Procrastination is indeed a terrible thing.

It’s evil and ugly, sulky and heavy.

It weighs down on you and it gets in the way of all of your plans.

I can say with absolute confidence that the reader I just mentioned is far from being the only one with this problem.

There are millions of people out there who to a greater or lesser degree have a problem with procrastination, because, for most of us it’s a completely natural reaction to a number of different situations we find ourselves in.

So let’s take a look at some of the reasons why we might procrastinate and what we can do in each situation to avoid procrastination instead.

Reasons We Procrastinate (and What To Do About Each One)

Now, before I get started, for those of you who are thinking of bookmarking this article and coming back to finish reading it later, STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!!

I am going to keep this as concise as possible and I’m only giving you 3 reasons to consider, OK?

Even better, I’ll just give you one solution for each.

😉

Reason #1: We Procrastinate Because We Are Overwhelmed

One of the reasons we procrastinate is because of too many options which leads us to feel overwhelmed.

When we’re faced with too many options, and we have to make a choice, often we don’t make a choice at all.

The way we can get around this, if we know that’s the reason, is by giving ourselves fewer choices.

So to explore this a little further, let’s consider an example. Let’s say you’re buying a car and you have a tendency to procrastinate…

So you’re all set up to buy this car. You even know which car you want. You look it up online – and that car is available in a fantastic 28 different colors.

28 different colors!!

You thought you knew what you wanted but that is enough to send you into shock.

The manufacturer sees this as a competitive advantage for his product. They think it’s a great range to offer. What they don’t realize is that for buyers like you, that’s a really good reason to decide another day.

So how can you choose from 28 colors?

You have no idea. You have a look on the website anyway, and of course, you’re overwhelmed. So you make no choice at all.

TRY THIS INSTEAD: Let’s just find a way to cut down your options.

How do we do that?

Well, let’s find a car dealership first of all. The dealerships won’t have 28 colors to choose from – that’s just the manufacturers website. Let’s say the dealership closest to you has only 10 of those colors. Most of those colors are colors you like, so now we have our choice down to 10, but that’s still too many.

Time to procrastinate?

No, stick with me, we’ll get there. So, from 10 colors you can immediately count out two of them which you’re not so keen on.

So now we have 8 colors.

Your current car is blue. Ask yourself this question: Do you feel like a change. Is that important to you? If it’s not then you still have 8 colors, but let’s say it is important to you. It’s important to you that you’d like something different, and there are two shades of blue each of which is quite similar to you current car’s color.

So now we are down to 6 colors.

Do you care about the car looking spectacular or do you prefer it to be relatively normal? You want a relatively normal color so let’s take out the super-jazzy colors – the shocking pink, the electric blue and the flourescent boy-racer lime green.

et voila: we are down to 3 colors.

…and you can definitely make a choice from 3.

Congratulations, you can buy your car today.

P.S. there are of course other questions you could have asked: How important is it that it’s easy to clean? Is there a difference in price for some of the colors? Do you want a metallic finish? What color car do the neighbors have? Do some colors exclude other optional extras on the car? and so on and so forth…

Obviously this is just an example, and a pretty trite one, but hopefully you can see from this example that the same principles can be applied in just about any situation. Find ways to filter and break down the choices to beat the overwhelm and you will avoid procrastination when faced with too many choices.

Procrastination based on overwhelm is a perfectly natural phenomenon and nothing to be too concerned about, but once we understand it, as you can see, we can do something about it. In the spirit of keeping this article quite focused on the procrastination part and what to do about it, I’m not going to go into too much detail here, but I do intend to write another article explaining some of the science behind this very shortly.

Personally I find this particular area quite fascinating and understanding it is not just about beating overwhelm from a consumer point of view, it can also help us in business and marketing too.

Reason #2: We Procrastinate Out Of Habit

I’ve written quite extensively on habit so I’m not going to go into the details of how we form habits.

Suffice to say that if we are in the habit of procrastinating, it’s a pretty hard habit to crack.

You can go ahead and read the following articles to try and replace your procrastination habit with the habit of taking action:

How To Learn Anything
How To Learn ANYTHING (by Understanding How We Form Habits – Pt 2 of 2)
Why Habits Are Awesome + Follow-Up On The ‘Give Up One Thing Challenge’ (1 of 2)

what the above articles talk about a lot is that in the process of forming habits, we must also consider the cue (which in this case is that you’re faced with a choice or a decision), the routine (you procrastinate) and the reward (the reward from procrastination is not having to make the choice).

Luckily, I do believe that the reward for the consistent habit of taking action is much stronger than the reward will ever be for procrastination. The reward for consistently taking action is seeing results, and seeing results is a much better reward than avoiding decisions and the safety or the perceived safety of avoiding decisions, because as we all know that perceived safety is not real. A lot of people procrastinate to avoid making decisions and the comfort they get from procrastinating is very short lived. They actually wish they could make quicker decisions and take more action.

Note: The best way to do it is to do it. Understand the habit forming process, and replace the reward of the safe feeling (that very temporary safe feeling we get when we procrastinate) with the reward of results.

Another very important thing to bear in mind: when considering replacing procrastination with taking action and when purely considering this as a habit, is that the first step is often the hardest, as covered in this article: Every Journey Starts With A Small Step which is also worth reading for further perspective.

Reason #3: We Procrastinate Out Of Fear

Finally, we often procrastinate because we’re afraid of the consequences of making a big decision. We feel we are not yet ready to make such a big decision.

The decision is too big – so the solution is to break it down so that we can make smaller decisions. There is a tremendous advantage to that which is that suddenly we don’t have to be so afraid, we can even perhaps afford to make mistakes because we are making much smaller decisions and the consequences of getting those decisions wrong are in turn much smaller.

When done properly, in the end the sum of making many small decisions can navigate us in a much more tried and true way and have an end result that surpasses the outcome one big decision would ever have given us. Yes, we have an article which covers this idea too: Efficiency Hack #4: Make Tiny Decisions. It may also be worth rading some of the other efficiency hacks and maybe also our other article on the power of small changes if you really want to go to town on beating procrastination into total submission.

Most choices and most decisions can be broken down. You just have to find a way.

Let’s explore another example I’ve been discussing with a couple of my clients lately. The decision that you are going to change your career.

So you’ve decided to change your job. That’s a pretty big decision. You’re all set, but then, you realize what a big decision it is, you get cold feet and you procrastinate.

You’ve had enough of your current job so you decide to change completely.

Procrastination kicks in, of course.

What if it’s the wrong choice? What if you can’t find another job? What if you’re no good at the next job? What if you hate the other job even more than this one? We could probably come up with about a gazillion of these what-if’s for a decision as big as changing your job.

What would make that decision much easier would be to break this huge decision down into many smaller, easier decisions.

For example, you could decide to update your resume, that’s something you could do very easily and when you’ve done it, it has no negative consequences whatsoever, and when you’ve done it you are DEFINITELY closer to changing your job. It doesn’t commit you to anything but it’s going to make you clearer on your skills etc and feel more prepared.

Another thing you could easily do is to create a shortlist of jobs that you would prefer.

You get the idea, there are in fact many smaller decisions you can make which make the eventual step of changing your job more informed, less risky and therefore much easier.

Again, just an example but you can see that the same principle can be applied to pretty much any scary big decision.

Note: Perhaps in the end you take the opposite action to the original big decision (in this example above you end up deciding not to change your job) – but then if that happens, that’s just your smaller decisions working their magic for you – it probably means that it actually was the wrong big decision in the first place and breaking it down into smaller pieces means you got to make the decisions you really needed to make instead.

What smaller decisions can you make today which will take some of the risk, fear or uncertainty out of the bigger decision? By making the right smaller decisions the big decision has no choice but to start shrinking!

Dangers of Procrastination

When we procrastinate we leave things to the last minute and then guess what happens ….

go on, guess what happens ….

guess ….

what ….

What?

….

still guessing?

that’s right ….

… we run out of time.

Another consequence of this is we often don’t give ourselves time to evaluate how much time we need. We procrastinate on something we’ve been given a week to do , something that on the face of it is a 5 hour task. So without thinking too much about it, without planning, without any thought at all, we leave it to the last day.

One day is enough time for a 5 hour task, right?

The only problem is that even though the task in question does take 5 hours but it only takes 5 hours if we are sufficiently prepared with the right information or the right tools – so we end up being late. Again.

How To Procrastinate About Procrastinating

I thought I’d like to include a brief video in this article too so I had a quick search on you tube for something appropriate.

I found nothing appropriate.

I watched about 3 really rubbish videos then thought that instead of procrastinating any further on choosing a procrastination video or giving up and not adding one at all, I’ll just add this one which doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know but is fairly amusing, and being only 1 minute 21 seconds long won’t waste too much of our time.

The fact that the guys voice is a little annoying probably helps too.

So if you want to procrastinate about procrastinating you’ll have to watch it over and over, or you could always spend lots of time looking for a better clip on YouTube.

Final Thought

Something I’ve avoided writing too much about here is the consideration of the line between actual procrastination (putting things off when we should be taking action) and delaying things for good reason.

There are times when delaying decisions or delaying work is actually the right choice, but the test of these cases is that none of the three reasons above apply.

Briefly, the examples I can give you from the top of my head are: delaying training so that it falls just before it can be used in practice, organizing or delaying work to manage cash-flow in a business sense or delaying reviews on a piece of work to manage re-work. I’ll perhaps write something else to explore this side of things later but please note that in each of these examples, none of the reasons above apply. That’s when we know that we’re being objective.

So If you can relate to any of the reasons above for procrastination, then you now know what you can do about it.

Understanding why we procrastinate (which can be a little deeper rooted than ‘that’s just what I do’) is half the battle.

If this has been helpful, or you can think of other reasons why you procrastinate, then please let me know.