Battling procrastination: understanding and dealing with it

A lesser known truism is that behind every great achievement sits a mountain of unseen procrastination. This is because even the most productive among us are not immune to time-wasting, deadline delaying, or over-preparing. While procrastination is normal and you should never feel like a failure for having deep cleaned the oven instead of drawing up your business plan, it can be detrimental if you let it go on too long. Unchecked procrastination can ultimately have negative effects on your mental health, creating stress over unfinished projects and work pileups. This is of particular concern for entrepreneurs and hopeful business owners, whose economic success depends on their capacity for self-motivation and, often, their ability to manage procrastination. Battling procrastination is all about acceptance, understanding, and personal approaches. We all handle procrastination differently because it is ultimately about how we work as individuals. That said, there are helpful methods and approaches which everyone can employ to better understand and manage their procrastination. Read on for our advice on not eliminating procrastination from your life, but learning to live with it so that it doesn’t negatively affect your work. 

Having said that everybody procrastinates to some degree, it’s important to distinguish between regular procrastination and chronic procrastination. The general definition for both is the act of delaying or postponing tasks until close to—or past—their deadlines. 

Regular procrastination may occur because the particular task you’re putting off is difficult or tedious, or you don’t know how to begin. We may procrastinate because we believe we have plenty of time later to finish the task, or that it isn’t going to take long so there’s no rush to get going on it. Another major contributor to regular procrastination is waiting for the right moment. While there’s some truth to being more productive when you act on inspiration, waiting for that lightbulb moment isn’t feasible when you have a full time job or a business to get off the ground. If you only wait for inspiration to get things done, those moments of inspiration will be fewer and further in between.

Chronic procrastination is when your regular procrastination becomes more frequent, negatively affecting your job, mental health, and many other things. Think of it like the difference between sadness and depression: everybody gets sad sometimes, but not everyone falls into a depression. Once things get to this point we have to address the problem; it’s no longer just a one off.Chronic procrastination may stem from working a job you hate or studying a degree you feel no passion for. It may stem from problems in your personal life, such as money stress or relationship/family problems. Chronic procrastinators are also often sufferers of depression, ADHD, or OCD.

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Within these two degrees of procrastination, there are two distinct types. Understanding the two can help you better target the root of your procrastination and begin to work on it. 

This might sound strange to anyone who doesn’t do it, but active procrastinators will deliberately delay completing or beginning a task, because they believe they work better under pressure. The closer to the deadline they leave the task, the more likely they are to get it done. While time pressure is undoubtedly a motivator, this is not a healthy approach to work. Relying on the time crunch to get your work done will likely lead to rushing the task, risking poor work quality. It also breeds stress, especially if other tasks are piled on in the meantime and suddenly you have even less time to complete the task—or no time at all. 

Passive procrastinators may not realise they are procrastinating. Cognitively speaking, what passive procrastinators are doing is postponing a task due to difficulty in making decisions. So while the active procrastinator is confident the looming deadline will be a boon for productivity, the passive procrastinator is underconfident, putting off the task because they don’t believe they are ready to start. The passively procrastinating student may continue to research their paper topic long after they have collected enough information, because they fear they are not ready to start writing. A small business owner who is this type of procrastinator may put off advertising their services because they don’t yet feel confident in the services they offer. 

The more serious neurological conditions which make concentration and task completion difficult (OCD, ADHD, etc.) aren’t going to be addressed in this article because they require professional advice and scientific methods to deal with. Instead, we’re going to deal with the external factors and neurotypical behavioural trappings which contribute to regular and chronic procrastination. 

An unrealistic goal is simply something you wish to achieve but haven’t considered how you might achieve it, or even if doing so is possible. This is particularly one for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Say you set yourself the task of accumulating a great deal of new customers in your first year of business operations. This goal is hopeful and ambitious, but there are many reasons it might be unrealistic. For instance, is your business properly prepared to take on new customers? Have you assessed and anticipated the many challenges this will bring? Is the market favourable to new businesses like yours at the moment? Interrogating your goals can help determine whether or not they are unrealistic. 

Setting yourself distant future deadlines may seem like a good approach to getting something done on your own time. But this is where the time crunch favoured by active procrastinators can come in handy. Students without strict deadlines or expected finishing dates of their studies may be tempted by distant deadlines if the opportunities present themselves. However, a lack of pressure to complete something can result in that thing never being completed. And even though there’s no stress to complete it, a distant deadline can lead to apathy and may lower one’s self-confidence in their ability to complete anything at all. If you’re given the option to set your own deadlines, find reasons to set them close—put a little pressure on yourself. 

Have you ever been faced with a task and thought, ‘That’s a problem for future me’. It’s a quick fix that alleviates immediate anxiety over a task by reassuring yourself it’s not a big deal yet. A kind of mental passing of the baton. When we do this, we’re fooling ourselves into thinking we’re palming the task off to someone else, as if at a later date we’ll be a new person prepared to take on the task. Admin, such as doing your tax return, is often a responsibility we leave to our future selves. This is usually because admin is a constant presence in our working and personal lives, and we are afforded many opportunities to delay or ignore it at the time. But if you don’t want to do it now, where is the logic in assuming you’ll want to do it later? Try to keep in mind that ‘future you’ is just another term for ‘you’. You’ll hate the obligation to do the task in the future just as much as you do now, but instead you’ll be under more time pressure and maybe suffer some self-loathing at having delayed it.

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In addition to active and passive procrastinators, there are also optimistic and pessimistic ones. The optimistic procrastinator is confident enough they’ll be able to complete the task, so delaying it is no big problem. The pessimistic one lacks confidence and avoids the task instead of confronting it. Both types have the same consequence: the task doesn’t get done. The solution here is a balance of both pessimism and optimism. Be optimistic enough that, when you begin the task, you won’t be overwhelmed or doubt your abilities. But maintain some pessimism about your ability to do the task quickly, so that you approach it with a realistic expectation of your abilities.  

‘Decidophobia’ is the term for the fear of making decisions or, more specifically, the fear of making the wrong decisions. While not every procrastinator suffers this to the extent of a full-blown phobia, this is still a key contributor to procrastination. Decidophobia is dangerous for small business owners, especially those with employees. As a founder you will need to be at the head of decision making. You may have a team helping you assess the decisions, but ultimately they will come down to you. If you fear making decisions you may delay your company’s growth, perhaps missing opportunities to make deals with clients or add features that will boost customer satisfaction. Tackle decidophobia by drawing up pro and con lists of each decision you have to make, or using the Decision Making Quadrant.   

We’re all encouraged from a young age to be the best that we can be, to give everything to each task that comes our way. The problem with this advice is that it can manifest as a message about perfection—that if our best isn’t good enough then it’s not our best and we have to do better. Artists and creative people frequently suffer from perfectionism, to the extent that it may get in the way of starting an enterprise to market their work, because they feel it’s never good enough to warrant an audience. Perfectionists procrastinate by forever making edits, changes, or additions to completed works. They become stuck on one project instead of moving onto the next.Tackling perfectionism, always remind yourself of the truth: that nobody, and nothing, is ever perfect, nor can it be. Instead of perfection, strive to achieve satisfaction. Show your work to friends and family when you suspect it may be nearly ready, to gain fresh perspectives. 

Similar to perfectionism, fear of failure is a more drastic form of procrastination which often results in never starting anything. The procrastinator who fears failure focuses on fabricated disastrous consequences instead of the task at hand. Suddenly, the first step is a whole staircase leading to nowhere. Fear of failure is specific to no one, as we can always attach failure to anything we attempt. If you find yourself afraid of failing things before you attempt them, remember that failure is subjective. Is it a failure or a setback? A learning experience? Failure is also a part of life: did you intend to get up at 8am and instead got up at 8.45am? Was it a disastrous failure or did you barely give it a second thought? Try to de-catastrophise and accept that little failures happen every day, usually with little or no consequence.

While it’s important to understand that procrastination is a personal journey, there’s still a great deal of research on the subject and very useful advice worth implementing. Below are some of the popular techniques for dealing with procrastination on a daily basis.

First of all, ask yourself: what kind of a procrastinator am I? The above procrastination types should provide a good reference for the specificities in procrastination, demonstrating that it isn’t just a blanket term for everyone. Better understanding your own procrastination style means knowing how to identify the particular things holding you back from completing your tasks on time. 

Procrastination is a form of self-sabotage. Even the overconfident active procrastinator is still making things difficult for themselves and self-sabotaging, which likely speaks to deeper issues of self-belief. Speaking to the American Psychological Association, Dr. Ferrari explained that non-procrastinators, i.e. people who don’t procrastinate to a point that it’s detrimental in their lives, have a ‘stronger personal identity’ and aren’t concerned with what others think of them. It’s difficult to boil down something as complex and personal as building self-confidence. Try to focus on the reward system, which is neurologically healthy and a great way to increase your self-esteem. Set yourself small tasks which need to be done, complete them, and congratulate yourself. Try to get hooked on the feeling of achievement. 

You’ll mostly hear about the ‘all or something’ approach from dieting and exercise blogs. Dieticians and exercise advice columnists are encouraging readers to give up on the ‘all or nothing’ approach to dieting and exercise because rigid calorie regimes and exercise rosters put too much pressure on us. We are human and we give in to temptation. We shouldn’t be punished for this. The same goes for combatting procrastination. If you begin your day with a task in mind and you refuse to be satisfied until the task is complete, you’re putting a great deal of pressure on yourself. By saying ‘all or nothing’, you’re more likely to land on ‘nothing’ than ‘all’. ‘All or something’ means maybe you’ll get it all done, but if you don’t, whatever you do get done is enough. 

Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro technique has remained a popular time management technique since Cirillo devised it as a student in the 1980s. Using a tomato-shaped timer (hence ‘pomodoro’, italian for tomato), Cirillo would set 25 minute intervals in which he would work non-stop, separating them with short breaks. The technique is broken down into six steps: 

The technique works because it instils a small sense of urgency into the task by working to a timer. But the sense of urgency isn’t stressful because there’s no external pressure—only your own determination to work for the duration of each interval. 

We live in a world of infinite distractions, and most of those distractions are contained within our phones which we keep on us at all hours of the day. One way to minimise your distractions is to keep your phone out of reach when implementing the above pomodoro technique. This way, if you have messages to respond to, you’re not trying to make them wait all day, just 25 minutes. This makes the task of holding off communication much easier. Use distractions as a rewards system: allow yourself a few minutes after intervals of work to be distracted, so that you work towards the reward of a bit of texting, scrolling, watching something, getting up from your desk, or whatever it may be. 

Daily planning is said to work best for the ‘dreamer’ procrastinator. This is someone who gets lost in their own thoughts or allows themselves to tumble down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles unrelated to the task at hand. The best way to do daily planning is to do it early—ideally before you start your work day. When you sit down at your desk, check your emails and tasks for the day and write them down in a list, all the while thinking of how long each task will take and how much you can feasibly get done. Make your lists as detailed as you like: include breaks to make a cup of tea, spending a few minutes on your hobby, or taking lunch. You might find that a detailed daily plan simplifies a complex set of tasks for the day.  

Accepting the inevitability of procrastination can open you up to engage in what’s called ‘productive procrastination’. If you acknowledge that we all, to some degree, delay tasks with unrelated activities, then why not make those activities productive in their own right? Find another task that needs to get done and use that to procrastinate on the task you don’t want to do. It could be work related, such as answering emails or messages, filling in holiday time or planning meetings for the week. Or it could be personal: wiping down the benches in the kitchen, replying to your mum’s last message, getting your weekend plans in order. The intended effect of productive procrastination is to waste time efficiently. By booking that doctor’s appointment or taking that quick trip to the supermarket, you might free up your mind and make it easy to focus on the task you’ve been avoiding. Calling it ‘structured procrastination’, philosopher John Perry calls it ‘the art of making this bad trait work for you’.

Much as we’d like to, no one defeats procrastination. There’s no intensive anti-procrastination course, no one piece of life-changing advice, and no set of tricks that will keep procrastination out of your life forever. Dealing with procrastination is a process that needs to be employed anew with every task.First, identify the kind of procrastinator you are, and do your best to understand why you’re procrastinating on this particular task. Then, lower your expectations for perfection and accept the inevitability of minor failures along the way. Lastly, approach each day as an opportunity to achieve something, not everything. And always remember that each task, job, or goal has its own challenges that need to be faced anew, every time. The better you are at handling a wide variety of procrastination challenges, the more likely you’ll be able to tackle new ones as they come along.