How to stop procrastinating

Procrastination has a narrower meaning in research than in everyday talk. The psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl sum up the definition their field uses: the voluntary delay of an intended action, despite knowing you will probably be worse off for the delay (Sirois and Pychyl, 2013).

Three parts of that sentence matter. The delay is voluntary, so a day lost to a real emergency does not count. The action was intended, so there was a plan, even an unspoken one. And you expected the delay to cost you. Putting something off because waiting is the smarter move is scheduling, and nobody needs a page to stop doing that.

The same paper explains why anyone would choose a delay they expect to regret. A task that is boring, frustrating or unclear brings on an unpleasant feeling the moment you turn toward it, and turning away makes the feeling stop. The authors call this short-term mood repair, and borrow a line from earlier researchers: we give in to feel good.

The relief is real, and it arrives at once. The cost goes to a later version of you, who has the same task, less time, and now the memory of having dodged it. Sirois and Pychyl put that handover to the future self at the center of their account. It is also the reason this page ends in a weekly count of hours: a count brings the future self’s bill into the present, where you can see it.

“Procrastination is laziness.”

The definition already rules this out, because it needs an intention. Someone who never meant to write the report is not procrastinating on it. The people in these studies wanted the thing done. A delay is also often filled with other work, such as email, tidying or a different assignment, and that is not what doing nothing looks like.

The explanation from mood, on the other hand, has experiments behind it. Dianne Tice and colleagues ran 3 of them. In the last one, people who had been put in a bad mood spent more of their time procrastinating instead of preparing for the task that came next (Tice and colleagues, 2001). But when people were led to believe their mood could not change, that extra delay disappeared. Laziness cannot explain that result, because a fixed mood should make no difference to a lazy person. Mood repair can: to someone delaying in order to feel better, a delay that cannot help is not worth having.

If your trouble is less a plan you keep delaying and more that there is no plan, and the evenings slide by, the page on how to stop being lazy starts from there.

“I work better under pressure.”

Students who say so can be checked against their grades. Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister followed students across a semester in 2 studies, recording who procrastinated, how stressed they felt and what grades they got (Tice and Baumeister, 1997).

Early in the term, the procrastinators reported less stress than everyone else. Late in the term they reported more, and they received lower grades on all assignments. The authors describe a pattern of short-term benefits and long-term costs. In other words, the pressure was real, and the better work was not.

1. Write the plan in hours. Pick one thing you keep putting off and give each day of the coming week a figure: an hour on Monday, half an hour on Tuesday. A plan in hours can be checked. “Work on the thesis this week” cannot.
2. Plan from what happened before. People picture the work going smoothly and expect it to take less time than it does, which psychologists call the planning fallacy. In one study, 37 students expected to finish a thesis in 33.9 days and took 55.5, and only 29.7% finished by their own estimate (Buehler and colleagues, 1994). Base next week’s hours on last week’s real ones.
3. Tie the first step to a moment. Write one sentence with a when, a where and a what: “If it is nine and I am at my desk, then I open the past paper and answer the first question.” Psychologists call this an implementation intention. A review of 94 tests found it raised the odds of reaching a goal (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). The size of the effect, on the standard scale researchers use to compare studies, was 0.65, which the authors class as medium to large.
4. Shrink the unpleasant part. Steel’s review found that people put off what is unpleasant, so cut the first session down until it no longer is: one question, one paragraph, one phone call. Starting is the moment the wish to feel better gets in the way, and a small start gives it less to push against.
5. Bring a finish line closer. A reward months away loses to a show tonight. Give the week its own finish: a section sent to a friend on Friday, a past paper marked on Sunday.
6. Count planned against done. At the end of the week, add up the hours you planned and the hours you did. Divide done by planned. That share, and the hours put off, are the two numbers the rest of this page is about.

Of these six ways to stop procrastinating, step three is the one most worth doing today. The sentence takes a minute to write, and it moves the decision out of the moment when the task feels worst. To plan a whole week this way, with a set time for each task, see time blocking.

A week of putting things off is hard to see from inside it, because every single delay felt reasonable at the time.

A good way to run this test counts the done hours from what you already write or say about your day, so the count does not depend on remembering to start a timer for the very task you avoid. Most journaling apps record how guilty the delay felt. They do not set the hours you planned next to the hours you did.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: study, the project you planned, your phone, shows, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. A weekly plan and targets put the hours you meant to do next to your real ones, and a to-do with a reminder can hold the first step.

Write my first day

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The test asks for a share that rises, not for a fixed score, because no study sets a pass mark. A rising share says the delays are shrinking. A share that stays low for all three weeks says the plan is too big, and the fix is a smaller plan you can keep.

Here are the example student’s three weeks with a plan, weeks two to four, each held against the same plan of 17h 30m a week.

• Week two, the first with a plan

  69%

  12h done of 17h 30m planned. Two short sessions most days. Every day had some study, and no day reached the plan.

• Week three

  86%

  15h done of 17h 30m planned. Six days on the plan exactly, and one Wednesday with nothing.

• Week four

  97%

  17h done of 17h 30m planned. Some study every day, asleep by eleven.

The share went from 69% to 86% to 97%, and the hours put off fell from 5h 30m to 30m. Week three holds the lost Wednesday and still beat the week before it.

One honest note on week four. On the Friday the app also filed a one-hour lecture as study, so that week reads 17h. By the student’s own words it was an hour less, and the share a little lower.

The chart also shows week one, which is there for contrast. With no plan there was nothing to hold the hours against, and they came to 5h. For keeping the hours going once they have started, the page on self-discipline picks up where this one stops.

Every research figure on this page links to one of these sources, read in full or in its published abstract.

1. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65 to 94.
2. Sirois, F. M. and Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115 to 127.
3. Tice, D. M., Bratslavsky, E. and Baumeister, R. F. (2001). Emotional distress regulation takes precedence over impulse control: if you feel bad, do it! Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(1), 53 to 67.
4. Tice, D. M. and Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: the costs and benefits of dawdling. Psychological Science, 8(6), 454 to 458.
5. Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366 to 381.
6. Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119.