Many highly successful people claim to have ADD, and some genuinely meet the clinical definition.

One of them was Jake Eberts, a film producer whose works include Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Dances with Wolves, Driving Miss Daisy, A River Runs through It, The Killing Fields, and Chicken Run, and whose films received sixty-six Oscar nominations and seventeen Oscar wins (he passed away in 2012).

By his own admission, he had a short attention span and very little patience, and he was easily bored. But his powerful intellect found him graduating from McGill University at the age of 20 and leading the engineering team for the European company Air Liquide before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School at age 25.

Early on, Jake identified his chief weakness: a tendency to procrastinate. He is of course not alone in this, and it is not a problem unique to people with attention deficit disorder. To combat it, Jake adopted a strict policy of “do it now.” If Jake had a number of calls to make or things to attend to piling up, he’d dive right in, even if it cut into leisure or socializing time. And he’d do the most unpleasant task—firing someone, haggling with an investor, paying bills—the first thing in the morning to get it out of the way.

Following Mark Twain, Jake called it eating the frog: Do the most unpleasant task first thing in the morning when gumption is highest, because willpower depletes as the day moves on. (The other thing that kept Jake on track was that, like most executives, he had executive assistants. He didn’t have to remember due dates or small items himself; he could just put a given task in “the Irene bucket” and his assistant, Irene, would take care of it.)

Procrastination is something that affects all of us to varying degrees. We rarely feel we’re caught up on everything. There are chores to do around the house, thank-you notes to write, synchronizing and backing up of our computers and smartphones to do. Some of us are affected by procrastination only mildly, others severely. Across the whole spectrum, all procrastination can be seen as a failure of self-regulation, planning, impulse control, or a combination of all three. By definition, it involves delaying an activity, task, or decision that would help us to reach our goals. In its mildest form, we simply start things at a later time than we might have, and experience unneeded stress as a deadline looms closer and we have less and less time to finish. But it can lead to more problematic outcomes. Many people, for instance, delay seeing their doctors, during which time their condition can become so bad that treatment is no longer an option, or they put off writing wills, filling out medical directives, installing smoke detectors, taking out life insurance, or starting a retirement savings plan until it’s too late.

The tendency to procrastinate has been found to be correlated with certain traits, lifestyles, and other factors. Although the effects are statistically significant, none of them is very large. Those who are younger and single (including divorced or separated) are slightly more likely to procrastinate. So are those with a Y chromosome—this could be why women are far more likely to graduate from college than men; they are less likely to procrastinate. As mentioned earlier, being outside in natural settings—parks, forests, the beach, the mountains, and the desert— replenishes self-regulatory mechanisms in the brain, and accordingly, living or spending time in nature, as opposed to urban environments, has been shown to reduce the tendency to procrastinate.

Procrastination comes in two types. Some of us procrastinate in order to pursue restful activities—spending time in bed, watching TV—while others of us procrastinate certain difficult or unpleasant tasks in favor of those that are more fun or that yield an immediate reward. In this respect, the two types differ in activity level: The rest-seeking procrastinators would generally rather not be exerting themselves at all, while the fun-task procrastinators enjoy being busy and active all the time but just have a hard time starting things that are not so fun.

An additional factor has to do with delayed gratification, and individual differences in how people tolerate that. Many people work on projects that have a long event horizon—for example, academics, businesspeople, engineers, writers, housing contractors, and artists. That is, the thing they’re working on can take weeks or months (or even years) to complete, and after completion, there can be a very long period of time before they get any reward, praise, or gratification. Many people in these professions enjoy hobbies such as gardening, playing a musical instrument, and cooking because those activities yield an immediate, tangible result—you can see the patch of your flower bed where you removed the weeds, you can hear the Chopin piece you’ve just played, and you can taste the rhubarb pie you just baked. In general, activities with a long time to completion—and hence a long time to reward—are the ones more likely to be started late, and those with an immediate reward are less likely to be procrastinated.

Piers Steel is an organizational psychologist, one of the world’s foremost authorities on procrastination and a professor at the Haskayne Schoolof Business at the University of Calgary. Steel says that two underlying factors lead us to procrastinate:

Humans have a low tolerance for frustration. Moment by moment, when choosing what tasks to undertake or activities to pursue, we tend to choose not the most rewarding action but the easiest. This means that unpleasant or difficult things get put off.

We tend to evaluate our self-worth in terms of our achievements. Whether we lack self-confidence in general—or confidence that this particular project will turn out well—we procrastinate because that allows us to delay putting our reputations on the line until later. (This is what psychologists call an ego-protective maneuver.)

The low tolerance for frustration has neural underpinnings. Our limbic system and the parts of the brain that are seeking immediate rewards come into conflict with our prefrontal cortex, which all too well understands the consequences of falling behind. Both regions run on dopamine, but the dopamine has different actions in each. Dopamine in the prefrontal cortex causes us to focus and stay on task; dopamine in the limbic system, along with the brain’s own endogenous opioids, causes us to feel pleasure. We put things off whenever the desire for immediate pleasure wins out over our ability to delay gratification, depending on which dopamine system is in control.

Steel identifies what he calls two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.

Certain behaviors may look like procrastination but arise due to different factors. Some individuals suffer from initiation deficits, an inability to get started. This problem is distinct from planning difficulties, in which individuals fail to begin tasks sufficiently early to complete them because they have unrealistic or naive ideas about how long it will take to complete sub goals. Others may fail to accomplish tasks on time because they don’t have the required objects or materials when they finally sit down to work. Both of these latter difficulties arise from a lack of planning, not from procrastination per se. On the other hand, some individuals may be attempting a challenging task with which they have no previous experience; they may simply not know where or how to begin. In these cases, having supervisors or teachers who can help them break up the problem into component parts is very helpful and often essential. Adopting a systematic, componential approach to assignments is effective in reducing this form of procrastination.

Finally, some individuals suffer from a chronic inability to finish projects they’ve started. This is not procrastination, because they don’t put off starting projects; rather, they put off ending them. This can arise because the individual doesn’t possess the skills necessary to properly complete the job with acceptable quality—many a home hobbyist or weekend carpenter can testify to this. It can also arise from an insidious perfectionism in which the individual has a deep, almost obsessive belief that their work products are never good enough (a kind of failure in satisficing).

Graduate students tend to suffer from this kind of perfectionism, no doubt because they are comparing themselves with their advisors, and comparing their thesis drafts with their advisors’ finished work. It is an unfair comparison of course. Their advisors have had more experience, and the advisor’s setbacks, rejected manuscripts, and rough drafts are hidden from the graduate student’s view—all the graduate student ever sees is the finished product and the gap between it and her own work. This is a classic example of the power of the situation being underappreciated in favor of an attribution about stable traits, and it shows up as well in the workplace.

The supervisor’s role virtually guarantees that she will appear smarter and more competent than the supervisee. The supervisor can choose to show the worker her own work when it is finished and polished. The worker has no opportunity for such self-serving displays and is often required to show work at draft and interim stages, effectively guaranteeing that the worker’s product won’t measure up, thus leaving many underlings with the feeling they aren’t good enough. But these situational constraints are not as predictive of ability as students and other supervisees make them out to be. Understanding this cognitive illusion can encourage individuals to be less self-critical and, hopefully, to emancipate themselves from the stranglehold of perfectionism.

Also important is to disconnect one’s sense of self-worth from the outcome of a task. Self-confidence entails accepting that you might fail early on and that it’s OK, it’s all part of the process. The writer and polymath George Plimpton noted that successful people have paradoxically had many more failures than people whom most of us would consider to be, well, failures. If this sounds like double-talk or mumbo jumbo, the resolution of the paradox is that successful people (or people who eventually become successful) deal with failures and setbacks very differently from everyone else.

The unsuccessful person interprets the failure or setback as a career breaker and concludes, “I’m no good at this.” The successful person sees each setback as an opportunity to gain whatever additional knowledge is necessary to accomplish her goals. The internal dialogue of a successful (or eventually successful) person is more along the lines of “I thought I knew everything I needed to know to achieve my goals, but this has taught me that I don’t. Once I learn this, I can get back on track.” The kinds of people who become successful typically know that they can expect a rocky road ahead and it doesn’t dissuade them when those bumps knock them off kilter—it’s all part of the process. As Piers Steel would say, they don’t subscribe to the faulty belief that life should be easy.

This post has been adapted from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, published by Penguin Random House.