Stuck watching cat videos? Here’s why we procrastinate and how to stop it

Feel like you’ve got procrastination down to a finely-tuned art, and you’re always playing catch-up as a result? Here’s how to stop constantly putting things off.

If you regularly put tasks off, whether it’s finishing that project for work, organising a dinner party you’re hosting or following through on a favour you’ve promised a friend, you’ll understand the saying that procrastination is the great thief of time.

There’s every chance you’ll be familiar with some of the common impacts it has, too – everything from lost productivity to feelings of regret and even damaged self-esteem.

So why do we keep doing it to ourselves?

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The role reward plays in procrastination

Researchers say procrastination is the result of something called present bias – the tendency, when considering the trade-off between two future events, to give more weight to the one that happens sooner.

“Psychologically, we perceive the impact of an event – or the value of a reward – as dampened if it is further away in the future,” Loughborough University behavioural scientist Dr Pragya Agarwal says.

In other words, we view a desired result in the future as being less valuable than one in the present.

“When we’re procrastinating, we are choosing a positive activity in the present, such as watching cat videos or socialising, over a positive consequence later on, such as the satisfaction of completing a task or getting a good grade on an assignment,” Dr Agarwal says.

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Some brains may be hardwired to procrastinate

According to a 2018 study, the brains of doers may differ slightly from people who procrastinate regularly.

Using magnetic resonance imaging to assess study participants’ brains, researchers identified two areas that are linked to a person’s ability to control their actions.

They also discovered that the size of one of these brain regions and the connectivity of the two varied between people who tend to put tasks off rather than tackling them head on.

How to be proactive against procrastination

Procrastination isn’t always a negative, with research showing it can help us navigate difficult emotions, but if you’re keen to stop it from stealing your time when it comes to everyday tasks, the following strategies may help.

Don’t beat yourself up about past behaviour

According to Dr Agarwal, it’s important to forgive yourself if you’re a regular procrastinator.

“The more we internalise the shame and guilt, the more we are likely to procrastinate in the future – and this can be an additional trigger that can compel us to procrastinate even more,” Dr Agarwal says.

Focus on the task’s practical details

Instead of thinking about it in general high-level terms, research shows that when people purposefully drill down into the how, when and where details involved in completing a task instead, they’re much more likely to get it done on time.

If you set yourself a deadline, make it a short one

When researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago set out to discover what type of deadlines are most effective in motivating people, the results were interesting.

After asking study participants to help out by completing an online survey and giving them either no deadline, a one-week deadline or a one-month one, it was the deadline-free people who responded the most and the earliest, followed closely by the people given one week to respond.

On the other hand, the one-month deadline gave people permission to procrastinate – and then many completely forgot about the task altogether.

“We interpret this as evidence that specifying a longer deadline, as opposed to a short deadline or no deadline at all, removes the urgency to act,” co-author of the study, Professor Stephen Knowles, says.

“People therefore put off undertaking the task, and since they are inattentive or forget, postponing it results in lower response rates.”

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Written by Karen Fittall.