How to stop procrastinating

Why you put off things you care about

Start with the word most people use for it: lazy.

If you were lazy about the report, you wouldn’t care whether it got written, and you wouldn’t be searching for how to stop putting it off. You care. You just don’t start.

Picture the moment you sit down to write the report. The report is boring, or hard, or you don’t know where to begin, or you’re worried it won’t be good enough. Whichever it is, thinking about the report feels bad, and it feels bad right now. The reward for finishing it is days away.

Your phone is right there on the desk. Your phone feels good right now.

So you pick up the phone, and within seconds the bad feeling is gone. That relief is what procrastination is for. Researchers who study procrastination describe it the same way: we put a task off to repair our mood in the moment, and we hand the bill to a later version of ourselves.

One experiment shows this neatly. Students were told they were about to take a math test that said something about their intelligence, and they got 15 minutes alone in a room to practice. The room also had a video game, a puzzle and some magazines.

Students who had been put in a bad mood just before spent almost 14 of their 15 minutes on anything but the math.

Then came the clever part. Other students, in the same bad mood, were told that a scented candle in the room would freeze their mood for a while, so nothing they did would change how they felt. That was nonsense, but they believed it. And they practiced more than anyone.

Same test, same bad mood, same video game in the room. The students who played the game weren’t avoiding the math. They were trying to feel better, and the students who believed they couldn’t feel better had no reason to put the math off.

That’s why procrastination is so hard to shake. It works. It makes you feel better within seconds, every single time, and the cost comes later.

Later is somebody else’s problem. That somebody else is you, tomorrow.

Why tomorrow never feels different

When you put the report off, you tell yourself something that sounds perfectly reasonable: I’ll do it tomorrow, when I feel more like it.

People who come to us for coaching often say it as “I’ll start Monday” or “I need to feel motivated first”. It’s the same thought each time. The task gets handed to a future you who is rested, focused and in the mood.

That person doesn’t show up.

Tomorrow you’re still you, and the report is still the report. Now there’s less time, and a bit of guilt on top.

When researchers followed students through a semester, the ones who put their work off felt less stressed than the others at the start. By the end they were more stressed, they had been ill more often, and their grades were lower. Putting the work off felt better first and worse later.

There’s a second reason the mood doesn’t come. When you think about a task, what you picture is the first few minutes of it. And the first few minutes are usually the worst part.

Researchers have measured this with exercise. They asked people at a gym, minutes before a workout, how much they expected to enjoy it, and asked them again afterwards. People enjoyed the workout more than they had predicted. That held for yoga classes and weight training, for easy workouts and hard ones.

The studies were small, but the explanation they point to is a useful one: we judge the whole workout by its start. In one of them, people rated a cycling class part by part. The class began and ended with the same ten minutes of easy pedaling, and people expected to enjoy those ten minutes a lot less at the start of the class than at the end of it.

Same pedaling. The only difference was which ten minutes came first.

I can’t show you the same study for reports and tax returns. But you’ve probably noticed it yourself: ten minutes into a task you had dreaded for a week, the task is rarely as bad as the dread was.

So waiting until you feel like it gets the order backwards. Feeling like it tends to come after you start, not before. You start, and the feeling catches up.

What makes procrastination worse

If putting a task off is a way to get away from a bad feeling, then two things make you more likely to do it: anything that makes the task feel worse, and anything that makes the escape easier.

Four of them are worth knowing, because you can do something about each one.

A task with no clear first step

“Sort out my finances” is not something you can sit down and do. There is no first move in it. So every time you look at it, you get the bad feeling and no way to make progress.

Tasks that are boring, frustrating or unclear about where to begin are the ones that get put off. You can’t start a task that has no start.

Something more fun within reach

Go back to the students with the math test. In one more version of that experiment, the room had no video game, only puzzles made for small children and technical journals that were years out of date.

This time the students in a bad mood practiced their math as much as everyone else. A bad mood only turned into procrastination when something enjoyable was sitting right there.

Your phone on the desk is the video game in the room.

A deadline that is far away

The further away a deadline or a reward is, the less it weighs on what you do today. A report due in three weeks loses to almost anything. The same report due tomorrow morning suddenly wins, which is why so much work gets done the night before.

Being hard on yourself about it

This one surprises people, because beating yourself up about procrastinating feels like the responsible thing to do.

But guilt is one more bad feeling attached to the report, and a bad feeling about the report is what you were getting away from in the first place. In a study of first-year university students, the ones who were hardest on themselves for putting off studying before their first exam put it off more before the second. The ones who forgave themselves put it off less.

So when it’s eleven at night and the report is untouched, the useful reaction is a dull one: okay, that happened. What is the smallest piece I can do tomorrow, and when?

That isn’t letting yourself off the hook. Guilt has never written a report. It only makes the next start harder.

How to start when you don’t feel like it

Everything so far points the same way. You can’t reliably change how you feel about the report, and waiting for the feeling to change by itself is how the report got to be a week late.

What you can change is how much the feeling matters.

1. Make the first step small enough to do in a bad mood

Don’t plan to write the report. Plan to open the document and type the three headings. Don’t plan to do the workout. Plan to put your shoes on and do the warm-up.

The first step should take about five minutes, and you should be able to do it while still not feeling like it. That’s the test. If the step needs a good mood, it’s too big.

After five minutes you’re allowed to stop. Often you won’t, because the start was the part you were dreading and the start is now behind you. And if you do stop, you have still done five minutes more than yesterday.

I can’t point you to a big trial of the five-minute start. It follows from how procrastination works, and it’s how we coach getting started with anything.

As I tell clients: don’t let the start stop you. If you can’t get to the gym, go outside and walk. If you can’t walk, eat one healthy meal today. If you can’t do that, drink a glass of water. There is always something you can do.

You don’t start great. You get great by starting.

2. Decide when and where before the moment comes

If you leave the first step for “sometime tomorrow”, tomorrow’s mood gets to decide. You already know how it votes.

So decide now, and tie the first step to something that is going to happen anyway. “When I’ve poured my coffee tomorrow morning, I’ll open the report and type the headings.” “When I get home from work, I’ll put my training shoes on before I sit down.”

Psychologists call this an if-then plan, and it has been tested more than 600 times. On average it helped people follow through by a small to medium amount, and two details from that research are worth using.

Plans written as “if this happens, then I’ll do that” worked better than plans that only set a time and a place. And if-then plans worked best for people who already wanted to do the task. That’s you.

It’s no magic, though. For getting people to exercise more, an if-then plan on its own made only a small difference. So use it together with the small first step, not instead of it.

3. Put the fun option out of reach first

Before the first step, take thirty seconds to move whatever you usually escape to. Put the phone in another room. Close the game, don’t just minimize it.

Think of the math students. With nothing fun within reach, even a bad mood didn’t pull them off the task.

In our coaching we say that a good system is high resistance on the stuff you shouldn’t do, and low resistance on the stuff you should do. So leave the report open on the screen tonight, or the training clothes on the chair, and make the phone the option that takes effort.

4. Let the task feel bad, and start anyway

The bad feeling will probably still be there when the coffee is poured. That’s fine. You don’t have to get rid of the feeling before you start.

You only have to carry it for five minutes, and it’s usually lighter once you’re moving. Five minutes doesn’t need you to feel ready.

What to do when it comes back

It will come back. Some morning the coffee gets poured, the report stays closed, and by the evening you’re on the phone again wondering what happened.

That doesn’t mean the approach failed, or that you did. Putting things off is an old habit with a fast reward, and old habits don’t leave quietly.

Two things from our coaching help here. The first is the target. My rule for everything we coach is 80 percent, not 100, because I’d much rather have you be 80 percent consistent every month than 100 percent in the first month and 20 percent in the second and third.

If you take your first step on four days out of five, you’re doing what we would ask of a client.

The second is how you look at the day you missed. We ask clients to treat it the way a scientist would: a day that didn’t go to plan is not a failure, it’s data. Was the first step too big? Was the “when” too vague? Was the phone on the desk again?

Change that one thing and run the experiment again tomorrow. The motto we use is “I either win, or learn.”

Over time, the aim is fewer decisions, not more discipline. The same first step, at the same point in the day, in the same place, stops being a choice you have to win every morning. And every choice you don’t have to make is one less chance to put the task off.

That is most of what we do as coaches at Gains For Gamers: help people build a routine that still runs on the days they don’t feel like it.