How to Stop Procrastinating: A Plan for the Feeling Under the Task

About this tool

How to stop procrastinating is almost always answered with time management, and almost everyone asking has already tried time management. Procrastination is the voluntary delay of something you intended to do, in the knowledge that delaying will make things worse. That last part is what separates it from sensible postponement, and it is also why planners, timers, and color-coded calendars fail so reliably: the problem was never that you did not know what to do or when. You knew. You did something else anyway.

The explanation with the best support treats procrastination as short-term mood repair. Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl set it out in a 2013 paper: faced with a task that makes you feel incompetent, bored, resentful, or anxious, you give priority to feeling better in the next ten minutes over the goal you will care about next week. Scrolling works immediately. The tax return does not. On this account procrastination is an emotion regulation strategy that has simply mortgaged your future self, which is why it so often comes with guilt and so rarely with relief.

That reframe tells you where to intervene. Piers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis of procrastination research found task aversiveness, low self-efficacy, impulsiveness, and distance from the deadline among the strongest correlates. Three of those four are about how the task feels rather than how it is scheduled. So the useful questions are not when will I do this but what exactly is unpleasant about it, and what is the smallest version of it that does not trigger the feeling. Boring, ambiguous, and threatening tasks each get avoided for different reasons and need different fixes.

The first fix is shrinking the start. Make the first action small enough that refusing it would be absurd: open the document and write the heading, find the file, draft the subject line. Five minutes of the real task, with permission to stop at five. Most people keep going, and that is a useful bonus rather than the point, because the point is that starting dissolves the dread. The anticipation of an aversive task is reliably worse than doing it, which is a finding people rediscover every single time and still fail to predict.

The second fix is deciding in advance. Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions, summarized in a 1999 paper and in a large 2006 meta-analysis with Paschal Sheeran, shows that plans in the form if situation X arises, I will do Y outperform plain goal intentions across 94 independent tests, with a medium-to-large effect. The mechanism is that the situation itself triggers the action and you skip the moment of deciding, which is exactly the moment procrastination hijacks. So not I will work on the report this week but when I sit down with coffee at 8am Tuesday, I open the report and write the summary section. The worksheet at If-Then Plan (Implementation Intentions) goes deeper on the format.

The third fix is friction. Make the task easier to start than the thing you flee to: clothes laid out, document already open, phone in another room, browser blocked for the first hour. Katherine Milkman and colleagues tested the opposite tactic in 2014 and called it temptation bundling, pairing something you want with something you avoid, in their case audiobooks only at the gym, with gym attendance rising. Bundling has not been tested much beyond that setting, so treat it as a sensible trick rather than settled science, and keep an eye on whether the reward ends up swallowing the task.

The fourth fix is the counterintuitive one, and it has direct evidence. Michael Wohl, Pychyl, and Shannon Bennett found in 2010 that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before a first exam procrastinated less before the next one. Self-criticism keeps the mood bad, and a bad mood is precisely what triggers more avoidance, so the loop tightens. Dropping the self-attack is not permission. It removes the fuel. If the guilt is the loudest part of your procrastination, that line is the one worth taking seriously.

Some procrastination has a root that willpower cannot reach. Chronic, lifelong difficulty starting tasks despite genuine intention, alongside distractibility, time blindness, and trouble with boring administrative work, can point toward adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, where the useful question becomes assessment rather than discipline. Procrastination driven by fear that the work will not be good enough is closer to perfectionism, and the fix there is lowering the standard for a first pass rather than shrinking the task. Procrastination that arrives with exhaustion and flat mood may be burnout or depression, where rest and treatment come before productivity tactics.

The worksheet below is our own design, built from the findings above rather than copied from any single program. It runs on one task at a time on purpose. A list of eleven avoided tasks is itself a way of not starting any of them, so pick the one that is costing you most and write that one down. Expect to use the sheet again for each new task until the pattern becomes automatic, which takes most people several weeks.

If the stakes are getting serious, with deadlines missed at work, bills unpaid, studies at risk, or shame building to the point where opening the laptop feels impossible, a therapist or coach can help more quickly than another system will. The Procrastination Test and the ADHD Test on this site can help you sort which pattern you are dealing with before that conversation, and Goal Setting covers the step after starting, which is keeping going. The Psychology.com directory is free to search.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the mood regulation account of procrastination, the implementation intention format, and the attention deficit and perfectionism signposting.

References

1. Sirois F, Pychyl T. Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. 2013;7(2):115-127.
2. Steel P. The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin. 2007;133(1):65-94.
3. Gollwitzer PM. Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist. 1999;54(7):493-503.
4. Gollwitzer PM, Sheeran P. Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. 2006;38:69-119.
5. Wohl MJA, Pychyl TA, Bennett SH. I forgive myself, now I can study: how self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences. 2010;48(7):803-808.
6. Milkman KL, Minson JA, Volpp KGM. Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: an evaluation of temptation bundling. Management Science. 2014;60(2):283-299.

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