The Real Origins of Procrastination

Most psychologists see procrastination as a kind of avoidance behavior, a coping mechanism has gone awry in which people “give in to feel good,” says Timothy Pychyl, a professor who studies procrastination at Carleton University, in Ottawa.


It usually happens when people fear or dread, or have anxiety about, the important task awaiting them. To get rid of this negative feeling, people procrastinate — they open up a video game or Pinterest instead. That makes them feel better temporarily, but unfortunately, reality comes back to bite them in the end.


Once the reality of a deadline sets in again, procrastinators feel more extreme shame and guilt. But for an extreme procrastinator, those negative feelings can be just another reason to put the task off, with the behavior turning into a vicious, self-defeating cycle.

Tim Urban, who runs the blog Wait But Why, created an amazing and funny (if layman's) explanation of what may happen inside the brain of a procrastinator. Urban calls himself a master procrastinator — he didn’t begin writing a 90-page senior thesis until 72 hours before it was due. Urban recently gave a TED Talk about his own extreme procrastination tendencies, in which he used some of his own cartoons to explain how life is different for an extreme procrastinator.

People can be various kinds of procrastinators, Urban says. Some procrastinate by doing useless things, such as searching for cat GIFs. Others actually accomplish things — cleaning their homes, working their boring jobs — but never quite getting to the things they really want to accomplish in life, their most important, long-term goals.

To illustrate this, Urban uses a concept that is known as an Eisenhower Matrix, a graphic that was included in “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” It’s named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, the famously productive president. Eisenhower thought that people should spend their time on what was truly important to them — the tasks in Quadrants 1 and 2 below.

Unfortunately, most procrastinators spend little time in those quadrants, Urban says. Instead, they mostly hang out in Quadrants 3 and 4, doing things that may be urgent, but are not important. Occasionally, when the panic monster takes over, they take a very brief detour to Quadrant 1.

Urban says this habit is disastrous because “the road to the procrastinator’s dreams — the road to expanding his horizons, exploring his true potential and achieving work he’s truly proud of — runs directly through Quadrant 2. Q1 and Q3 may be where people survive, but Q2 is where people thrive, grow and blossom.”

This is Urban's own personal explanation of how and why he procrastinates — but his account actually corresponds with psychological research on the topic.

Pychyl discusses the idea of the "monkey mind" — that our thoughts are constantly darting all over the place, preventing us from concentrating. And psychologists agree that the problem with procrastinators is that they are tempted to give in to instant gratification, which brings people the kind of instant relief psychologists call "hedonic pleasure," rather than staying focused on the long-term goal.

Important goals (the kind that occupies the first and second quadrants above) are more challenging but in the long run, bring longer-lasting feelings of well-being and self-satisfaction that psychologists call "eudaimonic pleasure."