How to Stop Procrastinating

To stop procrastinating, stop treating it as a laziness problem and start treating it as a feelings problem: we put things off because the task makes us feel bad, and delay buys a little relief. So the fix is to make starting feel smaller and kinder, one five-minute step at a time, and to forgive yourself for yesterday's delay instead of punishing it.

“Yes, I’ll do it first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Oh no, it’s 5:40 pm. I’ll start at 6.”

“I’ll just call them back tomorrow.”

“There’s so much to do and I’m so overwhelmed. I can’t start now.”

We’ve all been there. We’ve heard these lines from people we love, and we’ve said them to ourselves, usually with a straight face. If you think about it, procrastination takes real creativity. It’s quite something how many reasons we can come up with to delay a task that would have taken a minute.

And somewhere along the way, procrastination became a joke we’re all in on. Memes, mugs, “I work best under pressure.” Everyone knows it costs us, and everyone does it anyway. So let’s start there, gently: stop glorifying it. We aren’t asking you to hustle every waking hour. We’re asking you to notice that every time we laugh it off, we tell ourselves we can’t start, even before we’ve tried.

The good news is that once you see what’s really going on, it gets a lot easier to change. So let’s break it down.

Why do we procrastinate?

Psychologists have studied procrastination for decades, and the picture is surprisingly consistent. A large review of procrastination research by Piers Steel found that the strongest predictors include how unpleasant a task feels, how far away its reward is, how capable we feel of doing it, and how impulsive we are. Researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl go a step further and describe procrastination as short-term mood repair: we dodge the bad feeling now and hand the bill to our future self.

In other words, it’s rarely about time management. It’s about how the task makes us feel. If you’d like the funnier version, Tim Urban’s Why Procrastinators Procrastinate is a classic. (Don’t save it for later.)

Here are the most common feelings hiding behind a stalled task. See which ones sound familiar.

The task is more complex than it looks

“Cook dinner” looks like one line on a list. But if you’ve only recently started cooking, it’s really five tasks: decide what to make, check you have the ingredients, find a recipe, do the prep, and clean up afterwards. Our brains see the whole knot and back away.

It involves a hard decision

“Buy a dress for the wedding” sounds simple until it turns into a budget decision, a travel decision and a does-this-go-with-the-theme decision. When a task hides a decision we don’t want to make, we tend to avoid the whole thing.

It means facing difficult emotions

Some tasks ask us to reach into tender places. A manager puts off a difficult conversation with a colleague they like. A family leaves a loved one’s belongings untouched for months after they pass away. This isn’t laziness. We’re simply not ready to feel what the task will make us feel, and that deserves patience.

The reward is a long way off

We’re drawn to rewards we can feel today. When a task pays off in months or years, like exercise, saving or learning a skill, something more urgent always seems to turn up. Just naming this (“I’m avoiding this because I won’t see results for ages”) is often enough to loosen its grip.

Motivation has gone missing

Sometimes we’ve been handed a task we never wanted, or we simply don’t feel like it. That’s normal now and then. It becomes a problem when it’s persistent. If this is you, Thomas Frank’s short video on getting out of an unmotivated rut is worth ten minutes.

Perfectionism

If you need a task done perfectly, at the right moment, in the right mood, the safest option is not to start. Perfectionism piles on pressure, and the result is delay, stress and the strange feeling of having been busy all day while achieving nothing. The School of Life’s video on the perfectionist trap puts this kindly, and we’ve written about embracing imperfection too.

Fear of failure, and doubting ourselves

If you’ve failed at something before, starting again can feel like signing up to fail twice. And when our self-belief is low, we assume we won’t manage the task, so we avoid it. Suddenly other “important” things pop up, and weeks go by.

We just don’t like the task

Some tasks are dull, fiddly or unpleasant, and no amount of reframing will make taxes fun. They still need doing. Sometimes the kindest thing is to admit you don’t like it and do it anyway.

What about laziness?

Most people blame laziness. But look back over the list above. Usually something deeper is going on, and that’s good news, because a feeling can be worked with in a way that a label can’t.

Now that you know what might be behind the delay, it’s time to look at what you can do about it.

Forgive yourself for yesterday

This one comes first because it makes the rest possible. When we’ve put something off, the instinct is to tell ourselves off. It feels responsible. It isn’t helping. Berating yourself adds anxiety, and anxiety is exactly the feeling you were trying to escape in the first place.

One study of university students, led by Michael Wohl with Timothy Pychyl, found that forgiving yourself for procrastinating was linked to procrastinating less the next time round. Self-forgiveness gets the hook out so you can move.

So talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend who’s stuck. You are more capable than you feel right now. If your inner voice tends to be harsh, our piece on the power of positive self-talk is a good next read.

Five-minute action: write one sentence to yourself about the task you’ve been avoiding, starting with “It makes sense that I put this off because…”. Then add: “And today I’ll do the first small step.”

Break it down until it’s almost silly

Big, vague tasks are where procrastination lives. Small, specific ones are hard to avoid. Take that “cook dinner” knot and untangle it into steps. Or think about exercise: instead of promising yourself an hour-long workout, commit to a five-minute warm-up for the first few days and nothing else.

It’s far easier to give five minutes to something new than sixty. And once you’ve started, carrying on is usually the easy part. As five minutes gets comfortable, add a little more. This works especially well for perfectionists: aim to finish one stage at a time.

Five-minute action: pick the task you’ve been dodging longest and write down the very first physical step. Not “do taxes” but “find last year’s tax folder”. Then do only that.

Make the hard decisions while you’re fresh

When a task hides a decision, the decision is usually the real obstacle. So separate the two. Make the decision first, ideally when you have the most energy, which for most of us is not 6 pm after a long day. Once the decision is made, the task itself often shrinks to almost nothing.

The same goes for the task you dread most. Tackling it early, sometimes called “eating the frog”, means the biggest thing on your list is done before the day has a chance to talk you out of it. The relief tends to carry you through the rest.

Five-minute action: look at your stalled task and write the one decision it’s waiting on as a question (“What’s my budget for the dress?”). Set a reminder to answer it first thing tomorrow, before email.

Build a habit so you don’t need motivation

Motivation is a bit like a strong coffee. It gives you a lovely rush, then it wears off, usually right when you need it. Habits are what carry us after the rush is gone. When we do the same thing at the same time and place, it slowly becomes automatic, the way some of us wake up a minute before the alarm.

Be patient with this. In one study of people building a new daily habit, the time it took to become automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing a single day didn’t derail the process. So if you slip, you haven’t broken anything. Just pick it up again tomorrow.

Five-minute action: attach your avoided task to something you already do every day: “After I pour my morning tea, I’ll spend five minutes on the report.” Write it on a sticky note where the tea lives.

Get organised enough that starting is easy

We don’t just mean your planner. A little order in the rest of life lowers the cost of starting almost anything. If your paperwork lives in one folder, taxes take less dread. If your grocery list is up to date, dinner is easier to make. Friction is procrastination’s best friend, so take some away.

Organisation also means a bit of cleanup when a task is done: saving files in the right folder, putting the duct tape back where it belongs. Future you will be grateful. For more on setting up your day so the right things get done, see our five tips to increase productivity.

Five-minute action: set a timer for five minutes and gather everything you need for your avoided task into one place, one folder, one tab or one corner of the desk. Stop when the timer goes.

Do it together, or hand it over

Some things are easier with company. If you want to start working out, do it with a friend. You’re far more likely to turn up when someone is waiting for you, and you can cheer each other on. The same goes for a stalled work task: telling someone what you plan to do and when makes it more likely to happen.

And some things don’t need to be yours at all. If you’re a manager trying to do everything yourself, that may be the real reason you’re overwhelmed. Even at home, you can hire someone to do your taxes or ask a friend who loves spreadsheets to help with a budget. Delegating costs something, but sometimes the cost of the task never getting done is higher.

Five-minute action: send one message, either to a friend (“Can I tell you on Friday whether I’ve done this?”) or to someone who could take the task off your plate.

Take a real break

Sometimes the honest answer is that you’re carrying more than you can handle. We all have a point beyond which we stop being useful, and pushing past it just makes everything take longer. You are allowed to rest. In fact, if you’ve been working flat out lately, you deserve to.

A real break means stepping away properly, not scrolling while feeling guilty. You’ll come back with fresh eyes, and the task that felt impossible often looks a lot more ordinary.

Five-minute action: stand up, step outside or to a window, and spend five minutes doing nothing productive at all. Then come back and do the first small step from earlier.

Be honest about when it’s more than procrastination

We all have days when we don’t want to do anything, and most of the time we get to the important things in the end. But if you’ve been stuck for a long time, or the putting-off comes with low mood, constant worry or feeling flat about everything, it may be worth looking a little deeper. Talking it through with someone you trust really does help.

And if it persists, please have a conversation with a doctor or a therapist. There’s no shame in getting support for something that’s been weighing on you.

Five-minute action: write down the one task that has been stuck the longest and the name of one person you could talk to about it this week.

You can start smaller than you think

We believe procrastination is a very human way of protecting ourselves from a feeling, and once you see the feeling, you get your choice back.

The fact that you’ve read this far tells us you can get things over the line. So how about that pending task? Five minutes. Today. You’ve got this.

What’s the one task you’ve been putting off? Tell us in the comments, and come back to tell us when it’s done.