Procrastination is not laziness: what really lies behind putting things off

“First thing tomorrow morning, as soon as I get in, I’ll write it. Really. I just can’t face it today.”

I have heard this sentence in many versions. It is a report that has been waiting for three weeks, an email to a client that would be five lines long, a phone call that would take two minutes. And when someone says it, they almost always add something: “I know, I’m lazy.” Or: “I have no discipline.” Or, most painfully: “Something is wrong with me.”

Yet when we look more closely at what this person has been doing for those three weeks, we do not find laziness. We find someone who has tidied a drawer, answered twenty other messages, helped a colleague, and lain awake at night composing the first sentence in their head. Someone who has been busy the whole time — just not with that one thing. That is not laziness. Procrastination is something else, and once you understand what, you can start talking to it differently than with a whip.

Laziness wants rest; procrastination never gets it

Laziness, if we want to call it that, is a fairly calm state. Someone does not feel like doing something, does not do it, and does not feel especially bad about it. Procrastination is the exact opposite. You want to do the task, you know you should, you often even care about it — and still you do not start. And you are not resting while you put it off. For as long as the task is waiting, it is there in the background like a low hum, like a stone in your shoe.

Psychologists describe procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. Two words matter here: intended and worse off. It is not about things we consider unimportant, but precisely about the ones we consider important. And it is not about ignorance — you know perfectly well that tomorrow will be harder than today.

You can find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under procrastination. Here I would like to go a step further: to the question of what procrastination is actually for.

Procrastination manages your mood, not the task

In 2013 the Canadian researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl drew together a body of research into a conclusion that is now almost universally accepted: procrastination is above all a form of short-term emotion regulation. When we turn to a task, an unpleasant feeling arises — doubt, boredom, fear of being judged, confusion about where to start. Putting it off silences that feeling immediately. We open something else and the relief is almost physical.

The problem is that the relief lasts a few minutes, while the task remains. The next time we remember it, a new layer has been added: guilt for not having done it yet, and less time, which means more pressure. The feeling is now stronger, and so is the need for relief. The loop closes.

How common is this? In a large 2007 review of procrastination research, Piers Steel cited estimates that procrastination is chronic for 15 to 20 per cent of adults — not occasional, but a lasting pattern that causes them problems. Among students the proportions are considerably higher. So this is not a rare flaw of character, but a very human way of dealing with unpleasant feelings.

An older study by Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister from 1997 showed neatly how this bargain plays out over time. Students who procrastinated had less stress and fewer health complaints than others at the start of the term. Towards the end of the term the picture reversed: they had more stress, more illness and worse grades. So procrastination really did help — it is just that the bill came later, with interest.

Your future self as a stranger

Sirois and Pychyl added another interesting piece. When we procrastinate, we mentally hand the task over to someone else — our tomorrow self. And this tomorrow self seems remarkably capable: rested, focused, motivated, with more time. Hal Hershfield’s research on how we experience our future self shows that we often think of ourselves a few months or years from now almost as if we were thinking of a stranger. And we have no qualms about loading a stranger with all sorts of things.

When tomorrow comes, it turns out that the tomorrow self is the same person with the same feelings. Only now with even less time.

From this follows something that sounds almost simple: with procrastination the key question is not “How do I force myself?” but “What exactly do I feel about this task, and can I bear it for ten minutes?” A task is hard to do while the feeling around it is unbearable. Once the feeling becomes bearable, the task often gets going almost by itself.

Which tasks we most like to put off

If you look at your own list of backlog, you will probably notice a pattern. We rarely put off tasks that are clear, short and pleasant. We put off the ones that have one of the following:

• An unclear beginning. You do not know what the first step is, so every start feels like jumping into fog.
• Judgement at the end. Someone will read the result, assess it, compare it. Perhaps your manager, perhaps a client, perhaps only your inner voice.
• Boredom or pointlessness. A task where you cannot see why anyone would need it.
• A relationship in the background. An email in which you have to say “no” to someone, apologise, or raise a subject everyone avoids.

The last point is often the most important for understanding procrastination at work — and also the most overlooked.

A workplace is a system: who is the task really for?

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we do not look at an individual separately from the relationships they live in. In this sense a workplace is similar to a family: it has roles, unwritten rules, alliances and triangles. And the task you keep putting off is never just a task. It is always also a message to someone.

Look at who the thing that has waited longest is meant for. It often turns out to be a person around whom you feel small. A manager who returns every piece of work covered in red. A colleague who “gave” you the task because they did not want it. A management team you disagree with but have never told.

In a system like that, procrastination sometimes becomes the only “no” that is allowed. You cannot say out loud that the task seems pointless to you or that you cannot do it by the deadline. But you can put it off. It is not a conscious strategy, but it is a message — quiet, indirect and, sadly, the kind that harms you most. From a systemic point of view, then, a useful question is: what would you say if you were allowed to say it directly?

The other part of the system matters too: what happens when you hand something in. If every mistake in your environment comes with humiliation, it is entirely logical that you avoid handing things in. I wrote about how a single mistake at work can colour a whole month in Shame after a mistake: why one error eats up a whole month. Procrastination is often just the other end of the same story: if you fear the shame of a mistake, you will gladly postpone the moment when a mistake might show.

Where we learn the pattern

Most people who procrastinate chronically grew up in an environment where a finished piece of work was a dangerous moment. Not necessarily harshly so. Perhaps it was just a father who, at every school report, first asked why it was not top marks. Perhaps a mother who always “touched up” the homework a little. A child learns that finishing means being judged — and that being judged hurts. As long as it has not been handed in, everything is still possible. As long as it has not been handed in, you can still be excellent.

That is why procrastination is so often intertwined with perfectionism. I described in more detail how fear of making mistakes disguises itself as endless rumination in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear. The voice you hear when facing a task often has a name and a face — you will find it in the knowledge base under the inner critic.

A conversation might sound like this (composite, not a real person):

“When I open the document, it feels as if someone is looking over my shoulder.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. No one. My manager won’t read it for another week.”
“And what does this someone over your shoulder say?”
A pause. “That I could have done this yesterday. And better.”
“Whose voice is that?”
“…My mum’s. She always said I had potential, I just didn’t use it.”

When someone recognises that they are not sitting alone with the task, but with a whole history of being judged, something loosens. The task is no longer proof of their worth. It becomes again what it is: a report that needs writing.

Why self-criticism does not help

The most common response to procrastination is harshness towards yourself. “You’ve done it again. You’ll never change.” It seems logical that strictness will work as motivation. Research shows the opposite.

In 2010 Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett followed students across two exam periods. Those who, after the first exam, forgave themselves for studying at the last minute procrastinated less before the second exam. Those who condemned themselves for it procrastinated as much or more. The explanation is simple: self-condemnation is yet another unpleasant feeling that the task now carries with it. And the more unpleasant feelings there are, the more reasons there are to delay.

In 2014 Fuschia Sirois also showed that people who procrastinate show, on average, less self-compassion and more stress, and that this lack of self-compassion partly explains why procrastination wears them down so much. I described what self-compassion is and is not in more detail in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism: what Kristin Neff’s research shows, and you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under self-compassion.

Self-compassion is not leniency. It does not mean you do not care about the deadline. It means talking to yourself as you would to a friend who has slipped up — kindly enough that they do not fall apart, and honestly enough that next time they do things differently.

Exercise: ten minutes with the feeling

This exercise does not promise that you will finish the task. It only promises that you will start it — and that you will learn something about yourself along the way. Choose the one task you have been putting off longest and give yourself a quarter of an hour.

1. Write down the task and who it is for. Not “report”, but “the report for Mark, who will read it on Friday”. Notice what happens in your body when you write the name.
2. Name the feeling in one word. Fear, boredom, anger, shame, confusion. It does not have to be precise. It is enough that it is not “laziness”.
3. Say one sentence of forgiveness to yourself. For example: “It makes sense that I put this off, because I’m afraid of being judged. I won’t punish myself for it.” Out loud or on paper.
4. Decide on the smallest next step. Not “I’ll write the report”, but “I’ll open the document and write the title and three bullet points”. Make the step so small that it seems almost silly.
5. Set ten minutes and stay with the task. When the urge to open something else appears, notice it and come back. After ten minutes you may stop. Write down how strong the feeling was at the start and how strong at the end.

Most people notice that the feeling was strongest just before starting and that it eased while they worked. That is valuable information: you were not afraid of the task, but of the moment of beginning it.

If the exercise shows that the name in the first step is always the same, that deserves attention. Perhaps your procrastination is less a question of time management than of a relationship that needs addressing — through a conversation, a clearer division of roles, or with someone who can help you look at why this particular person affects you so much.

Where this explanation falls short

Seeing procrastination as emotion regulation is powerful, but it does not explain everything. A few cases where the answer lies elsewhere:

When you put off almost everything and it has been that way since childhood. If since your school years you have only been able to start under last-minute pressure, if you lose things, forget deadlines and struggle to stay with a task that does not interest you, it makes sense to consider an attention disorder as well. A blog post cannot judge that — talk to your GP, who can refer you for a proper assessment.

When you have no energy for anything, even pleasant things. Procrastination is one thing; a loss of energy and joy across every area of life is another. That can be a sign of depression or burnout. In Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break I described how to recognise it. In that case, exercises for starting a task are not the first step; the first step is a conversation with a doctor.

When you are not putting off an action, but a decision. Sometimes you do not start a task because you cannot decide which path to take, and the thinking goes round in endless circles. That is a related but different phenomenon, described in Decision paralysis: when thinking it over becomes a way of avoiding.

When the problem is in the system, not in you. If you have three times more work on your desk than can possibly be done, procrastination is not a psychological phenomenon but a reasonable response to impossible conditions. Then the solution is not to organise yourself better, but to talk to your manager about the workload — and if that is not possible, to answer honestly whether this job is right for you.

When to seek help

Procrastination is common and is not in itself a reason for therapy. It does make sense to seek help when it is causing your relationships or your job to fall apart, when tasks trigger strong anxiety, or when you notice you are avoiding more and more things. I wrote about how avoidance helps today and harms tomorrow in Anxiety and avoidance: why avoiding helps you today and harms you tomorrow.

In therapy we do not treat procrastination as a bad habit to be eliminated. We look at what it protects: from which feeling, from whose gaze, from which old relationship. You will find a short explanation of how emotions are regulated, and why some ways help in the short term but not in the long term, in the knowledge base under emotion regulation. Once it is clear what procrastination protects, it is often needed much less.

What to remember

• Procrastination is not laziness. It is short-term regulation of the unpleasant feelings a task stirs up.
• Roughly one in five or six adults procrastinates chronically — it is a very human pattern, not a flaw of character.
• A task at work is always also a message to someone. Look at who the one that has waited longest is meant for.
• Self-criticism prolongs the loop; self-forgiveness loosens it — that is what the research shows.
• If you put off almost everything, or have no energy for anything, the answer may lie elsewhere — talk to a doctor.