The Science of Procrastination
Episode 18 explores the way your amygdala sabotages your prefrontal cortex and how a naked novelist shows us how to beat it.
You probably know Victor Hugo for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, but his solution to procrastination should be just as well known. Hugo, famously, received a huge advance against the manuscript for the Hunchback, but couldn’t bring himself to write it. The deadline came and went, and after eighteen months, he still hadn’t written a single word.
Hearing stories of the legendary parties that Victor had been throwing when he was supposed to be writing finally pushed his publisher past the breaking point. “We’re going to sue you,” they said. “You have six months to deliver, or we’ll fine you 1,000 francs ($13,000 in modern dollars!) a week.”
So Victor came up with a solution: He had his butler lock away all his clothes until he’d finished the novel. He couldn’t attend or host social events without risking embarrassment (and arrest).
It worked! He wrapped himself in a large gray shawl (gotta stay warm to write), and set pen to paper every day until the novel was finished – two weeks before the date of the first fine.
The solution to procrastination is nudity, you heard it here first.
But fortunately, scientists have learned a lot more about the neuroscience of procrastination in the last ten years, to say nothing of the last 150! Thanks to the techniques that have come out of that research, you can procrastinate less AND keep your clothes on.
What Science Used to Think
I’m a lifelong procrastinator. I have vivid memories of playing Fantasy General until 1am when I was supposed to be writing my English thesis in high school, and despite dozens of attempts to break the habit, I still procrastinate today.
I’ve done two deep dives into procrastination research before, trying to find something that would transform me into someone who starts the work the day it was assigned. I tried once in college, spending a couple weeks I really should have been working on my projects diving deep into the research. The team and I tried again in 2010 when we created the Email Game at Boomerang, hoping that gamification could short-circuit the part of my brain that loved putting things off (it kind of did!)
Back then, the conventional wisdom was that procrastination stemmed from lack of time management skills and poor planning. The solutions involved getting better at making schedules and breaking up projects into the right sets of smaller steps.
None of it worked, and in retrospect, it was obvious that it never would.
I know how to make a schedule. It’s not hard to block out “6:00-6:30 PM: dinner, 6:30-7:15 PM: work on part one of project.” The problem came at 6:30 PM when it was time to start working on part one of project. Suddenly, I discovered articles on the internet that needed reading and bookshelves that needed organizing. I just couldn’t make myself do the work. Improving my planning skills was a solution to the completely wrong problem.
What Science Knows Now
Research from the last five years reveals something completely different: The fundamental issue in procrastination isn’t failures of scheduling or planning at all. It’s about emotional regulation and avoiding bad feelings.
When you’re not doing something, it’s because the task makes you feel a negative emotion, like anxiety, fear, stress, or boredom. So you avoid the task to avoid that feeling. And things like social media, with an instant drip of dopamine, have made it easier and more tempting than ever to procrastinate.
Neuroscience shows that procrastinators tend to have brain structures that are more susceptible to this effect for a number of reasons:
1. Larger fear center (amygdala): Procrastinators feel the pain and fear of tasks more intensely than non-procrastinators.
2. Weaker connection to the prefrontal cortex: The planning and emotional regulation part of your brain can’t effectively override the fear center because the connection between them is weaker.
3. Reduced error alarm response: Non-procrastinators’ brains light up more intensely when they think about the future negative consequences of not completing a task well and on time. Procrastinators’ brains light up more intensely thinking about the current, at-this-moment pain rather than the future consequences.
Real Solutions, Not Colored Pencils
The dividend from all this research is a set of techniques that genuinely can shift us away from procrastination.
Solution 1: Borrow From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
This approach is particularly effective for neurotic people who procrastinate due to anxiety – basically, people like me!
Since we recorded the podcast episode, I’ve been trying these techniques, and they’ve genuinely been helping. If you procrastinate out of an unsettled feeling that your work won’t ever get done or won’t ever be good enough or that you will take the wrong approach, it might work for you too.
ACT, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is a technique used by therapists to help patients work through all kinds of issues. And I am absolutely unqualified to use the technique as a therapist or teach anyone how to use it that way. But to use these ideas to take on procrastination, you don’t need a therapist.
The core of this approach is that when you’re feeling a negative emotion, you don’t have to change your behavior because of it. You can feel the negative emotion and do absolutely nothing about it.
The metaphor the researchers used is surfing a wave. The feeling will come, you’ll observe it and name it, and it will pass. Meanwhile, you can wait it out, or just keep working through it.
Research from a consortium of universities in the Netherlands gave PhD students a 30-minute-per-week self-guided web course on using ACT principles for procrastination called the Get Started Program. After seven weeks, plus two brief sessions with a coach (not a therapist), the students saw a 30% reduction in procrastination that persisted after the program ended.
The approach rhymes with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in the sense that you focus on thinking about your feelings, but it’s subtly different. With CBT, you’d typically analyze whether the anxiety you are feeling is rational or based on a distortion of reality. With ACT, you skip that step entirely. You don’t ask if the fear is grounded in reality. Instead, you:
Acknowledge, observe, and name: “I’m feeling anxious right now.”
Even if it feels uncomfortable, you do the thing anyway as you wait for the feeling to pass. If it’s too uncomfortable, wait in stillness and continue to observe until is passes enough for you to get started.
It kind of matches one of Moah’s sayings about her childhood: Cry and do it anyway.
According to the study, practicing these techniques helps you become more comfortable with negative feelings and with operating normally even in their presence. You’re rewiring the neurons so the fear center doesn’t control you as much, so it gets even easier with time and practice.
Solution 2: Mental Contrasting and Implementation Intention (MCII)
This approach works well for people with lower conscientiousness who just need help with follow-through - like my cohost, Moah!
To use MCII, you need to pre-plan for obstacles that could come up and how you will work around them. There are three steps you’ll want to follow.
Step 1: Define Outcome in the form of “If I accomplish [X], the best reasonable outcome is [Y]”
Planning out the desired outcome as an if/then statement crystalizes the benefits in your brain and helps you with the next steps. At this stage, you want to think about the best reasonable outcome rather than thinking about what could go wrong.
Example: “If I go to bed on time, the best outcome is I’ll be in bed by 11 PM and get eight hours of sleep, so I’ll wake up with energy and no brain fog.”
Step 2: Define Obstacles “The main things that could stop me are me are [A, B, C]”
If you define things that could prevent you from accomplishing your goal in advance, you can plan for how to short-circuit them up front. Listing internal obstacles are especially important.
Example: “The obstacles to me going to be on time are that: social media is addicting, and I lose track of time, that I won’t have my teeth brushed on time, and that one of the kids will need something”
Step 3: If-Then Plans “If/when the obstacle appears, I will [do this specific thing]”
Example: “At 10:30 PM, I will turn off internet access on my phone. I will brush my teeth right after I eat. I will plug in my phone if I need to comfort a nightmare-frightened child”
When you know exactly what you need to do as soon as something comes up, it makes it easier to follow through than if you have to react in the moment. And even if something comes up you didn’t foresee, the planning you already did gives you an edge. As the inventor of the Eisenhower Matrix once said, “Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable!”
Studies on revenge bedtime procrastination (more later!) found this approach very effective, and it only takes about three minutes of planning to see the effects.
Solution 3: Temptation Bundling
This is the easiest quick win in our toolbox. Pair something you don’t want to do with something enjoyable, making the task feel good RIGHT NOW.
Katie Milkman’s research showed that people who only allowed themselves to listen to addictive audiobooks at the gym increased their gym attendance by 10-15%, and the effect lasted beyond the study period.
Hate writing performance reviews? Moah does it while getting a pedicure.
Solution 4: Commitment Devices
If you tend to honor social pressure and external commitments more than internal ones, a commitment device might be just the thing to help you beat procrastination.
Remember Victor Hugo and his locked-away clothes? That’s one commitment device! External consequences and accountability often can provide the extra motivation you need to tackle something you’ve been putting off, even when you’ve tried everything else. Some devices that I’ve used include a midway project review with a senior colleague or my boss that require me to have started on the thing so I have progress to show, asking a friend to check in, or using something like Flow Club to provide faces who might wear disappointed expressions if I don’t do what I said I would.
Procrastination That Isn’t Procrastination
We’ve talked a lot about why we procrastinate, but I want to make sure to note that not all forms of delay are really procrastination. There are two cases where what feels like procrastination is actually smart, and it’s important not to ACT and MCII your way out of them.
Creative Incubation
When you’re working on a creative task, what looks like procrastination can actually be your brain doing background processing. Right before the deadline, you’ll come up with a spurt of what seems like inhuman creative productivity. Behind the scenes, your brain was working on it unconsciously the whole time.
Mozart once took this to an extreme. He delayed and delayed on writing the opera Don Giovanni, so much they had to delay the opening. The morning of the already-delayed premier, his wife Constance woke him at 5 AM to remind him: “Hey, you have an opera opening tonight. Maybe you should finish that?”
He wrote from 5 AM until the performance. When the musicians got their music sheets, the ink was still wet. They never had time to practice. But the opera is one of Mozart’s most famous works and widely considered one of the greatest operas ever written.
Mozart wasn’t “just” procrastinating. His brain was giving itself time for incubation.
Strategic Delay
Sometimes people mistake prioritization as procrastination. Everyone has some “one day maybe I’ll get around to this” projects that have never made it to the top of the pile. And that’s because they never became as important as the projects that did.
Here’s an example from Boomerang’s history.
Google typically announces API changes 6-18 months in advance. Early in our company’s history, our CTO Mike (our co-founder who is by far the most conscientious of the three of us and who does not have a procrastination problem) would start work on preparing for the changes soon after they were announced.
Then, a month before the deadline, Google would often say, “Actually, we’re not ready, it’ll be another 18 months and work a little differently than we announced” or sometimes cancel the change completely.
Though Mike’s cortisol level went up a bit1, we learned to delay working on this type of project until much closer to the deadline. By then, we had more confidence that the changes would happen as as announced, and someone else will have already figured out the path and written about it, so we could do it faster.
We do the same thing with our company’s tax returns. We file with an extension every year, even though we’re usually owed a refund, which means we forego some interest income. Why? Because the product and strategy work we do in Q1 every year has way more impact on the company than the interest we’d earn on a small tax refund. That’s using time wisely, and even though it looks similar, it couldn’t be more different than scrolling TikTok because we can’t face doing our work!
The New Doom Loop: Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
Just what we needed - a new kind of procrastination!
“Revenge Bedtime Procrastination” (delaying bedtime to gain a sense of control) is a phenomenon that’s emerged since the smartphone. It was first described on the Chinese social network Weibo, among workers on the “996” schedule (9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week). The phenomenon is also common in Western societies, especially among parents of small children, college students, and anyone else who works too much.
It’s called revenge bedtime procrastination because it’s getting revenge against the people who control your schedule by taking it out on your own body. Instead of going to sleep, we stay up scrolling on our screens, extending our limited free time by sacrificing sleep.
Revenge bedtime procrastination creates a vicious cycle:
Revenge bedtime procrastination (scrolling on your phone late into the night instead of going to sleep)→ not enough sleep
Not enough sleep → less executive function the next day
Less executive function → more procrastination on other things
More procrastination → less caught up → less time to yourself
Less time to yourself → more revenge bedtime procrastination
Research shows that 74% of people go to bed later than planned at least once a week. And three habits correlate strongly with procrastination in other areas of life: not getting enough sleep, not getting enough exercise, and (surprisingly) skipping breakfast. So if there’s one place to stop procrastinating first, it’s probably keeping a consistent bedtime.
Applying the Tools
Don’t procrastinate on getting started using these techniques! But if you do, one important thing to keep in mind is that you need to extend grace and forgiveness toward your past self while you’re trying to make changes like this.
One study found that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on one test procrastinated less on the next test. Kicking themselves just created a doom loop.
It is more possible than ever to get a handle on procrastination. All of these approaches showed results in randomized controlled trials. The effects lasted beyond the initial intervention for all of them. And best of all, these new anti-procrastination tools don’t require a behavioral step change. You don’t need to start a full ACT therapy program or spend a month reworking all of your workflows.
Just start paying attention when you feel the urge to procrastinate and observe and name what you are feeling. Or just spend a minute thinking through what mental obstacles will keep you from your goals and how you could work around them. Or, if all else fails, go for a pedicure and then throw away all your clothes!
To hear the full discussion, listen to Episode 18 of Less Busy Lab. Have questions? Want to share a procrastination story or a technique that’s worked for you? Send them to questions@lessbusylab.com
It was suggested that Gen Z might relate to a cortisol reference as: Mike was fully future-proof-maxxing for Google’s API glow-up, but his cortisol absolutely spiked when Google announced an indefinite delay and mogged his prep arc.