Learning about the many causes of procrastination will help you identify and understand why you procrastinate. Procrastination occurs when we don’t feel like doing a task that we know we should do. To manage procrastination, it helps to address our feelings about the task and the factors that give rise to those feelings. There are thousands of causes for procrastination, like tiredness, fear or disinterest. Most people are influenced by a range of different causes. Some of the most common causes are listed here. If any of these causes affect you, follow the links to find strategies to overcome them.
Willpower is the ability to control our actions, emotions and urges. It is vital to productive work and avoiding procrastination. Willpower has the following features:
Burnout is a period of low energy and lack of enthusiasm brought on by exhaustion. It is caused by working too hard or experiencing too much stress over extended periods. If you are currently experiencing burnout, you need time to rest. If burnout has been a problem for you in the past, or you feel it is approaching, these measures can help avoid burnout.
Tiredness kills productivity. A tired brain will seek rest by diverting from challenging tasks to something more restful and so cause procrastination.
Are you tired from a lack of sleep? Or do you have mental fatigue?
A variety of factors can cause low energy:
Every significant project starts with uncertainty and unanswered questions, both of which can trigger procrastination. If we don’t consciously prepare for this, our minds can steer us away from ever starting. The first step for any challenging project is proper planning.
A common trigger for procrastination is completing a task and not knowing what the next task should be. This gap creates uncertainty, which can trigger procrastination. You can overcome this by:
The first step towards any goal can feel overwhelming, especially if you are unsure where to start. If you know what you must do but still can’t start, make the first step easier.
Sometimes not starting allows us to protect our imagined ideal outcome from being sullied by the inevitable imperfection of reality. In that way, we can always tell ourselves that we could have succeeded or will get around to it someday. Unfortunately, this strategy will likely leave us feeling unfulfilled. Working towards goals we genuinely care about can bring meaning and contentment to our lives. The first step towards this is to identify our life goals and values.
If fear is preventing you from starting a task then it may help to process your fears.
Feeling overwhelmed is a common trigger for procrastination. Our brains can only focus on one challenging task at a time. When faced with several at once, we can become overwhelmed and avoid the tasks altogether by procrastinating.
It is difficult to think your way out of overwhelm. But there are steps you can take to break free from overwhelm in the moment. There are also many ways to avoid becoming overwhelmed in the future. First, identify if any of the following situations are contributing to your feeling of overwhelm:
Getting organized can also help to de-clutter your mind and surroundings, reducing your mental load and your likelihood of becoming overwhelmed.
Impossible deadlines can reduce our motivation to work. They can also cause stress, which in turn drives procrastination. The only ways to deal with an impossible deadline are to renegotiate the deadline or reduce your expectations for the outcome. Good planning can help you avoid impossible deadlines and renegotiate them if needed.
We often set goals during a surge of motivation. We might one day have a stark realization that we’ve fallen out of shape and decide that today we will do something about it. Or we might get inspired by a piece of art and think ‘I want to make something this good.’ When this happens, it is easy to become overenthusiastic and set an extremely challenging goal. Sometimes, part of our motivation is the desire to prove to ourselves and others that we can achieve difficult goals. Unfortunately, when our initial motivation has waned, we find that we don’t quite have the time or energy that we hoped we would. Sometimes an unexpected issue arises that takes time away from the goal. Pretty soon, the challenging goal becomes impossible. When that happens, our motivation plummets and our forward momentum stalls, making it more likely that we give up on that goal. Once we have given up, we often put the goal to the back of our minds until our next burst of motivation when we start the process all over again.
You can avoid impossible goals by creating an appropriate plan that considers the time and resources available and includes realistic leeway.
If you find yourself working on an impossible goal, refocus on a more achievable goal, perhaps a smaller part of the original goal.
Sometimes it can help not to have an end goal at all and instead focus on the process. This can work well for goals where the actions required are inherently motivating. Learning the guitar can be an example of this. Rather than setting a goal to learn to play a particular song, aim to practice for a set period every day and focus on making the practice as enjoyable as possible. Building good habits is one way to focus on the process rather than the end goal.
Stress is uncomfortable physical, emotional or psychological tension and is a natural response to challenging situations. Our brains often try to avoid the discomfort caused by stress by diverting our attention to something more comfortable, causing procrastination.
Finding relief from stress is sometimes vital for our physical and mental well-being. At the same time, stress can help us focus on important issues and stressful experiences often help us learn and grow. It’s neither possible nor healthy to avoid stress altogether but we can learn how to deal with stress and use it to our advantage.
Losing steam toward the end of a goal is natural. The start of a project often holds most of the novelty, inspiration and discovery, leaving the back half feeling uninspiring by comparison. Making the tasks fun or boosting your motivation can help with this.
Difficulty finishing can be a symptom of another issue like concern that the work is not good enough or being worried about negative feedback. If you often find it hard to finish projects, try using the finishing perspective tool.
Feeling that the product of your effort won’t be as good as you hope is a motivation killer and can quickly distract you from completing your goals. All challenging projects involve a process of learning and refining. If you aren’t happy with the quality of your work, you can often continue refining until you are.
Being worried that the quality of your work isn’t good enough can arise from a fear of negative feedback or poor planning. Learning to manage your expectations can help. This perspective tool helps to identify and address the cause of these feelings.
Anxiety is a state of unease or worry about anticipated events. It is an uncomfortable feeling that we can sometimes temporarily avoid by distracting ourselves, so it is a common cause of procrastination. Unfortunately, procrastination rarely deals with the source of our anxiety so that anxiety can persist and grow in the background until it forces its way back to the front of the mind. Several tools can help us respond to anxiety. If you need immediate respite, meditation and exercise can provide relief.
At times, everyone has difficulty focusing on tasks. This can have several causes, including:
Chronic inability to focus can be a symptom of an underlying health issue. If this is a problem for you, talk to your doctor or someone you trust.
Fear is one of the most potent causes of procrastination. It is a core driver of behavior that protects us from danger. It is normal and often beneficial to be disinclined to do something that causes fear, so fear drives procrastination. There are a variety of techniques that can help manage fear. Good planning can help deal with fear before it arises. While meditation, making it easy to start and using tiny tasks can help respond to fear in the moment.
Procrastinating as a way of avoiding feelings of sadness is common. Low mood is often accompanied by low motivation and willpower, making it much harder to do productive work. Occasional periods of sadness or low mood are normal and healthy. Depending upon the cause and intensity of these feelings, it can help to give yourself time to experience these emotions and respond to the things in your life that cause them. Regular exercise, good nutrition and sufficient sleep can all help with difficult emotions in the long term. If you need immediate relief, these tools can help change your state.
Some tasks or goals are just not motivating. There will always be an element of drudgery to any significant goal. If all steps towards a goal were fun and easy, the goal wouldn’t be significant. To help overcome this, you can:
If the problem is chronic or every aspect of the goal is uninteresting or uncomfortable, then consider changing your goal. Good planning can help avoid this in the future.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why we procrastinate. First, try the Technique. If that doesn’t work, try investigating the task itself. If that fails, skim through this list of causes of procrastination and pick one that feels right.
Daydreaming can be a form of procrastination but it is also an essential mental state. It helps us process our experiences and plan for events in the future. It also boosts creativity and helps with problem solving. If we don’t allow ourselves unfocused time to rest or daydream, our brains will eventually reach their limit and we will daydream at inopportune moments.
Daydreaming also signals that our brain has had enough of the present experience. If you find yourself unintentionally daydreaming, it’s probably time to take a break. Where possible in the future, try to get sufficient rest so that your brain has time to decompress before it reaches its limit and you find yourself daydreaming when you shouldn’t be.
If you are daydreaming about future tasks or goals, it can help to write down what you are thinking about for later review or create a backup memory system.
If there is something more important to do right now, then doing it isn’t procrastination; it’s what you should be doing. Be careful not to confuse emotionally compelling things with steps that move you toward your goals or help you be true to your values. If you are unsure, try writing down the reasons why you should do each task and comparing them. Planning your day ahead of time can help avoid facing this problem in the future.
Motivation is the desire to take action toward a goal. If we aren’t sufficiently motivated to do a task, then we will procrastinate. Motivation can sometimes be elusive and uncontrollable, but there is always a cause for fluctuations in motivation. If you can identify that cause, you can develop some control over your motivation and use it to achieve your aims.
Overcoming unpleasant tasks is part of achieving anything significant. You can greatly increase your chance of success by learning how to tackle unpleasant tasks. Once you’ve completed a task, you’ll usually find that it wasn’t as unpleasant as originally anticipated. These tools can help you make unpleasant tasks more enjoyable.
Boring tasks can make any distraction seem compelling and fuel procrastination. If scheduled intelligently though, boring tasks can provide a welcome relief from difficult or stressful tasks. Understanding your natural energy cycles can show you the best time to work on boring tasks. You can also make boring tasks more fun.
Difficult tasks can inspire uncomfortable feelings like stress and fear. These feelings can prevent us from working on difficult tasks and even make us avoid thinking about those tasks at all. At the same time, uncomfortable emotions brought about by difficult tasks will continue to arise until the task is either started or abandoned. So the longer we put off difficult tasks, the more overall stress we feel.
Tasks often seem more difficult before they are started than after they are finished. This is because unknown aspects of the task are more likely to cause stress and fear. All of this means that proactively tackling difficult tasks can reduce your stress and fear overall. There are multiple steps you can take to manage the difficulty of tasks. It can help to make starting easy or to investigate the task to identify why it appears difficult.
Writer’s block is the loss of the ability to produce new work. Often associated with creative writing, it’s a catchall term for procrastination around creative tasks with multiple potential causes, including:
Humans are social animals and we care deeply about what other people think. Desiring praise and disliking criticism is healthy and natural. When that need stops us from achieving our goals however, it can cause bigger problems than it solves. Before civilization, when humans lived in small tight-knit groups, we relied heavily upon social cohesion for survival. Consequently, our brains became highly sensitive to negative feedback from our peers. Today, our more complex society allows us to live independently and our survival is not as closely bound to small social groups. Our brains however, have not had time to develop to this new reality, meaning that concern about negative feedback today can feel way out of proportion to its actual consequences. You can help address this disconnect by processing your fears.
Failure should be a little scary. Our brains need to intermittently remind us of potential risks and be concerned about expending energy on uncertain goals. Fear of failure can also drive us to work harder and prepare better. The problems arise when that fear grows out of touch with reality or prevents us from working toward our goals.
Sometimes the fear of failure prevents us from starting altogether. It’s common to unconsciously justify not starting as a way of protecting ourselves from the pain of failing. This is usually misguided though, because while sometimes painful, failure helps us to learn and grow and can be deeply motivating.
You can ease your concerns about failing by properly planning your goals and managing your expectations. You can also overcome these feelings by processing your fears.
Wanting to do something other than the task at hand drives procrastination. Sometimes that desire comes from a compelling distraction. Sometimes negative feelings about the task at hand make the distraction seem more compelling than it really is.
If you can identify why you want to do something else, you can implement strategies to avoid succumbing to that desire. The Technique is a great first step to discovering why you want to do something else.
If a distraction is deeply compelling, you can try solutions designed specifically for that distraction. If the problem is simply that you don’t want to do the task at hand, consider trying the following solutions:
Video games are designed to be fun and addicting, so wanting to play them is natural. They tap into our brain chemistry by rewarding us with good feelings for taking specific actions. Unfortunately, video game designers have gotten so good at this that they can keep us playing long after the novelty and joy of playing have gone. In bad cases, video games can take up so much of our time that they hinder our goals and relationships. If video games are driving procrastination for you, there are tools that can help you limit video game procrastination.
Television can be a source of joy, relaxation and education. Many of us get home after work or school, sit on the couch, switch on the TV and let it take over our attention for the evening. Most television programming is designed to capture our attention and keep us watching for as long as possible so its producers can sell ads or subscriptions. Too much television consumes our time and distracts us from more important things. If you consume more than an hour of television a day, consider whether it is negatively affecting your life. The good news is that if you want to, you can reduce overuse by changing your relationship with television.
Most large news providers operate just like entertainment providers. Their main job is to attract and hold our attention to sell that attention to advertisers. They regularly provide sensational, misleading, scary and infuriating content in order to do so. This content causes chemical spikes in our brains that control our behavior to make us consume more news. Over time, this trains our brains to procrastinate with the news.
One of the more compelling aspects of news is that it can feel serious and important. The news often brings us information about significant events of global consequence. Unfortunately, most of what purports to be news today is neither important nor consequential. On most days, the news is unlikely to directly impact any important choice you make. The news media makes events seem far more significant to our lives than they are because doing so increases the chance that we will consume that news and thereby see the associated ads. Any essential news can likely be gleaned from 2 minutes of scanning headlines. Reading the news will rarely have a more significant positive effect on your life than spending that time working towards your goals. If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will be able to recall several times in the last few years when we were deeply disturbed or angered by something in the news that seemed crucial at the time but that we have not since followed up on and that has had no perceptible effect on our lives.
If you feel compelled to regularly check the news for information on topics that otherwise have no perceptible impact on your life, then you could be using news as entertainment and may have become addicted to it. Fortunately, there are many simple ways to reduce your news consumption.
The Internet gives us access to seemingly endless entertainment and information. It is an incredible resource but also a source of tempting distractions. Distractions alone are bad enough when trying to overcome procrastination, but the Internet doesn’t just give us access to information and entertainment; it gives the owners of online services access to us. Almost every major website or app on the Internet profits from its users. The more users the website has and the more time those users spend on the website, the more the owners profit. This motivates websites to compete with one another to attract users and keep them on their service for as long as possible. This competition forces websites to become increasingly attention-grabbing and addictive. This has disastrous results for their users’ productivity. Fortunately, giving up the Internet is not the only answer. There are many ways to use the Internet productively.
Smartphones are so helpful and commonplace that they can seem indispensable. Unfortunately, the makers of smartphones and their apps have learned to use our phones to control our attention for their own benefit. If left unchecked, smartphones will demand our attention with notifications at all hours, dragging us into addictive and time-consuming apps where we become a source of profit. By regularly calling for our attention and providing small doses of pleasure from app content, our phones train our brains in distraction. In the short term, this sucks up time that could have been used for productive work. Long term, it makes it harder for us to focus for extended periods. If you have ever picked up your phone without knowing why, or have found yourself 20 posts deep in social media when you were supposed to have been working, then your phone has trained you in distraction. Fortunately, you can reduce smartphone procrastination.
Email is an insidious trigger for procrastination. It is a helpful tool and necessary for many jobs so using it often feels productive. Unfortunately, emails also regularly distract us from the task at hand with notifications, sounds or even just the thought that an email might have arrived. If you don’t feel an intense desire to check your inbox when the notification pops up, then you are among the rare few. Thankfully, there are simple and effective ways to improve your relationship with email.
Believing that your work is futile is deeply de-motivating and can lead to chronic procrastination. Sometimes, this belief won’t stand up to examination and your work really does provide benefits that you’ve just lost sight of. Reviewing your goals can help you get another perspective. If that doesn’t help, consider re-planning your tasks to better match your goals. It might also help to review your life goals and values to see if you are moving in the right direction.
Our conscious minds can only focus on one task at a time. Complicated tasks require holding multiple ideas in our short-term memories at once and shifting our focus between them. When distracted from a task, our minds lose track of those ideas. Once we return to the task, we must re-gather all those ideas before we can begin working on the task again. Not only does this take precious time, we can also forget some of the ideas we were originally working with. This all makes complicated work harder, less fun and take longer. You can improve your focus and output by eliminating external distractions. You can also take steps to address these common distractions:
Sometimes distractions come from within our own minds. You can learn more about internal distractions here.
Sleep is vital to health, well-being and productivity. Anyone who has stayed up all night studying or working knows that a tired brain doesn’t work as well as a rested one. Sleep allows our brains time to rest and recuperate. If tiredness is affecting your productivity, then the first thing you should look into is improving your sleep.
Using up all your mental energy on a task will leave you without energy for other tasks. Our brains grow tired from exertion, just like our muscles. After long periods of doing challenging tasks, our brains stop operating efficiently. If mental fatigue is affecting your productivity, try taking a break or learning how to properly rest your brain.
Our brains work on an internal clock, guided by chemicals that affect our sleep/wake cycle and mood. The amount of these chemicals in our bodies fluctuates throughout the day. Some of those chemicals help us wake up and focus, while some prepare us for sleep. If you ever have trouble focusing early in the morning or become exhausted shortly after lunch, you are probably feeling the effects of your internal clock. While this can sometimes be frustrating, it is normal and healthy. You can increase your productivity by working with your body’s fluctuating energy levels. You can also help limit disruption caused by fighting against our internal clock by setting consistent times and rituals for waking and sleeping. The food we eat can be a big factor in fluctuating energy levels, so improving our diet can help to increase energy levels and raise productivity.
Most of us want to change our lives, but few of us take the time to examine the underlying motivators for our desire to change. It is possible to work hard to achieve a goal but feel no pride upon completion. If this has happened to you, you may have been working towards the wrong goal.
Some goals are more likely to satisfy our desires than others. A desire for good health and weight loss might inspire a goal of running a marathon. Training for a marathon can certainly improve health and promote weight loss, but most people whose aim is long term weight-loss and good health will be better off focusing on broader lifestyle changes that incorporate sustainable healthy eating and regular exercise habits. Before embarking on any goal, it is helpful to examine the underlying desires motivating that goal and consciously develop a goal best suited to achieve them.
The best goals are those that you are intrinsically motivated to achieve: goals that naturally flow from your core values. Having a clear view of a personally meaningful goal can motivate you to overcome hurdles along the way. A personally meaningful goal directs your effort to your life’s purpose rather than an arbitrary target that may mean very little shortly after completion. Further, achieving personally meaningful goals builds self-esteem and confidence and encourages you in future goals.
Taking time to clarify your life goals and values and properly plan your goals can help direct you to deeply meaningful goals, reduce procrastination and increase your chance of success.
Procrastination is often triggered by distractions that arise within our minds. Common examples of this include:
Sometimes internal distractions arise when our brain is trying to be helpful. Our brains often remind us of important things we need to do by pulling thoughts and feelings into our conscious minds. That nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something when you leave your house is an example of this. As is when the assignment you have been putting off pops into your head as you try to sleep. Our brains don’t have an alarm to tell them when to remind us of important things, so they intermittently pop thoughts about important things into our consciousness to remind us of them. Sometimes this happens at inopportune moments and distracts us from the task at hand. If our unconscious brain is very concerned about the thought, it will pop into our heads frequently, causing repeated distractions and procrastination. Once distracted, properly refocusing on a task can take several minutes. These mental interruptions can also build stress, particularly if they are numerous or remind you of stress-inducing things. Fortunately, there are ways of dealing with these distractions. Noting can help you deal with these thoughts in the moment. Creating a backup memory system can eliminate the need for your brain to prompt you with these thoughts and improve your overall focus and productivity.
Temptations are a common trigger for distraction. Fortunately, there are many helpful techniques for dealing with temptations before they distract you from your task.
Social Media
Most popular social media services are designed to provide quick, easy, and short bursts of entertainment. These bursts intermittently and repeatedly stimulate chemicals in our brains to encourage us to continue using the service and become addicted to it. Two signs that procrastination on social media has become a significant problem are:
Any outside influence with such a strong subconscious control over our minds will likely contribute to procrastination. Fortunately, there are several powerful tools to help improve social media consumption.