But getting a better understanding of why our brains are so prone to procrastination might let us find new strategies to avoid it. For example, psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a <a href="http://postcog.ucd.ie/files/2010%20I%20forgive%20myself,%20now%20I%20can%20study%20How%20self-forgiveness%20for%20procrastinating%20can%20reduce%20future%20procrastination.pdf">paper </a>showing that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to procrastination are, overall, less compassionate toward themselves - an insight that points to ways to help.

<a href="http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/prg/about/about_director.html">Pychyl </a>, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has been studying procrastinators for some 19 years. I talked to him about why people procrastinate and how they can learn to stop. Susannah Locke: What are the biggest misconceptions about procrastination? Tim Pychyl: When a procrastinator thinks about themselves, they'll think, "Oh, I have a time management problem," or, "I just can't make myself do it. There's a problem with my willpower." And when other people think about procrastinators, they use that pejorative term: "They're lazy."

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." SL: What's the evidence that just beginning a task, even in a very small way, makes it easier to follow through? TP: We know from psychological research by <a href="http://www.psych.rochester.edu/people/elliot_andrew/">[Andrew] Elliot </a>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.

Tax Day is a horror for many procrastinators. For many people, a little procrastination isn't harmful - like 15 minutes lost in Facebook or putting off doing the laundry for a few days. But then there are things like taxes. And all the people who keep meaning to start saving for retirement, but never do.

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Productivity

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Mindfulness

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Time Management

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Science & Nature

Why your brain loves procrastination

What started as a fast-paced, frenzied, exciting project hit what Seth Godin calls " <a href="https://www.nateliason.com/lessons/the-dip-seth-godin/">The Dip </a>": "The Dip is the long stretch between beginner's luck and real accomplishment. The Dip is the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out... Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most." The Dip is not a new idea. Startup founders have known about it for ages, as what <a href="http://avc.com/">Fred Wilson </a>and <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/">Paul Graham </a>call the "Trough of Sorrow":

The Dip is to keep you out

Discussions of The Dip leave out an equally challenging piece, though: The Start. People like Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and Y Combinator alums have no problem with The Start, so it gets overlooked. But The Start is a much bigger problem since you can't reach The Dip if you don't get through The Start, and many more people fantasize about doing something than actually do it and give up.

Fantasizing about doing things

<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/">LessWrong </a>gives us a more helpful equation: As they describe it, your motivation is a function of your Expectancy (how likely you think you are to accomplish the goal) multiplied by the Value of the goal to you, divided by the product of your Impulsiveness (how distractible you are) and the Delay (how far off the result seems).

Motivation math equation 

Depending on which part of the challenge you find yourself on you'll have to more aggressively design that part of your machine. You'll either need to make it so easy to start that you can't say no, or make it so easy to continue that you never stop. Before we continue, a clarification. When I talk about "getting motivated to start a project" I mean actually starting it . Many people will say they're "motivated" to learn Spanish or take up basket weaving, but they never start. These people aren't motivated, they just have an interest. They likely want to <a href="https://www.nateliason.com/do-vs-have-done/">the project, not actually </a><a href="https://www.nateliason.com/do-vs-have-done/">it </a>. Our challenge is to design a system that easily and reliably motivates you to action, instead of only talking about your interests over happy hour.

Work behind the math

Increasing the reasons to start a project deals with the top of the motivation equation: Expectancy and Value. We have to create ways to dramatically increase the Value of starting the project now, as well as increase our Expectancy of succeeding. The easiest way to increase the value of starting a project is to clearly define what outcome you will get by accomplishing the goal . If your goals aren't motivating, you may not have attached a sufficiently high value to them. If you only want to learn Spanish because you feel like you should learn a second language, you're unlikely to see high enough Value in it. But if you have a reason like "I spend at least a month each year in Spanish speaking places and I want to be able to make friends when I'm there," you have a much stronger value.

However you choose to frame it, focus on creating a value that is intrinsically meaningful to you . If you try to justify pursuing a goal because of something you think you should do or that you're supposed to do, it won't work. That's not high value. They can't just be goals that you have chosen, they have to be <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167298245010">goals that were generated autonomously </a>and that resonate with your personal desires.

Your Expectancy is how likely you believe you are to succeed at this project you're taking on. Increasing it requires pulling two levers: decreasing your learned helplessness , and increasing the perceived ease of accomplishing it . If you've ever taken on self-directed projects and failed before, or you've never been able to get yourself motivated to start them in the past, you may have developed a degree of " <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness">Learned Helplessness </a>" around motivating yourself. It's a psychological phenomenon in which repeated failures conditions you to not bother trying, even when the factors that caused you to fail in the past have been removed.

Learned helplessness

The solution?Set small, incremental goals that are sufficiently exciting to be motivating and which you have a reasonable expectation of hitting . A good technique for this is setting process goals instead of outcome goals. An outcome goal is great for planning, but it's bad for day to day tracking since you can't control your outcomes. You can only control what you do in pursuit of those outcomes.

The challenge is keeping that high-level goal in front of you while you're working through the minutia and day to day of working to accomplish it. You can do this multiple ways, but here's what's worked well for me. I think of my goals on three levels: quarterly, weekly, and daily. The quarterly goals are the loftiest: finish a book draft, grow my business to &gt; $30,000 MRR, dial in my productivity system. From those quarterly goals, I can create weekly goals as well as monthly "check-in" goals to make sure I'm on track. Then from those weekly goals, I create my daily goals, either each night when I wrap up or each morning before I get started. (For more on this, read <a href="https://www.nateliason.com/lessons/getting-results-agile-way-j-d-meier/">Getting Results the Agile Way </a>).

As such, these methods will focus on preventing distraction, avoiding procrastination, and stopping doing the "urgent unimportant" tasks instead of the " <a href="http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/10/23/eisenhower-decision-matrix/">important non-urgent </a>" ones you should be doing. "This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future."

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Einstein Stop me if you've heard this one before. Ryan has decided to learn Spanish.

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Personal Development

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Motivation & Inspiration

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Habits

The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal - Nat Eliason

Whatever your identity is right now, you only believe it because you have proof of it. If you go to church every Sunday for twenty years, you have evidence that you are religious. If you study biology for one hour every night, you have evidence that you are studious. If you go to the gym even when it's snowing, you have evidence that you are committed to fitness. The more evidence you have for a belief, the more strongly you will believe it.

Identity belief and habit

For most of my early life, I didn't consider myself a writer. If you were to ask any of my high school teachers or college professors, they would tell you I was an average writer at best: certainly not a standout. When I began my writing career, I published a new article every Monday and Thursday for the first few years. As the evidence grew, so did my identity as a writer. I didn't start out as a writer. I became a one through my habits.

Become the best by practice 

No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it actually is big. That's the paradox of making small improvements.

Small changes make a big difference

Of course, it works the opposite way, too. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it's a vote for that identity. The good news is that you don't need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don't need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn't matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

In one of my very first articles, I discussed a concept called identity-based habits. The basic idea is that the beliefs you have about yourself can drive your long-term behavior. Maybe you can trick yourself into going to the gym or eating healthy once or twice, but if you don't shift your underlying identity, then it's hard to stick with long-term changes.

Why your brain loves procrastination

The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal - Nat Eliason

How to Change Your Beliefs and Stick to Your Goals for Good

Anlyn Deels