Four Things Procrastinators Need to Learn

One litmus test for being a serious procrastinator: there are items on your to-do list that were there a year ago.

A year is more than one percent of even a very long life—what could be so difficult or intimidating that we’d avoid it for that long? For some of us, anything really: making a doctor’s appointment, cleaning out the trunk, fixing a leaky faucet.

To be a chronic procrastinator is to be fooled repeatedly by the same illusions about how your mind works and how things actually get done. You hit the same ruts, spin out in the same place, and misunderstand what happened in the same way as every other time.

Once in a while, you spot one of these mirages right before you step into it again, and finally see the truth behind the illusion. Here are four such truths about I wish I could tell my younger self.

1) Confidence comes after you start, not before.

To the procrastinator, starting a task feels always feels dangerous, because it’s the first moment you can be exposed as a hack or a fool. You can ponder, plan, and envision a task indefinitely, while enjoying a certain sense of safety. But the moment of actually starting brings real-world dangers into the picture: failure, ridicule, complications, and maybe the discovery of a new, deeper level to your ineptitude.

So before you start, you look for a little more assurance that things will go well for you. This inevitably leads to more planning, more thinking, perhaps some flow-charting of possibilities (either mentally or on paper), maybe some haphazard web research. One reliable standby is a thorough round of house cleaning, in order to clarify the mind. Or why not a spa day, to rejuvenate?

How prepared do you need to feel? It’s hard to say, but it’s always a little more than you feel now.

Confidence is helpful for any task, but in reality there’s little you can do to create it before starting. Once you actually start the task itself, things begin to fall into order. You quickly discover where the real effort is required, what’s surprisingly easy, and what possibilities you can ignore. The tendrils of the flowchart fall away. You just do the next thing.

Almost magically, the task shrinks before you, because it’s no longer composed entirely of your imagination. Only then, when some of the reality of the task is behind you, does confidence make its first appearance.

2) Your dilemmas seem tangled together only until you solve one of them.

The longer and dustier your to-do list gets, the more it seems like a hopeless tangle of interconnected problems. You have no idea how long anything will take, and what new problems will emerge when you dig into something. There is a fear of making things worse.

Your list begins to look like a great, singular problem, a cursed ball of Christmas lights that will take a correspondingly great, singular effort in order to untangle. This great effort is always scheduled for next Monday.

In reality, the “tangle” isn’t real. It’s a mirage that is created when you try to map out everything in your head without actually doing anything.

Work is always done in pieces, and you never know quite what any of it looks like until it is happening. As David Allen says: you can’t “do” a project, you can only do actions, and projects are nothing but actions. Even huge projects are made up only of sketches, phone calls, brushstrokes, application forms, little circles made with a polishing cloth, and other tiny, eminently doable actions.

Even when you are literally untangling knotted cords, it’s only ever a matter of patiently passing one strand back along itself, while you ignore everything else.

It’s when you’re trying to trace the path entirely in your head that it feels hopeless. And that hopeless mental task is what the procrastinator is always trying to do: foresee all real difficulties well enough in advance that they can be avoided perfectly.

It’s impossible. You have to choose a piece and solve it. Once you have, the illusion is dispelled and hopelessness lifts. Mark my word: the whole list looks different the moment you knock off one tough thing.

3) Finishing is everything; “working on” is useless or worse.

Finish something every time you sit down to work. Get to the end of a chapter, a section, a definite stage of some sort.

Don’t just work on something. It’s entirely possible to feel a rich sense of progress without actually getting closer to accomplishing anything. In fact, it’s easy to inadvertently make a task bigger as you work on it. You keep adding, refining, replacing, and second-guessing, and at the end of the day you have more work, not less.

If you can’t answer the question “What are you trying to finish right now?” then you’re probably making the task bigger, rather than moving towards its end.

To dispel this illusion, I often write on a scrap of paper what I’m trying to finish in this session. I have one beside me now. It says “Rough drafts of all four sections!”

It’s easy to overlook the necessity of finishing, especially if you’re not used to getting much done, because the sense of joy that comes with getting “somewhere” can be present even when that somewhere hasn’t been defined. Even a ship going in circles feels fast.

4) Doing feels dangerous and stalling feels safe, but the opposite is true.

Procrastination involves a great amount of thinking about doing, without much actual doing. This thinking is involuntary and often painful, and only ceases after the doing starts.

Through your mind’s eye you can live, and re-live, the horror and struggle of jobs you haven’t even started. This imagined struggle can last months, or years, even for tasks that end up taking less than an hour.

In response to these mental horrors, the procrastinator bides their time, as though delay is an advantage. “Yes, I’ll do it later, when I am more psychologically prepared, when I’ve assembled all my resources, when I can bring the full weight of a new Monday morning to the job.”

Meanwhile, new layers of difficulty are settling onto the original task. By rescheduling the beginning, you’ve made the task harder, taller, more dangerous in your mind. Lead time is burning away, along with any momentum you may have had. Then there’s shame, for having waited so long, which makes the prospect of asking for help go from unpleasant to unthinkable.

Beginning anything without a lot of confidence seems dangerous, but the real danger is delay. Biding your time seems like a move towards safety and self-assuredness, but you don’t actually move anywhere. The task gets even harder, while real, predictable dangers advance on you: missed deadlines, penalties, shame, stress, and further damage to your confidence.

Almost always, the most predictable, most damaging, and most easily avoidable dangers come from stalling. The longer you spend doing a nervous little warm-up dance, the taller the diving board grows.

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More on this topic: How to Get Yourself to Do Things

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen

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