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Do you put off work that needs to get done? What’s the book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle about?
In Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, psychologist Timothy A. Pychyl contends that you aren’t procrastinating because you’re bad at managing your time. Instead, you’re procrastinating because you haven’t learned how to handle your emotions.
Read below for a brief Solving the Procrastination Puzzle book overview.
Overview of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle
All of us know (some of us quite intimately) what procrastination is. This counterproductive but irresistible tendency tempts us into putting off a task to get some benefits now in exchange for some costs later. In his book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle (2013), psychologist and professor Timothy A. Pychyl explains that by telling yourself “I don’t feel like it” and putting a task off until later, you prioritize how you feel in the short term over the goals you want to achieve in the long term. In doing so, you’re knowingly sabotaging your own progress, and you might not even realize why you’re doing it. Pychyl contends that procrastination is less of a problem with managing our time and more of a problem with managing our emotions. Without learning to handle the emotions that cause you to put off your tasks, you’re stuck.
Pychyl spent his career researching procrastination and how it affects our well-being. He retired from his position as an associate professor at Carleton University in Ottawa in 2022, and in 2023 he created a procrastination-focused series for the popular Waking Up meditation app. Pychyl sees procrastination as a puzzle you have to solve: You have to understand each of its pieces and how they fit together. Pychyl contends that if you can identify what emotions are causing you to put off the tasks you chronically delay, then you can start to see your procrastination habit—and a realistic path to curtailing it—more clearly.
What Is Procrastination?
Throughout the book, Pychyl corrects some common misconceptions about procrastination—like the idea that we procrastinate because we’re bad at managing our time or the belief that to kick the procrastination habit, we have to put a stop to any kind of delay that slows our progress toward our goals. In this section, we’ll take a look at how Pychyl explains what procrastination is and how he explains what procrastination isn’t (making a useful distinction between procrastination and other, more productive kinds of delays).
Procrastination Isn’t About Time, But Emotions
Procrastination is a choice to postpone a task you need to complete, even though you know that negative consequences will follow. Pychyl explains that when you choose to procrastinate, you deliberately make a decision that sabotages your progress toward your goals. But your knowledge that there will be consequences doesn’t make the habit any easier to overcome. That’s because procrastination isn’t rational: Instead, it’s driven by emotions.
You’ve likely heard that procrastination results from a failure of the cognitive capacity psychologists call self-regulation: the ability to manage your emotions, attention, and behavior so you can work toward your goals or act according to your values. Pychyl contends that procrastination is specifically a failure of emotion regulation. He explains that you procrastinate because you want to feel positive emotions, and you achieve that by avoiding tasks that make you feel negative emotions about your work or yourself.
We associate all kinds of negative emotions with the tasks we procrastinate on. For example, you might put off reading a proposal at work because you anticipate being bored by it. Or you might delay assembling the desk your partner asked you to build because you’re worried you’ll struggle with the instructions—being defeated by an Ikea desk would be pretty humiliating.
By avoiding negative emotions, we get to feel better temporarily. However, as Pychyl points out, we typically feel bad about procrastinating, so we don’t get to opt out of negative emotions altogether. Nonetheless, we choose to “feel good” for the moment by both avoiding an unpleasant task and imagining ourselves accomplishing that task some other time—like “later” or “tomorrow.” The problem is that this doesn’t happen just once: Procrastination becomes a habit, one prompted by the thoughts or feelings we associate with a task.
Not Every Delay Is Caused by Procrastination
Before we dig further into what causes procrastination and how you can overcome it, Pychyl contends that it’s important to learn to tell the difference between procrastination and more productive kinds of delays that can temporarily impede your progress toward your goals. He points out that it’s sometimes necessary to put a task on the back burner, for all kinds of practical (and rational) reasons. To work toward your most important goals or fulfill the obligations of your most significant roles, you often have to put one task ahead of the other things on your agenda, handling the most important or most time-sensitive things first.
Prioritizing inevitably leads to putting off some tasks, but Pychyl emphasizes that’s not the same thing as procrastination. For example, you might have to push back a project at work to stay home with your child when they catch the flu. You’re delaying something you need to do, but you’re doing it to take care of something more important. Pychyl says these delays don’t qualify as procrastination. Procrastination only happens when we deliberately put off a task that we could (and should) begin right away. You can recognize procrastination because you’re not putting the task off for a rational reason: Instead, you don’t feel like getting started on it, so you defer it until “later” or “tomorrow.”
Why Is Procrastination Harmful?
If you’re reading this guide, you probably realize that procrastination comes with some costs. Pychyl contends it’s important to be aware of the specific ways your procrastination habit works against you. After all, procrastination keeps you from putting your limited time to the best possible use, and this can have a cascade of consequences. In this section, we’ll consider three ways that procrastination can sabotage you: by hurting your ability to do your best work, increasing the negative feelings you experience, and undermining your health and well-being.
It Chips Away at Your Ability to Get Things Done
Making a habit of putting things off hinders your ability to do and be your best. Pychyl warns that when you give in to procrastination and delay working on the tasks that your partner, your boss, or your friends are depending on you to complete, you don’t put your best effort into fulfilling your obligations. He warns that it’s easy to disappoint yourself or somebody else and regret it later.
Pychyl argues that if you aren’t able to find the time to do the things you said you would, procrastination can undermine your relationships with the people you care about most. It can also make you regret missing out on things you always wanted to do but never got around to doing, like taking the trip you and your partner have always talked about.
When you keep putting a task off, you might find yourself in the final stretch before the deadline with little time left to do a good job. Pychyl explains that procrastination often reduces the quality of the work you ultimately do. This can feel like an acceptable trade-off because it seems to lower the stakes, too. (If you do a good job, you manage to perform well even when working at the last minute. And if you do a poor job, you can just attribute it to the lack of time left to complete the task, and move on.) But no matter how you justify it to yourself, procrastination still keeps you from doing your best work.
It Results in More Negative Feelings, Not Fewer
You might recall from the previous section that the desire to avoid negative emotions often drives procrastination. Pychyl warns that this rarely works out the way we expect it to: Procrastination doesn’t really make you feel happier, even in the moment. He explains that when you know you should be working on a task you’ve delayed, you probably feel mixed emotions about it. One of the most common is guilt (which you feel when you know you’re doing something that conflicts with your sense of what’s right or wrong for you).
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Here's what you'll find in our full Solving the Procrastination Puzzle summary:
- The real reason why you procrastinate
- How procrastination undermines your ability to live a happy, healthy life
- Practical advice for changing your relationship with your most dreaded tasks
