Why your brain loves procrastination

But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions. So we see it as giving in to feel good. And it's related to a lack of self-regulation skills.

My graduate student Eve-Marie Blouin-Hudon just did three studies, and what she looked at is our ability to imagine the future self. She measured people's self-continuity. You'd see circles representing present self and future self and choose how much to overlap them. Some people see these selves as completely distinct, and some people see them totally overlapping. The people who see the present and future self as more overlapping have more self-continuity and report less procrastination.

If you speak to people, they'll tell you that it doesn't feel voluntary: "I feel like I have no control over it." For some people, it feels totally involuntary, like they can't help themselves.

TP: One of my pet expressions is, "Just get started." And it's important you don't say, "Just do it" - that's overwhelming. But just get started.

Whenever we face a task, we're not going to feel like doing it. Somehow adults believe that their motivational state has to match the task at hand. We say, "I'm not in the mood."

Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don't feel like it, but I'm just gonna get started."

TP: We know from psychological research by [Andrew] Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being. So the most important thing you can do is bootstrap a little progress. Get a little progress, and that's going to fuel your well-being and your motivation.

TP: [Peter] Gollwitzer and his colleagues for years have shown us that implementation intentions make a huge difference to even deal with things like distractions.

Implementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I'm not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we're going out, I'm going to say no." So you've already made this pre-commitment.

You can use implementation intentions to keep yourself focused: "If I've finished this part of the article, then I'm going to immediately turn my attention to reading the next part."

SL: Can people really overcome procrastination?

TP: I guess I'm a living case. When I was an undergraduate, I procrastinated a lot. And now that I understand procrastination, I just have no room to wiggle.

Because it's all about self-deception - you aren't aware that it's going to cost you, but you are. When there's no more self-deception and you face yourself, you either shit or get off the pot. You're either going to do it, or you're not going to do it.

I really like my life, and I like to make time for the things that are important to me. [Robert] Pozen, who's written a book on extreme productivity , has the OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I'm like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there's not much of a middle ground. I'm not going to save it for a while.

And so if I can deal with it in two minutes - this is David Allen 's work - I deal with it.

I used to procrastinate, and now I don't, because I got all these wicked strategies. And it's every level: some of it's behavioral, some of it's emotional, some of it's cognitive. And now my biggest challenge is how do I teach my kids this? That's really hard.

Pychyl also hosts a podcast, called iProcrastinate , which often features interviews with other psychology experts in related fields and is also heavy with tips and tricks for overcoming procrastination.