Procrastination — Why Procrastinators Procrastinate?
The word procrastination means “the action of delaying or postponing something.“ Or in other words, the action of ruining your own life for no apparent reason. You already knew that, right?
The thing that the dictionary doesn’t understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional — it’s something they don’t know how to not do. To understand why procrastinators procrastinate let’s first try and understand the human brain.
The human brain
There are two types of brain, procrastinator brain and the non-procrastinator brain. Not literally, but you get the idea.
All brains have a “Rational Decision-Maker” inside them, but a procrastinator’s brain comes bundled with an “Instant Gratification Monkey” and a “Panic Monster.”
If all the brain had was a Rational Decision-Maker then the world would be in a much better place, but sadly the reality is far from it. Most human brains are ruled by the Instant Gratification Monkey, you know, the one that lives in the present and forgets to learn from the past and disregards the future. Yep, that’s most of us. So how do we let the monkey take the back seat and let the Rational Decision-Maker drive our processes?
Procrastination with deadlines
In order to let the monkey take the back seat and give the control back to Rational Decision-Maker, we will need to understand the kinds of procrastination. They come in two forms, the one with deadlines and the one without.
We aren’t going to talk about procrastination with deadlines because it’s synonymous to what we think procrastination is. And since Panic Monster wakes up when a deadline gets too close or when there’s the danger of public embarrassment, its mostly taken care of.
Procrastination without deadlines
While most people think of procrastination as the act of not doing something or delaying work that has a deadline — like assignments, tasks at work, etc — we mostly tend to ignore the kind of procrastination that has no deadlines. They are things like learning to play the guitar, taking care of our health, or working on that side-project that we have been planning to do for a long time.
We mostly keep such things for later or ignore them as unimportant since there’s no pressure of deadlines or public embarrassment. But they are the ones that come with the most regret and can result in long-term unhappiness.
How to beat procrastination?
There are two components of being able to achieve things in a healthy and effective manner — planning and doing, which we will go in more depth in the next sections.
Most procrastinators love planning, quite simply because planning doesn’t involve doing. But they plan in a vague way that doesn’t consider details or reality too closely, and that leaves them perfectly set up to not do anything. So how can we get better at both planning and doing?
Planning
Effective planning is the key to doing something that looks hard to achieve. Take a big list and select a winner. It’s prioritisation. It’s normal to have many interests, but prioritising can help balance your cognitive overload from “things that you want to do” to “things that you have to do right now.” Prioritise and then turn them into a series of small, clear and manageable tasks.
So if you want to write a book, for example, then start by allocating an hour (or minutes) every day in your calendar when you will just do that one thing and nothing else. Consistency matters at this point, not the amount of work.
Doing
It’s not that most procrastinators don’t like the concept of doing, but they picture things without the presence of the Instant Gratification Monkey. So when the time comes to do something they unknowingly let the monkey take over.
For example, the time comes to do some research on the book that you are going to write and you found out that there’s a video on Youtube of a talk by an expert about the topic. So you watch the talk, then the next and the next and suddenly you are stuck in an endless list irrelevant videos of no significant value-add to your research. That’s the Instant Gratification Monkey taking over.
How to actually start doing?
To actually start doing something, you need to “show” yourself that you can do it. Start by outlining the content of your soon-to-be-published book, for example.
Try to internalise the fact that everything you do is a choice. Solicit external support by telling one or more friends or family members about a goal you’re trying to accomplish and asking them to hold you to it. Minimise distractions.
Aim for slow, steady progress. Let’s plug the clichéd, “Rome was not built in a day.” But you know that that’s true, right? Internalise it in every plan that you make or action that you take.
Parting words
Try to increase the feeling of guilt for not doing something. This newsletter, for example, has to published once every week. The feeling of guilt is heavy on this since there are subscribers who expect us to deliver on our promise. Thanks for subscribing! 😍
Remember, the author who writes one page a day has written a book after a year. The procrastinator who gets slightly better every week is a totally changed person a year later.
This shortbound was based on a series of post and videos by Tim Urban. Read them here.
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