PDF Summary:Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, by Timothy A. Pychyl

You have goals to achieve and plans to make them happen—but you’re constantly sabotaging your progress toward getting them done. How? By procrastinating: leaving tasks for “later” or “tomorrow” when you could really be working on them today. 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—the negative emotions that pop up each time you consider working on a dreaded task.

In this guide, we’ll take you through Pychyl’s research-based insights into what procrastination is and how it’s undermining your ability to live a happy, healthy life. Then, we’ll dive into the reasons you’re procrastinating and explore Pychyl’s advice for changing your habits in the short and long term. We’ll also compare his ideas with those of other psychology and productivity experts who’ve studied procrastination, and we’ll look at additional strategies for changing your relationship with your most dreaded tasks.

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According to Pychyl, another reason that procrastination takes a toll on your physical health is that while putting off a few unpleasant tasks can seem harmless, procrastination isn’t so innocuous when it involves health-related tasks. Skipping gym sessions, delaying the start date for healthier eating habits, pushing back your bedtime, failing to find the time for doctor’s appointments, and delaying recommended health screenings all keep you from taking care of yourself to the best of your ability. Your health can suffer in the long run: After all, your blood pressure doesn’t care that you always intend to exercise more or that you have a plan to start a new diet next month.

(Shortform note: It makes sense that specific choices like skipping gym days can hurt your health. But it’s been difficult for researchers to sort out whether, overall, procrastination causes poor health or poor health leads to procrastination. A recent study investigated these relationships and ultimately linked the tendency to procrastinate now to a higher risk of poor health later. The researchers hypothesize that procrastination leads to depression, anxiety, or stress, and negative physical effects follow from there. They suggest trying cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to learn to translate long-term goals into short-term ones, manage distractions, and stay focused—helpful strategies whether you want to establish better work habits or start getting to the gym regularly.)

Why Do We Procrastinate, and How Can We Stop?

Procrastination is frustrating because we know what it is and we can see how it hurts us, but we keep doing it anyway. In this section, we’ll explore three forces behind procrastination: our desire for rewarding experiences, our trouble making realistic plans, and our lack of preparedness for obstacles and challenges. With each one, we’ll pair strategies that Pychyl recommends using to stop procrastinating and build more productive habits instead.

We Seek Out Rewards, and We Prefer Rewards Now Over Later

The first reason we procrastinate is that we want to have experiences that our brains perceive as rewarding—experiences that feel good rather than bad. According to Pychyl, this tendency explains two psychological causes of procrastination: your preference for getting a reward now even if there will be costs later, and your preference for a reward now over a better reward later.

We Choose a Reward Now, Even if There Are Consequences Later

One way that your brain’s love of rewards causes procrastination ties into the insight, which Pychyl emphasizes throughout the book, that you often procrastinate so you can avoid confronting the uncomfortable emotions or thoughts that a task brings up. When you feel you’ve sidestepped negative feelings, at least temporarily, that can feel rewarding. Procrastination becomes a habit when you do this over and over again, establishing a pattern of avoiding tasks so you can feel rewarded now and deal with the costs of those decisions later.

(Shortform note: Many pieces of literature have dramatized the desire to put off responsibilities and emotions until later to do something more rewarding now. Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows an unnamed character who’s miserable with her life in New York. She decides to run away from that misery by using prescription medication to sleep for a year, living on the money she inherited after her parents’ premature deaths, and waking up every three days to eat, bathe, and take another pill. Of course, few of us would go so far as to put off the work of building a life—or just being alive—for a year. But the novel illustrates just how hypnotic the lure of a temporary solution to a problem can be, despite the consequences.)

What to Do About It:

To keep your brain’s shortsighted desire for rewards from getting the better of you, Pychyl first recommends planning ahead for the moment you’ll feel the temptation to procrastinate. You can do this by making what psychologists call “predecisions.” As the name suggests, predecisions are decisions you can make before you find yourself in a challenging situation to smooth the path toward a better decision in the moment.

For example, you can make a predecision that if you catch yourself trying to put off going for a run, you’ll respond by getting up right away and putting on your running shoes. Deciding in advance about the timeline on which you’ll act and the specific part of the task you’ll tackle first can help you replace one habit—skipping your run because you don’t really want to go—with another habit—lacing up your shoes as soon as you catch yourself thinking you don’t want to go. Once your running shoes are on, you might as well get out the door, right?

(Shortform note: Predecisions sound great in theory, but what’s to keep you from throwing them out the window as soon as the moment comes? Win the Day author Mark Batterson advises that to use predecisions to improve at least a few of the 35,000 decisions you make every day, you should pair them with rituals. He explains that if you make a predecision to get out of bed as soon as your alarm goes off, then in theory, you eliminate the option of hitting snooze. But the key to actually making it happen is to build it into a ritual. For example, you might place your alarm clock across the room and establish a routine of rolling out of bed and making a cup of matcha each morning. Rituals create structure, which makes it easier to stick to the plan.)

A second strategy Pychyl recommends for resisting the reward of avoiding your negative emotions is determining which feelings prompt you to procrastinate. By noticing what goes through your head in those moments, you can learn to recognize specific emotions that make you want to put off a task and plan to deal with them, perhaps by making a predecision about what to do when you notice that familiar feeling. Pychyl notes that it can also be helpful to realize that you aren’t your emotions, and you don’t have to let temporary feelings dictate how you behave.

For example, you might realize you’re putting off working in your garden because you’re feeling annoyed about the gray weather. By acknowledging your irritation as a trigger for procrastination, you can make the predecision to deal with that feeling of annoyance by putting on your chore coat and getting to work instead of letting a gloomy day (or a gloomy mood) decide how you act.

(Shortform note: It’s not always easy to recognize what emotions you’re feeling. Experts refer to difficulty with recognizing your own emotions as “alexithymia,” and they estimate it affects as many as 1 in 10 people. Alexithymia sometimes occurs alongside mood disorders like depression or developmental differences like autism. People who have it seem to have difficulty interpreting physiological changes as emotional responses—for example, realizing that having a faster heart rate could mean they’re excited or frightened. To improve this ability, experts recommend tuning into your physiological responses. Paying attention to your heart rate, for example, can help you recognize the difference between emotions like anxiety and fear.)

Pychyl notes that predecisions are helpful not only for planning how you’ll react to emotions but also for building healthier responses to the excuses you use to justify procrastination. This means that you can decide ahead of time to turn your excuses for procrastination into triggers for more productive habits. For example, you can decide that when you catch yourself saying you’ll watch Netflix now and do your chores later because you’ve had a rough day at work, then you’ll get up and wash the dishes.

(Shortform note: While the excuses you make to justify your procrastination can feel compelling, they’re probably not very original—or very logical, when you start to look closely. One particularly common excuse is that you’re feeling too tired or stressed to tackle a task right away, and you’ll be more productive if you just do the work when you’re in a better mood. Fortunately, you can make a plan to handle this excuse by seeing through the logic: When you catch yourself rationalizing this way, remind yourself that you have no way of predicting whether your mood will be better later or tomorrow. You can also remember that making progress on an important or meaningful task will likely boost your mood anyway.)

We Care Less About Future Rewards Than Present Ones

A second way that the reward circuitry in your brain trips you up, says Pychyl, is by incentivizing you to pick a reward now over an even better reward later. While it would feel rewarding to finish a project or achieve a goal later, your brain wants you to instead choose a much smaller, more immediate reward, like a half-hour spent scrolling through TikTok videos you’ll immediately forget.

(Shortform note: Our love of immediate rewards is so strong that we procrastinate even when putting off a task means it’ll take a lot more work to do it later than it would be to get it done now—and we’re not the only animals to do it. Studies with pigeons have shown that when the birds can get food as a reward for pecking at a key, they prefer to delay that work, even when it takes four times as many pecks later as it would take now. Pigeons are impulsive, like humans. They prioritize how they feel in the short term—reluctant to get the task done—over what they’ll feel in the long term—reluctant to get an even more onerous version of the task done.)

Choosing a small reward now instead of a big reward later doesn’t quite make sense, so your brain also knows exactly how to convince you that your decision is sound. Pychyl points out that when you procrastinate, you know the decision to put off an important task doesn’t align with your values or goals. This means you experience cognitive dissonance: the uncomfortable tension that arises from holding two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time. (For example, those conflicting ideas might be “I want to exercise more” and “I’m not going to run today.”) One way you resolve the tension and explain away the dissonance is by making excuses about why now isn’t the right time for the task—but tomorrow will be different.

(Shortform note: Pychyl is explaining one of the destructive ways we can cope with cognitive dissonance: rationalizing our lack of progress on a task. But sometimes, we find constructive ways to cope with cognitive dissonance, too, like using it to motivate ourselves to take action. In the 2023 film Barbie, Barbie experiences cognitive dissonance when her belief that the world is a feminist utopia conflicts with the reality that patriarchal societies oppress women. She tries to avoid the dissonance by returning to Barbieland, which has been taken over by Ken in the meantime. She wants the world to be perfect, and she briefly wants to give up. But she uses the cognitive dissonance as fuel to confront the contradictions and make Barbieland more equal for everyone.)

What to Do About It:

To stop prioritizing rewards in the present, Pychyl recommends a strategy that might help you use cognitive dissonance to get things done. When you catch yourself wanting to procrastinate, you can remind yourself how the task or project at hand will contribute to your goals and help you uphold your values. That way, you notice that while it would feel rewarding to kick back and relax now, you’ll feel even better if you accomplish your goal later. Connecting tasks to goals can help you see the dissonance between wanting to achieve your goal and choosing to do nothing. It can also help you remember that what you do today matters and make it easier to begin working rather than do nothing.

(Shortform note: While Pychyl states that both goals and values can drive your progress and prevent procrastination on everyday tasks, some other psychologists advise focusing on your values first. In The Happiness Trap, psychologist Russ Harris explains your values are principles that should determine how you act. To live according to your values, you have to be clear about what kind of person you want to be and what you care about most. Harris notes that values are continuous, not something to achieve once, so it’s crucial to translate your values into actionable goals. Then, as Pychyl advises, you can connect the goals you want to accomplish and the values you want to uphold to your daily tasks, reminding yourself why they’re worth working on.)

We’re Bad at Planning

The second reason we procrastinate is that we have trouble with planning. Figuring out how to accomplish everything on your to-do list requires planning when and how you’ll get things done. But most of us aren’t very good at these kinds of plans. Pychyl explains that this puts you on a direct path to procrastination by making you think you really will feel like doing a dreaded task tomorrow and tripping you up when you estimate how long a task will take.

We Genuinely Think We’ll Do It “Later” or “Tomorrow”

Pychyl writes that you probably tell yourself that you don’t feel like doing a task now, but you’ll feel like it “later” or “tomorrow.” Almost every time, you’re definitely wrong, yet you genuinely feel like you’re right. That’s because, in addition to having trouble planning, your brain also has trouble predicting how you’ll feel in the future.

Because of a cognitive bias called focalism, you don’t think about all of the factors that will affect your mood in the future. You might really think you’ll feel like cleaning the house tomorrow night. But you’re likely not considering how a long day of work will leave you tired and an evening helping your kids with homework will make you grumpy about having to relearn fractions. Plus, because of a bias called presentism, you assume that how you feel now is how you’ll feel later. But this often isn’t accurate. You likely feel a lot more enthusiastic about leaving the cleaning until tomorrow in the present (as you’re making that decision) than you will in the future, when “tomorrow” is here and it’s time to get to work.

(Shortform note: Experts agree with Pychyl that our trouble predicting how we’ll feel in the future often trips us up and even makes us bad at anticipating what will make us happy. Strangers to Ourselves author Timothy Wilson and Stumbling on Happiness author Daniel Gilbert explain that because we overestimate how good or bad an event will make us feel or underestimate how quickly those feelings will pass, we overestimate the effect that a single event will have on our happiness. Gilbert also notes that when we think we’ll feel in the future the same way we feel now, due to presentism, we make poor decisions that won’t make us happy. These choices are often motivated by emotions that will quickly pass, not by rational thinking about the future.)

What to Do About It:

Pychyl explains that one of the best things you can do to stop your trouble with planning from leading to procrastination is to rethink your assumptions about motivation. It feels hard to get started on a task when you aren’t feeling motivated, and you’re expecting to feel more motivated tomorrow. But it’s important to realize that not only are you unlikely to feel motivated later, but that you don’t even have to feel motivated to just begin working. Then you can establish a habit of starting work right away, regardless of whether you feel like it or not.

(Shortform note: In the same way that psychologists like Pychyl say you shouldn’t wait for motivation to get to work, artists say that you don’t need inspiration to begin on a creative project. Many creative people—from writer Maya Angelou to painter Chuck Close—have said that they rely on routines and schedules to make sure that they “show up” and just start working. In Daily Rituals, Mason Currey writes that Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Miró, and dozens of other great artists established rituals that enabled them to get around obstacles to motivation and inspiration—and to keep themselves from wasting time procrastinating.)

We Underestimate the Time a Task Will Take

Another problem that contributes to trouble with planning, and then to procrastination, is the inability to accurately predict how much time you’ll need to complete a task. Pychyl explains that because of a cognitive bias called the planning fallacy, you probably underestimate the amount of time each task will take. You might think it’s reasonable to leave a task until Sunday, since it’ll only take you two or three hours to get it done. But come Sunday, it might take you six or seven hours instead, far longer than you expected.

(Shortform note: Psychologists say we fall for the planning fallacy because we fail to consider what it will realistically take to complete a task, whether that’s time, effort, money, or another resource. It’s not a bad thing to be optimistic, but it can get in the way of making a realistic plan. The planning fallacy was first described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the two psychologists who laid the foundation for the field called behavioral economics. Their work on judgment and decision-making shows that our behavior deviates in systematic ways from what’s rational: In other words, we have cognitive biases—like the planning fallacy—that cause us to make predictable errors of judgment, an idea that’s made an immense scientific impact.)

What to Do About It:

As Pychyl explains it, familiarizing yourself with the planning fallacy—and watching it in action as you try and fail to accurately project how long a task will take—can give you another reason to cultivate the habit of beginning a task right away. If you know that your estimated timelines are likely wrong, then you can see the benefit in beginning work on even a small part of the project right away rather than putting the whole thing off. (Shortform note: Other experts agree with Pychyl that doing whatever you can to just get started is a great way to counter procrastination. That’s because once you’ve begun, you’ll build momentum to keep going.)

(Shortform note: Deep Work author Cal Newport agrees with Pychyl that we’re bad at planning. Further, Newport contends that poor planning, even more than negative emotions, is to blame for procrastination. He explains that whether you’re a Paleolithic-era hunter going after a woolly mammoth or a modern student with homework to tackle, your brain has evolved to reject a haphazard plan that might get you in trouble. Running at a mammoth with a spear or pulling an all-nighter to write a paper are both plans your brain would reject, prompting a physiological reaction to deter you from getting started. Newport characterizes procrastination as a useful signal that you need a more detailed plan to take down that mammoth—or assignment.)

We Aren’t Prepared to Deal With Obstacles Along the Way

A third reason we find ourselves procrastinating is that we don’t prepare for even the most obvious things that might go wrong, according to Pychyl. You know yourself and know how you typically behave, but you likely don’t use that information to your advantage. That leads to two causes of procrastination: neglecting to prepare for distractions and failing to see how your personality may prime you to delay your tasks.

We Aren’t Prepared to Deal With Distractions

Pychyl explains that one of the most common obstacles that can throw you off when you work toward a goal is also one of the simplest: distractions. Whether they come in the form of colleagues knocking on your door or push notifications from your favorite social media app, distractions pull your attention away from what you need to do and make it harder for you to make meaningful progress. But as Pychyl notes, you probably don’t prepare yourself to run this gauntlet of interruptions.

What to Do About It:

Pychyl recommends that you start by reducing potential distractions (especially internet-related distractions) before you even sit down to begin work. You might put your smartphone away in a drawer, close all of the windows on your computer except the one you need, and draw your shades.

You might also find it useful to take note of the distractions you face as you’re trying to get work done so you can plan for them. Pychyl recommends observing the points in a task where you tend to give in to distraction. Plan to get past these predictable hurdles by removing the distractions that pull you away from your work or by making a predecision about how you’ll handle these difficult moments. (Shortform note: One way to observe what’s distracting you might be to borrow a meditation technique where you imagine your thoughts as leaves floating on a stream. Each time a thought distracts you, notice it, then place it on a leaf and let it float away. This allows you to practice letting distracting thoughts come and go without having to act on them.)

(Shortform note: Other psychologists agree with Pychyl that having an environment where you can work without distractions or temptations can play a crucial role in helping you avoid procrastination and get work done. In fact, as researchers re-evaluate classic studies with more rigorous methods, they’re finding it’s less important to be good at self-control than to eliminate distractions. The people who seem to be best at self-control are actually those who encounter the fewest temptations that might pull their attention from a task. This suggests that anticipating and eliminating potential distractions, as Pychyl recommends, might help you stay more focused on your work and make you more likely to accomplish what you want to get done.)

We Don’t Recognize Personality Traits That Make Us Likely to Procrastinate

Another obstacle that might stand between you and your goals—and divert you toward procrastination if you don’t prepare for it—is more difficult to change: your personality. Pychyl explains that certain personality traits have been linked to procrastination. Three traits, in particular, seem to have a marked link to higher rates of procrastination: Neuroticism (the tendency to experience negative emotions more than other people), impulsivity (the inclination to make choices without thinking them through fully), and perfectionism (specifically the kind of perfectionism caused by your perception that other people have unrealistically high expectations of your performance).

(Shortform note: While it’s difficult—but not impossible—to change your personality, you can defy your instincts at least temporarily. In a beloved episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza decides to do the opposite of what he’d usually do. He orders something different for lunch, strikes up a conversation with a beautiful woman, and speaks openly about not having a job and living with his parents—which leads to him getting a job and moving out. You don’t need to change who you are to change how you behave. But experts say there’s a tool you can use to be a little less neurotic, impulsive, or perfectionistic: mindfulness. By becoming more aware of what you’re thinking and feeling, you can decide more intentionally how you want to respond.)

What to Do About It:

While you could try to change your personality, that’s not the strategy that Pychyl recommends. Instead, he advises that you pay attention to the traits you have and how they prompt you to respond in your usual way (that is, how they make you prone to procrastination). Then, you can decide how to change that response. For example, you can counter the perfectionism that arises from thinking your boss won’t accept anything except brilliant ideas by learning to remind yourself that all ideas are welcomed and valued at your team’s meetings.

(Shortform note: In addition to finding that certain personality traits seem to correlate with procrastination, researchers have found likely links with some other common traits. For example, people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) tend to procrastinate as a way to put off tasks that feel overwhelming, either because they don’t know how to get started or because they keep getting distracted. Experts say that people with more severe ADHD symptoms are more likely to experience depression and anxiety linked to their procrastination. But dividing tasks into small pieces, using a reward for motivation, and limiting distractions can help people with ADHD learn to procrastinate less.)

Whether or not you have personality traits linked to procrastination, Pychyl emphasizes that you can’t rely solely on willpower to overcome it. He explains that willpower is limited, and it’s much more effective to make realistic plans to curb your procrastination than to assume you can change through sheer force of will. But when you know you’ll need to rely on willpower, Pychyl recommends preparing by getting enough sleep, spending time with people who give you energy, and not relying on willpower at the end of the day when you’re tired.

(Shortform note: For decades, psychologists subscribed to a theory called “ego depletion,” which says willpower is a finite resource, as Pychyl suggests. As detailed in Roy Baumeister and Jon Tierney’s Willpower, hundreds of studies seem to show that cognitive effort draws down our reserve of willpower. But experts have discovered major flaws in the research, and it’s possible the effect isn’t real at all. Indistractable author Nir Eyal explains it looks like willpower is more like an emotion: Emotions come and go and take effort to manage. Willpower is also a challenge. But if you accept that you’ll struggle with it from time to time, you can learn from your mistakes—and realize your procrastination habit will probably always be a work in progress.)