Why we put things off (and what to do about it)

Good morning!

This one might hurt a little bit. I once delayed submitting a tax return so long that the guilt from it began to behave like a roommate. It would wake up with me, follow me around the flat, interrupt my Netflix, whisper in my ear when I dared to enjoy myself. When I finally submitted the return—thirty-five minutes of focused effort—I had to laugh. I wasn’t avoiding the task itself. I was avoiding the feeling I thought the task would bring.

This is the central misunderstanding at the heart of most procrastination. Most procrastination is just poor emotional management.

It’s not about laziness. it’s about emotional regulation.

Let’s start with some research i was reading last week. Dr Tim Pychyl, a professor at Carleton University and one of the leading scholars on procrastination, says procrastination isn’t a time management issue. It’s an emotional one. We delay tasks because we’re trying to avoid negative feelings—boredom, self-doubt, anxiety, frustration. The problem is that procrastination is a short-term mood repair strategy that creates long-term consequences.

Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash

In that moment, when we reach for our phone instead of opening the document, what we’re really doing is choosing to feel good now at the cost of feeling worse later. It’s not unlike eating the cake instead of going to the gym. And it works temporarily. You feel a bit better. Until the guilt shows up. Until the deadline begins to whisper. Until you find yourself saying that classic line: “I just work better under pressure,” which is really just a poetic way of saying, “I only act when I’m afraid.”

This is important because once we understand that procrastination is emotional, not rational, we stop trying to fix it by downloading new calendar apps or writing increasingly aggressive to-do lists. Those things help, sure, but only if we first deal with the emotional temperature underneath. Ask yourself: what am I trying to avoid feeling?

Learn to interrupt the impulse

Now, understanding why we procrastinate is half the battle. The other half happens in that tiny sliver of time between the moment we think of the task and the moment we avoid it. That microsecond is where habits are formed or broken. Think of it as the sneeze before the sneeze.

What we need here is not just discipline, but what psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls “implementation intentions.” This is where you decide in advance what action you’ll take when faced with a trigger. It’s the difference between saying “I’ll work on the report tomorrow” and saying “At 9 a.m. tomorrow, after I make coffee, I’ll sit down at my desk and write the introduction.”

One study showed that people who used implementation intentions were twice as likely to complete their goals. The specificity gives your brain something to work with. It anchors your action to a context. That removes the need for motivation, which—as you may have realised by now—is a notoriously unreliable partner.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

This is also where the “just five minutes” rule becomes your friend. If you’re stuck, tell yourself you only have to do the task for five minutes. That’s it. After that, you can stop. But here’s the trick: most of the time, you won’t. You’ll keep going, because starting is the real mountain. Once we start, momentum takes over.

This is why procrastination is rarely about time. It’s about inertia. A task at rest tends to stay at rest. A task in motion tends to stay in motion. Your job is not to feel like doing the thing. Your job is to start doing the thing, even if your brain is kicking and screaming like a toddler being pulled out of a toy shop.

Design a world that helps you act

We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, floating above influence, directing our lives with pure logic like slightly overconfident chess grandmasters. But most of our actions aren’t the result of careful deliberation. They’re the result of the environment we’ve built around ourselves. The apps on your phone, the clutter on your desk, the softness of your bed in the morning — these aren’t neutral details. They’re suggestions. Quiet prompts. Subtle nudges.

Behavioural scientists call this choice architecture, the idea that the way options are presented to us affects our decisions. You don’t choose your environment and then rise above it. You are constantly being shaped by it. Your surroundings don’t care about your goals. They care about what’s easiest.

So take a look around. If you say you want to write more, is your writing software a single click away, or do you have to climb over a pile of dopamine traps to get to it? If you say you want to go to the gym in the morning, are your clothes and shoes already where they need to be, or are they buried somewhere beneath last week’s laundry? Are you charging your phone across the room, or are you cuddling it to sleep like it’s your emotional support device?

Willpower isn’t endless. It burns out. The harder you make it to do the right thing, the more likely it is you’ll delay or avoid it altogether. The goal isn’t to become more disciplined through sheer force. It’s to make your good intentions easier to follow through on. Less resistance, fewer decisions, more doing.

And we know this already, deep down. That’s why we go to coffee shops to work — not because they have better Wi-Fi or oat milk, but because we need a context shift. We need different cues. We need the silent social pressure of being surrounded by other people doing things. Sometimes, the easiest way to change what you do is to change where you are.

The future is built in small boring minutes

A lot of people I’ve worked with—or mentored—imagine their future self as a kind of superhero version of themselves. Future Me will wake up at 5 a.m., answer emails before sunrise, work on the big idea, drink water, and never feel overwhelmed. However, here’s the uncomfortable truth: Future You will be exactly the same as Present You, unless you change how Present You behaves.

Photo by Sepp Rutz on Unsplash

Procrastination thrives on the illusion that we’ll be different later. It survives because we believe in the myth of the perfect future—when we’ll finally have more time, more energy, more clarity. But no such moment exists. The only moment you ever have is this one. The present is the only place where action can happen.

So start there. Don’t wait to feel like it. Don’t wait to have a perfect plan. Don’t wait for the mood to be right. Start with five minutes. Set a clear trigger. Rearrange your space. And remember that no great project was ever completed in one big heroic push. It was completed in hundreds of tiny, often boring, almost invisible moments of choosing to do the thing, even when it didn’t feel great.

You’re not lazy. You’re just human. The trick is to build a life that works for humans—not heroes.

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