The Psychology of Procrastination

In this insightful 2010 article in The New Yorker, James Surowiecki explores the reasons for procrastination, which he calls “a basic human impulse.” The word comes from Latin – “to put off for tomorrow” – and consists of not doing what we think we should be doing – “a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people,” he says. “This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.” And it seems to be creating increasing anxiety in the modern era, judging by more-frequent references to it in literature and popular culture. Procrastination can be costly: Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars by filing their tax returns late and forgo vast sums by not getting around to signing up for a retirement plan. 

The basic problem is that we tend to do what is in front of us rather than what is out of sight, however positive and attractive future rewards may be. “[O]ur desires shift as the long run becomes the short run,” says Surowiecki. There’s also the “planning fallacy” – the tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a task by ignoring how long similar tasks have taken in the past. “When I was writing this piece, for example, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on,” he says. “Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.” 

Avoidance and denial aren’t the only reasons for procrastination. We often tend to do things “whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing,” says Surowiecki. “My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment.” 

Another cause of procrastination is “lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success,” he continues. Civil War General George McClellan was a classic example of this. He dithered and dallied, planned incessantly, and constantly asked for more troops and better equipment. “Viewed this way,” says Surowiecki, “procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict.” It’s as though there were different parts of ourselves, debating with each other – “jostling, contending, and bargaining for control… In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your ‘you’s’ have a problem.” 

Surowiecki says the philosopher Don Ross framed the problem correctly: “For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another – one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it’s interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is a result of a bargaining process gone wrong.” 

The idea of the divided self suggests the best ways to deal with procrastination, says Surowiecki: employing “external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work.” The classic example is Ulysses ordering his men to tie him to the mast of his ship so he wouldn’t be able to steer into the rocks when the Sirens’ song wafted their way. Similarly, Victor Hugo would write in the nude and have his valet hide his clothes so Hugo couldn’t go outside while he was supposed to be writing. A contemporary example: a program that cuts off your Internet access for eight hours so you can focus on a project. 

Another approach is trying to strengthen your will. “This isn’t a completely fruitless task,” says Surowiecki. “Much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger.” But the same research says we have a limited supply of will power and it can be used up quite quickly. One experiment found that people who resisted the temptation to eat forbidden chocolate-chip cookies had less will power left when asked to persist with a challenging task.

Which brings us back to one of the most common external devices for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Here’s an interesting experiment: students are required to complete three papers by the end of the semester. They can submit them all on the last day, or they can set three deadlines, with a grading penalty for missing any of them and no advantage for early submission. The rational thing is to stick with the end-of-semester deadline and hope to finish one or two of the papers early. But most students choose to set three deadlines. “This is the essence of the extended will,” says Surowiecki. “Instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.” 

A final way of dealing with procrastination is reframing the task in front of you. “Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (what is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever),” says Surowiecki. “So narrowing the gap, by whatever means necessary, helps.” One way is to divide large, long-term projects into short-term projects with discrete deadlines. This is the approach recommended by time-management guru David Allen (author of Getting Things Done): “the vaguer the task, or the more abstract thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it.” Reduce your choices, and you’re more likely to make the right one. 

Surowiecki closes with a confounding thought: sometimes we procrastinate because what we’re supposed to be doing is not worth doing at all. So the deepest challenge is knowing which kind of procrastination we’re confronted with: “the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point,” or the kind that’s telling you to get to work and DO IT! “The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too,” says Surowiecki, “is to figure out which is which.” 

“Later: What Does Procrastination Tell Us About Ourselves?” by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010, http://nyr.kr/bPULgD 

From the Marshall Memo #491