decision, you end up depleting your mental resources to some degree, especially if you are prone to indecisiveness. Accordingly, the more decisions you have to make during a certain time period, the more you deplete your capacity for self-control, and the more likely you are to procrastinate in making future decisions, at least until you have a chance to recharge yourself mentally.

Finally, note that this form of procrastination is generally referred to as decisional procrastination, since it involves a delay in making a decision. It is therefore contrasted with behavioral procrastination, which involves a delay in performing a task once you’ve decided on your preferred course of action.

Feeling overwhelmed

People sometimes procrastinate because they feel overwhelmed with regard to the tasks that they need to handle. A feeling of overwhelm can occur due to a variety of reasons, such as having a single task that feels huge in terms of scope, or having a large number of small tasks that add up. When this happens, a person might simply decide to avoid the tasks in question, or they might attempt to handle them, but then end up feeling paralyzed before those tasks are completed.

For example, if you need to clean up your entire house, the fact that the task will take so long and involve so many parts might cause you to feel overwhelmed, in which case you might avoid getting started on it in the first place.

Anxiety

People sometimes procrastinate because they feel anxious about a task that they need to handle.

For example, someone who feels anxious about checking their bills might repeatedly delay doing so, even though this avoidance won’t make the problem go away.

This issue can be especially problematic in cases where a person’s anxiety increases as a result of their procrastination, which can lead to a feedback loop where someone feels anxious about a certain task, which causes them to procrastinate instead of doing it, which makes them even more anxious, which in turn causes them to procrastinate even further.

Task aversion

People often procrastinate because they are averse to the tasks that they need to perform.

For example, if you need to make an important phone call to someone you dislike, you might end up procrastinating instead of just getting it done, because you don’t want to talk to them.

This occurs because, in general, the more people find a certain task unappealing, the more likely they are to want to avoid it, and therefore the more likely they are to procrastinate.

Note that there are many things that can make a person averse to a task in a way that causes them to procrastinate on it. For example, a person might procrastinate because they perceive a task as frustrating, tedious, boring, or too hard.

Perfectionism

People sometimes procrastinate because of their perfectionism. Perfectionism can lead to procrastination in a number of ways, such as by making someone so afraid of making a mistake that they end up not taking any action at all, or by making someone so worried of publishing something with any flaws that they end up reworking their project indefinitely instead of releasing it when it’s ready.

For example, someone might delay working on their book, because they want every line that they write down to be perfect from the start, which causes them to not write anything at all. Similarly, someone who has finished writing their book might repeatedly delay sending it out for feedback, because they want to make sure that it’s absolutely flawless first, so they keep going over it, again and again.

While it’s reasonable to want to create and publish high-quality work, the problem starts when perfectionists aim for unattainable flawlessness, which causes them to procrastinate by giving them a seemingly valid excuse for unnecessary delays.

In that regard, note that perfectionism doesn’t always lead to procrastination, and there are even situations where a person’s perfectionism can make them less likely to procrastinate, by pushing them to do a good job and complete their tasks in a timely manner. As such, perfectionism isn’t always a negative thing, and only leads to issues when it causes people to unnecessarily delay things because they’re overly worried about their work not being flawless.

Fear of evaluation or negative feedback

People sometimes procrastinate because they’re afraid of being evaluated or because they are afraid of receiving negative feedback from others.

For example, someone might delay publicizing a project that they worked on, because they’re worried about what other people are going to think about it.

In many cases, people’s fears in this regard are irrationally exaggerated or unjustified, either because the chances of receiving negative feedback are low, or because the consequences of that feedback aren’t as significant as they feel.

In addition, note that in some cases, it’s possible for fear of evaluation or fear of negative feedback to make people less likely to procrastinate, by motivating them to get their work done in a timely manner. Whether the influence of this fear is positive or negative depends on a variety of factors, such as how anxious a person feels about the upcoming evaluation, and how confident they are in their ability to successfully handle the task at hand.

Fear of failure

People often procrastinate because they’re afraid of failing at the tasks that they need to complete. This fear of failure can promote procrastination in various ways, such as by causing people to avoid finishing a task, or by causing them to avoid getting started on a task in the first place.

For example, someone might be so worried that their business idea will fail, that they end up continuing to work on it indefinitely, without ever making it available to the public.

How afraid someone is of failing is generally related to how important the task in question is, so that more important tasks are often associated with higher levels of procrastination, in cases where fear of failure is the driving cause behind the person’s procrastination.

Furthermore, certain personality traits, such as low self-esteem and low self-confidence, are associated with an increased fear of failure, which makes people who have these traits more likely to procrastinate. Moreover, fear of failure is an especially serious issue among those who suffer from high levels of self-doubt, and particularly among those who are prone to having negative, irrational beliefs about their abilities.

In addition, note that fear of failure doesn’t always cause people to procrastinate. Rather, fear of failure promotes procrastination primarily when it reduces people’s sense of autonomy, or when people feel incapable of dealing with a task that they’re afraid to fail at. Conversely, when people feel that they are well-equipped to deal with a certain task, fear of failure can serve as a motivating factor, that encourages people to avoid procrastinating.

Finally, keep in mind that fear of failure, perfectionism, and fear of negative feedback are all strongly related to each other, but one doesn’t necessitate the others, and a person might be influenced by any combination of these factors. For example, someone might be confident in their ability to perform a task well but still worry about receiving unjustified negative feedback from others, or they might worry about failing at something even if no one else will know about it.

Self-handicapping

People sometimes procrastinate as a way of placing barriers in their own way, so that if they fail their failures could be attributed to their procrastination rather than their abilities, a behavior which is referred to as self-handicapping.

For example, a student might procrastinate instead of studying for a test, because they prefer knowing that they failed due to their procrastination, instead of knowing that they failed because they were unable to understand the material well.

As a result of this defense mechanism, certain procrastinators spend more time procrastinating if they believe that they are likely to fail when it comes to the task at hand, especially if they feel that failure will reflect badly on them.

Self-sabotage

People sometimes procrastinate due to their tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors, which means that they actively try to sabotage their own progress.

For example, a person might delay applying for a new job, even though they knew that it represents a great opportunity for career advancement, because they feel that they don’t deserve to be at a better place in life.

There are various reasons why people engage in self-sabotage, and individuals who procrastinate for this reason tend to also engage in other types of related behaviors, such as pushing away people who treat them well.

Low self-efficacy

Self-efficacy reflects a person’s belief in their ability to perform the actions needed to achieve their goals. In some cases, having low self-efficacy can cause a person to procrastinate.

For example, if someone is given a task that they don’t think they can handle, they might delay getting started on it, because they feel that they will most likely fail to complete it anyway.

Note that people can have different levels of self-efficacy with regard to different domains in their life. For instance, a person might have high levels of academic self-efficacy, but low levels of social self-efficacy, which means that they believe in their abilities when it comes to tasks that are academic in nature, but not when it comes to tasks that are social in nature.

Furthermore, self-efficacy can relate to specific tasks or abilities. The most notable among these, in this context, is self-efficacy with regard to your ability to self-regulate your behavior, in order to get yourself to complete tasks in a timely manner. This is because the belief that you will be unable to avoid procrastinating could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which encourages you to procrastinate in situations where you might have otherwise been able to get your work done on time.

Perceived lack of control

People sometimes procrastinate because they feel incapable of controlling the outcomes of events in their life.

For example, a person might delay getting started on an assignment at work, if they feel that their boss will criticize it regardless of how much effort they put into it.

Though this perceived lack of control can play a role in specific, isolated cases, some people are more predisposed to feeling a general lack of control than others. This issue is operationalized through the concept of locus of control, which is the degree to which people believe that they have control over events in their life. The locus of control is described on a spectrum of internality and externality:

Individuals who are internally oriented believe that they have a high degree of control over their life.

believe that they have a high degree of control over their life. Individuals who are externally oriented believe that they have a low degree of control over their life, and think that external factors, such as other people or their environment, influence them more strongly.

Individuals who are internally oriented tend to get started and complete tasks on time, while individuals who are externally oriented tend to procrastinate more, perform worse on tasks, and experience more anxiety.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

Some people procrastinate as a result of their ADHD.

For example, a person might procrastinate because their ADHD makes it hard for them to concentrate on a single task for long, especially once it gets boring, so they constantly jump from one task to another, without finishing any of them.

In general, research shows that there is a significant correlation between engaging in ADHD-related behaviors and procrastination. This is expected, given the fact that many ADHD behaviors can lead directly to procrastination, and given that various forms of procrastinatory behaviors are sometimes viewed as direct symptoms of ADHD.

However, note that not all forms of ADHD are equally associated with procrastination, and research on the topic suggests that symptoms of ADHD that have to do with inattention are more strongly associated with procrastination than symptoms that have to do with hyperactivity or impulsivity.

Depression

Some people procrastinate due to underlying depression. This is because depression can lead to issues such as fatigue, difficulty in concentrating, and a reduced interest in activities, which in turn can cause people to procrastinate.

For example, someone who is depressed might repeatedly postpone cleaning their room or going out to get groceries, because they simply don’t have enough mental energy.

Lack of motivation

People often procrastinate because they are not motivated enough to work on a given task.

For example, a student might procrastinate when it comes to studying for a test in a subject that isn’t relevant to their major, because they don’t care about getting a good grade on it.

This is often an issue when the main motivation for performing a task is extrinsic, as in the case of someone who is pressured by their parents to do well in school, rather than intrinsic, as in the case of someone who simply wants to feel that they’ve successfully learned the material. Accordingly, when people are driven to complete a certain task by an external source of motivation, they generally display higher levels of procrastination than when they are driven by an internal and autonomous source of motivation.

Furthermore, there are various other reasons why people can be unmotivated to work on a task. For example, in some cases, people are unmotivated because they don’t value the reward for performing the task, or because they experience a disconnect between the task that they need to perform and the reward that is associated with it.

Finally, note that different people have different levels of general achievement motivation, which means that some people are more driven and motivated than others to pursue their goals in life. Accordingly, those who have lower levels of achievement motivation are more likely to procrastinate on various tasks.

Lack of energy

People are generally more likely to procrastinate if they suffer from low energy levels, in terms of physical or mental energy.

For example, someone who is tired after having worked hard all day might find it harder to exercise self-control when they get home late at night, which could cause them to procrastinate on things they need to take care of such as washing the dishes.

Laziness

Laziness reflects a person’s intrinsic unwillingness to put in the effort needed to achieve their goals, even when they are able to do so. In some cases, a person’s laziness can be one of the driving forces behind their procrastination.

For example, someone might procrastinate when it comes to doing the dishes, because they simply don’t feel like getting up and doing it.

However, note that in many situations, people might assume that their procrastination is driven by laziness, when in reality it’s actually occurring due to some other underlying reason, such as anxiety or fear of failure.

In addition, note that although laziness and lack of motivation appear similar, these are two separate issues. For example, it’s possible for someone to be highly motivated to pursue a certain goal, but at the same time not make any progress toward it because they’re unwilling to put in the necessary work.

Prioritization of short-term mood

People often procrastinate because they prioritize their feelings in the present, and do things that will help them feel better right now, even if this comes at the expense of taking action that aligns with their long-term goals, a phenomenon which is known as short-term mood repair.

For example, a student might delay getting started on an assignment by wasting hours on activities such as browsing social media, playing video games, and watching TV, because doing so is more pleasant in the short-term than working on the task at hand.

Essentially, this form of procrastination, which is sometimes referred to as hedonistic delay, occurs when people give in to their desire for instant gratification, and engage in behaviors that are satisfying in the short-term, instead of working on the tasks that will benefit them more in the long-term.

This kind of behavior relates to the concept of the pleasure principle, which is the tendency to seek out pleasurable activities and avoid unpleasant ones. While this tendency is natural and instinctive, it becomes a serious issue when a person is unable to control it, since it causes them to continuously pursue short-term satisfaction, at the expense of long-term achievement and development.

Low capacity for self-control

Self-control reflects a person’s ability to self-regulate their behavior in order to bring themself to follow through on their intentions, and take action that is in their best interest, particularly in the long-term. A lack of self-control makes people much more likely to procrastinate, which is not surprising, given that self-control is crucial when it comes to allowing people to self-regulate their behavior.

For example, a person low on self-control might browse social media for hours, while continually telling themself that they’ll get started on their work in just a few minutes, despite the fact that there is no reason for them to delay.

Lack of self-control can cause people to procrastinate in itself, and can also make them more likely to procrastinate as a result of other issues, such as task aversion or fear of failure.

Note that, in many cases, insufficient self-control can lead people to engage in behaviors that are easy and accessible, even if they’re not inherently appealing, instead of working on tasks that are more inherently appealing, but which would necessitate more effort.

For example, lack of self-control could lead people to browse social media instead of working on their favorite project, even if they don’t derive much pleasure from doing so, and even if they would feel better if they were working on their preferred project.

Lack of perseverance

Perseverance is the ability to maintain goal-driven behavior in the face of obstacles. A lack of perseverance makes people more likely to procrastinate, especially when it comes to finishing tasks that they’ve already started working on.

For example, a lack of perseverance could cause someone to stop working on their favorite side project, because they feel that they’ve reached a stage in development that is difficult and challenging.

Impulsivity

Impulsivity is the tendency to act on a whim, without planning ahead or considering the consequences of your actions. Impulsivity is strongly associated with the tendency to procrastinate, since the decision to procrastinate is often an impulsive one, such as when people ignore the long-term consequences of their actions, or when they fail to plan their work ahead of time.

For example, an impulsive person might end up procrastinating on an assignment that they’re currently working on, by suddenly deciding to go out with friends, even though the assignment is due soon and they need to work on it now if they want to be able to turn it in on time.

Distractibility

Distractibility is the inability to focus your attention on one thing at a time or to stay focused for long in general. High levels of distractibility can make a person more likely to procrastinate, such as when they lead people to constantly switch from one locus of attention to another.

For example, a person who is studying for a test might end up procrastinating because they are constantly distracted by the notifications on their phone. Similarly, someone might delay finishing various projects that they started working on, because they keep getting distracted by ideas for exciting new projects.

Sensation seeking

People sometimes procrastinate because they like to wait until right before the deadline to start working on tasks, in order to add pressure, challenge, and excitement to those tasks.

For example, a student might wait until the night before a class presentation is due to start working on it, because they feel that doing so will make the otherwise boring act of preparing the presentation more exciting.

In some cases, this type of delay can lead to positive outcomes, such as when it motivates a person to work hard on a task that they would otherwise find tedious. However, in most cases, this sort of delay leads to negative outcomes in terms of performance. Furthermore, postponing tasks for this reason can often increase the amount of stress that people experience, and can also hinder their performance in situations where the delay means that they don’t have enough time to deal with any unexpected issues that they encounter in their work.

Note that some researchers refer to procrastination that occurs for this reason as arousal procrastination, in contrast with avoidant procrastination. However, this distinction has been criticized, and it’s not crucial to understand it from a practical perspective, as long as you understand that this is a reason why some people procrastinate.

Rebellion

People sometimes procrastinate as an act of rebellion, either in general or against some form of control (e.g., against an authority figure), by postponing a task that they resent being given.

For example, an office worker might procrastinate on an assignment that they got at work, because they dislike their boss, and because they resent the fact that their boss sets their deadlines for them.

Similarly, people may procrastinate for similar reasons, such as revenge and resentment, including on things that they’re not necessarily given directly as tasks, such as going to bed.

How to stop procrastinating

In this article, you saw a comprehensive list of reasons why people procrastinate.

This knowledge is valuable from a practical perspective, because understanding why people procrastinate can help you understand why you yourself procrastinate, and because once you understand that, you can successfully figure out how to solve your procrastination problem.

For example, if you notice that you procrastinate because you use abstract goals, you can make sure to define more concrete goals for yourself. Similarly, if you notice that you procrastinate because you feel overwhelmed by a large task that you have to deal with, you can break that task apart into a series of small tasks that you will feel more comfortable handling.

Specifically, if you want to successfully overcome your procrastination, here are the main steps that you should follow:

Start by establishing your goals . When doing this, make sure to define your goals as clearly as possible, and make sure that these goals are significant enough that they’ll allow you to make meaningful progress, while also being possible for you to accomplish in reality.

. When doing this, make sure to define your goals as clearly as possible, and make sure that these goals are significant enough that they’ll allow you to make meaningful progress, while also being possible for you to accomplish in reality. Next, figure out the exact nature of your procrastination problem . You can do this by thinking about cases where you procrastinated, and then identifying when, how, and why you did so.

. You can do this by thinking about cases where you procrastinated, and then identifying when, how, and why you did so. Then, create a plan of action . This plan should involve a combination of relevant anti-procrastination techniques, that will allow you to deal with situations where your procrastination problem is preventing you from achieving your goals.

. This plan should involve a combination of relevant anti-procrastination techniques, that will allow you to deal with situations where your procrastination problem is preventing you from achieving your goals. Finally, implement your plan of action. As time goes by, make sure to monitor your progress and refine this plan, by modifying or dropping anti-procrastination techniques based on how well they work for you, and by adding new ones if you think they could help.

When it comes to anti-procrastination techniques, here are some examples of relevant ones that you can use:

Prioritize tasks based on how important they are.

Break large and overwhelming tasks into small and actionable pieces.

Get started on tasks by committing to only work on them for a few minutes.

Remove distractions from your work environment.

Identify when you’re most and least productive, and schedule your tasks accordingly.

Set intermediate deadlines for yourself on your way to your final goals.

Create a daily goal and mark streaks of days on which you’ve successfully achieved it.

Reward yourself when you successfully implement your plan of action.

Focus on your goals instead of on the tasks that you have to complete.

Visualize your future self experiencing the outcomes of your work.

Count to ten before you indulge the impulse to procrastinate.

Avoid a perfectionist mindset by accepting that your work will have some flaws.

Develop a belief in your ability to successfully overcome your procrastination.

If you want to learn more about this concept, take a look at the follow-up guide on how to stop procrastinating. It contains an in-depth explanation of the process that you should use in order to beat procrastination, and of the various anti-procrastination techniques that you can use.

Summary and main takeaways

We rely primarily on our self-control in order to get things done in a timely manner, though our motivation to be rewarded for our efforts can often provide our self-control with a helpful boost.

There are various demotivating factors that have an opposite effect than our motivation, meaning that they make us more likely to procrastinate; this includes, for example, anxiety, fear of failure, perfectionism, and task aversion.

Furthermore, there are also hindering factors that interfere directly with our self-control and motivation, meaning that they too make us more likely to procrastinate; this includes, for example, goals that are abstract, goals that are distant in time, and a disconnect between our present and future selves.

When demotivating and hindering factors outweigh our self-control and motivation, we end up procrastinating either indefinitely, or until some point in the future when the balance between them shifts in our favor.

In some cases, we might also be driven to procrastination by other factors, such as self-sabotage, sensation-seeking, or rebelliousness.

In conclusion

There are many reasons why people procrastinate, and a person might procrastinate for any number of them.

Understanding why people procrastinate is beneficial, since it can help you figure out why you yourself procrastinate, which in turn can help you figure out how to solve your procrastination problem. To learn more about this, and to understand how you can implement this knowledge in practice, read the follow-up guide on how to stop procrastinating.

Procrastination: A Scientific Guide on How to Stop Procrastinating

Procrastination is a challenge we have all faced at one point or another. For as long as humans have been around, we have been struggling with delaying, avoiding, and procrastinating on issues that matter to us.

During our more productive moments, when we temporarily figure out how to stop procrastinating, we feel satisfied and accomplished. Today, we’re going to talk about how to make those rare moments of productivity more routine. The purpose of this guide is to break down the science behind why we procrastinate, share proven frameworks you can use to beat procrastination, and cover useful strategies that will make it easier to take action.

You can click the links below to jump to a particular section or simply scroll down to read everything. At the end of this page, you’ll find a complete list of all the articles I have written on procrastination.

I. The Science Behind Procrastination

II. How to Stop Procrastinating Right Now

III. Being Consistent: How to Kick the Procrastination Habit

I. The Science Behind Procrastination

Let’s start by getting the basics nailed down. What is procrastination? What does procrastination mean? What exactly are we dealing with here?

What is Procrastination?

Human beings have been procrastinating for centuries. The problem is so timeless, in fact, that ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle developed a word to describe this type of behavior: Akrasia.

Akrasia is the state of acting against your better judgment. It is when you do one thing even though you know you should do something else. Loosely translated, you could say that akrasia is procrastination or a lack of self-control.

Here’s a modern definition:

Procrastination is the act of delaying or postponing a task or set of tasks. So, whether you refer to it as procrastination or akrasia or something else, it is the force that prevents you from following through on what you set out to do.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

Ok, definitions are great and all, but why do we procrastinate? What is going on in the brain that causes us to avoid the things we know we should be doing?

This is a good time to bring some science into our discussion. Behavioral psychology research has revealed a phenomenon called “time inconsistency,” which helps explain why procrastination seems to pull us in despite our good intentions. Time inconsistency refers to the tendency of the human brain to value immediate rewards more highly than future rewards. 1

The best way to understand this is by imagining that you have two selves: your Present Self and your Future Self. When you set goals for yourself — like losing weight or writing a book or learning a language — you are actually making plans for your Future Self. You are envisioning what you want your life to be like in the future. Researchers have found that when you think about your Future Self, it is quite easy for your brain to see the value in taking actions with long-term benefits. The Future Self values long-term rewards.

However, while the Future Self can set goals, only the Present Self can take action. When the time comes to make a decision, you are no longer making a choice for your Future Self. Now you are in the present moment, and your brain is thinking about the Present Self. Researchers have discovered that the Present Self really likes instant gratification, not long-term payoff.

So, the Present Self and the Future Self are often at odds with one another. The Future Self wants to be trim and fit, but the Present Self wants a donut. Sure, everyone knows you should eat healthy today to avoid being overweight in 10 years. But consequences like an increased risk for diabetes or heart failure are years away.

Similarly, many young people know that saving for retirement in their 20s and 30s is crucial, but the benefit of doing so is decades off. It is far easier for the Present Self to see the value in buying a new pair of shoes than in socking away $100 for 70-year-old you. (If you’re curious, there are some very good evolutionary reasons for why our brain values immediate rewards more highly than long-term rewards.)

This is one reason why you might go to bed feeling motivated to make a change in your life, but when you wake up you find yourself falling back into old patterns. Your brain values long-term benefits when they are in the future (tomorrow), but it values immediate gratification when it comes to the present moment (today).

The Procrastination-Action Line

You cannot rely on long-term consequences and rewards to motivate the Present Self. Instead, you have to find a way to move future rewards and punishments into the present moment. You have to make the future consequences become present consequences.

This is exactly what happens during the moment when we finally move beyond procrastination and take action. For example, let’s say you have a report to write. You’ve known about it for weeks and continued to put it off day after day. You experience a little bit of nagging pain and anxiety thinking about this paper you have to write, but not enough to do anything about it. Then, suddenly, the day before the deadline, the future consequences turn into present consequences, and you write that report hours before it is due. The pain of procrastinating finally escalated and you crossed the “Action Line.”

There is something important to note here. As soon as you cross the Action Line, the pain begins to subside. In fact, being in the middle of procrastination is often more painful than being in the middle of doing the work. Point A on the chart above is often more painful than Point B. The guilt, shame, and anxiety that you feel while procrastinating are usually worse than the effort and energy you have to put in while you’re working. The problem is not doing the work, it’s starting the work. 2

If we want to stop procrastinating, then we need to make it as easy as possible for the Present Self to get started and trust that motivation and momentum will come after we begin. (Motivation often comes after starting, not before.)

Let’s talk about how to do that now.

II. How to Stop Procrastinating Right Now

There are a variety of strategies we can employ to stop procrastinating. Below, I’ll outline and explain each concept, then I’ll provide you with some examples of strategy in action.

Option 1: Make the Rewards of Taking Action More Immediate

If you can find a way to make the benefits of long-term choices more immediate, then it becomes easier to avoid procrastination. One of the best ways to bring future rewards into the present moment is with a strategy known as temptation bundling.

Temptation bundling is a concept that came out of behavioral economics research performed by Katy Milkman at The University of Pennsylvania. Simply put, the strategy suggests that you bundle a behavior that is good for you in the long-run with a behavior that feels good in the short-run.

The basic format is: Only do [THING YOU LOVE] while doing [THING YOU PROCRASTINATE ON].

Here are a few common examples of temptation bundling:

Only listen to audiobooks or podcasts you love while exercising.

Only get a pedicure while processing overdue work emails.

Only watch your favorite show while ironing or doing household chores.

Only eat at your favorite restaurant when conducting your monthly meeting with a difficult colleague.

This article covers some specific exercises you can follow to figure out how to create temptation bundling ideas that work for you.

Option 2: Make the Consequences of Procrastination More Immediate

There are many ways to force you to pay the costs of procrastination sooner rather than later. For example, if you are exercising alone, skipping your workout next week won’t impact your life much at all. Your health won’t deteriorate immediately because you missed that one workout. The cost of procrastinating on exercise only becomes painful after weeks and months of lazy behavior. However, if you commit to working out with a friend at 7 a.m. next Monday, then the cost of skipping your workout becomes more immediate. Miss this one workout and you look like a jerk.

Another common strategy is to use a service like Stickk to place a bet. If you don’t do what you say you’ll do, then the money goes to a charity you hate. The idea here is to put some skin in the game and create a new consequence that happens if you don’t do the behavior right now.

Option 3: Design Your Future Actions

One of the favorite tools psychologists use to overcome procrastination is called a “commitment device.” Commitment devices can help you stop procrastinating by designing your future actions ahead of time.

For example, you can curb your future eating habits by purchasing food in individual packages rather than in the bulk size. You can stop wasting time on your phone by deleting games or social media apps. (You could also block them on your computer.)

Similarly, you can reduce the likelihood of mindless channel surfing by hiding your TV in a closet and only taking it out on big game days. You can voluntarily ask to be added to the banned list at casinos and online gambling sites to prevent future gambling sprees. You can build an emergency fund by setting up an automatic transfer of funds to your savings account. These are all examples of commitment devices that help reduce the odds of procrastination.

Option 4: Make the Task More Achievable

As we have already covered, the friction that causes procrastination is usually centered around starting a behavior. Once you begin, it’s often less painful to keep working. This is one good reason to reduce the size of your habits because if your habits are small and easy to start, then you will be less likely to procrastinate.

One of my favorite ways to make habits easier is to use The 2-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” The idea is to make it as easy as possible to get started and then trust that momentum will carry you further into the task after you begin. Once you start doing something, it’s easier to continue doing it. The 2–Minute Rule overcomes procrastination and laziness by making it so easy to start taking action that you can’t say no.

Another great way to make tasks more achievable is to break them down. For example, consider the remarkable productivity of the famous writer Anthony Trollope. He published 47 novels, 18 works of non-fiction, 12 short stories, 2 plays, and an assortment of articles and letters. How did he do it? Instead of measuring his progress based on the completion of chapters or books, Trollope measured his progress in 15-minute increments. He set a goal of 250 words every 15 minutes and he continued this pattern for three hours each day. This approach allowed him to enjoy feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment every 15 minutes while continuing to work on the large task of writing a book.

Making your tasks more achievable is important for two reasons.

Small measures of progress help to maintain momentum over the long-run, which means you’re more likely to finish large tasks. The faster you complete a productive task, the more quickly your day develops an attitude of productivity and effectiveness. 3

I have found this second point, the speed with which you complete your first task of the day, to be of particular importance for overcoming procrastination and maintaining a high productive output day after day.

III. Being Consistent: How to Kick the Procrastination Habit

Alright, we’ve covered a variety of strategies for beating procrastination on a daily basis. Now, let’s discuss some ways to make productivity a long-term habit and prevent procrastination from creeping back into our lives.

The Daily Routine Experts Recommend for Peak Productivity

One reason it is so easy to slip back into procrastination time after time is because we don’t have a clear system for deciding what is important and what we should work on first. (This is yet another example of the system often being more important than the goal.)

One of the best productivity systems I have found is also one of the most simple. It’s called The Ivy Lee Method and it has six steps:

At the end of each work day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day. Repeat this process every working day.

Here’s what makes it so effective:

It’s simple enough to actually work. The primary critique of methods like this one is that they are too basic. They don’t account for all of the complexities and nuances of life. What happens if an emergency pops up? What about using the latest technology to our fullest advantage? In my experience, complexity is often a weakness because it makes it harder to get back on track. Yes, emergencies and unexpected distractions will arise. Ignore them as much as possible, deal with them when you must, and get back to your prioritized to-do list as soon as possible. Use simple rules to guide complex behavior.

It forces you to make tough decisions. I don’t believe there is anything magical about Lee’s number of six important tasks per day. It could just as easily be five tasks per day. However, I do think there is something magical about imposing limits upon yourself. I find that the single best thing to do when you have too many ideas (or when you’re overwhelmed by everything you need to get done) is to prune your ideas and trim away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Constraints can make you better. Lee’s method is similar to Warren Buffett’s 25-5 Rule, which requires you to focus on just five critical tasks and ignore everything else. Basically, if you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.

It removes the friction of starting. The biggest hurdle to finishing most tasks is starting them. (Getting off the couch can be tough, but once you actually start running it is much easier to finish your workout.) Lee’s method forces you to decide on your first task the night before you go to work. This strategy has been incredibly useful for me: as a writer, I can waste three or four hours debating what I should write about on a given day. If I decide the night before, however, I can wake up and start writing immediately. It’s simple, but it works. In the beginning, getting started is just as important as succeeding at all.

It requires you to single-task. Modern society loves multi-tasking. The myth of multi-tasking is that being busy is synonymous with being better. The exact opposite is true. Having fewer priorities leads to better work. Study world-class experts in nearly any field—athletes, artists, scientists, teachers, CEOs—and you’ll discover one characteristic runs through all of them: focus. The reason is simple. You can’t be great at one task if you’re constantly dividing your time ten different ways. Mastery requires focus and consistency.

Regardless of what method you use, the bottom line is this: Do the most important thing first each day and let the momentum of the first task carry you into the next one.

How to Avoid Chronic Procrastination With Visual Cues

Another way to overcome the trap of chronic procrastination is to use visual cues to trigger your habits and measure your progress.

A visual cue is something you can see (a visual reminder) that prompts you to take action. Here’s why they are important for beating procrastination:

Visual cues remind you to start a behavior. We often lie to ourselves about our ability to remember to perform a new habit. (“I’m going to start eating healthier. For real this time.”) A few days later, however, the motivation fades and the busyness of life begins to take over again. Hoping you will simply remember to do a new habit is usually a recipe for failure. This is why a visual stimulus can be so useful. It is much easier to stick with good habits when your environment nudges you in the right direction.

Visual cues display your progress on a behavior. Everyone knows consistency is an essential component of success, but few people actually measure how consistent they are in real life. Having a visual cue—like a calendar that tracks your progress—avoids that pitfall because it is a built-in measuring system. One look at your calendar and you immediately have a measure of your progress.

Visual cues can have an additive effect on motivation. As the visual evidence of your progress mounts, it is natural to become more motivated to continue the habit. The more visual progress you see, the more motivated you will become to finish the task. There are a variety of popular behavioral economics studies that refer to this as the Endowed Progress Effect. Seeing your previous progress is a great way to trigger your next productive action.

Two of my favorite strategies that use visual cues are The Paper Clip Strategy, which is helpful for beating procrastination day-after-day, and The Seinfeld Strategy, which is great for maintaining consistency over longer periods of time.

Where to Go From Here

I hope you found this short guide on procrastination useful. If you’re looking for more ideas on how to stop procrastinating and take action, then check out my full list of procrastination articles below.

All Procrastination Articles

This is a complete list of articles I have written on procrastination. Enjoy!

Best Articles on Related Topics

Or, browse my best articles.

5 Great Articles about Procrastination

Good and Bad Procrastination by Paul Graham – The most impressive people I know are all procrastinators

Why Wait? by Eric Jaffe – Psychological science is finally beginning to understand the complexities of procrastination

Waiting versus Idleness by Venkat Rao – When you waste your own time, it’s called idleness. When others waste your time, it’s called waiting. I enjoy idleness. I don’t like waiting

Later by James Surowiecki – What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

Procrastination by David McRaney – Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

(Video) The Definition Of Procrastination & Why You Are Not So Smart

Whenever you’re looking to reach a goal in your life, especially if that’s building your own business, there’s one piece of advice you hear over and over again. You must have a ‘why’ that keeps you going when things get tough. And that’s good advice…but it’s incomplete. Picking just one why—no matter how compelling it may seem—isn’t enough to carry you through when things get tough. And they are going to get tough (that’s an inevitability!) Hanging the success of your big dream on one why is setting you on a path to failure. (more…)

Can’t Stop Procrastinating? Just Procrastinate Better

Procrastination is often unfairly regarded as productivity’s evil twin, writes Donné Torr over at Hootsuite. Sure, procrastinators can be slow and unreliable, but there exists research to suggest not all people who put things off are unproductive. Whether it’s the sort of “research” that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, I’ll leave for you to decide.

You can’t beat your Facebook addiction into submission – so schedule it into your work day, says Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit.

Big Think’s Maria Konnikova covered psychologist John Perry, who is notable for proposing a theory of Structured Procrastination:

“Perry proposes the following strategy for the effective procrastinator. Create a list of tasks that you need to accomplish. Order them from most important to least important. Now, procrastinate doing something that is higher on the list by doing something lower on the list, instead of something random that doesn’t appear at all. That way, you’ll be doing something that needs doing while not doing something that’s even more pressing and important, thus satisfying your procrastinating tendencies. As a result, you’re still a procrastinator par excellence, avoiding important deadlines and responsibilities, but in addition, you’ve suddenly become productive as well.”

Perry features prominently in Torr’s article for his ideas on how “effective dawdling” can lead to creativity and innovative solutions. Inspired, Torr suggests tailoring your time-management habits to the needs of your job. I suppose a good example would be for a humble blogger tasked with writing about big ideas to spend his lazy online time visiting sites that promote knowledge. Not that I know anybody who fits that profile…

The key takeaway here? Torr stresses that, in a counterintuitive twist, active and structured procrastinators might very well be just as productive as their go-getter counterparts.

Do I buy it? Eh, not really. Procrastination is, in the words of the great David McRaney, “fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.” If we could condition ourselves to not procrastinate, we’d all likely be happier people. But since we apparently can’t all do that, I suppose the Perry method is a fair Plan B.

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Read more at Hootsuite.

Photo credit: Sergey Paranchuk / Shutterstock

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