How to stop procrastinating: the science of why you put things off

To stop procrastinating, it helps to make the first step so small that you'll definitely manage it, to connect the task to something you care about, to clear away distractions and to set yourself a nearer deadline. Those four ideas come from Temporal Motivation Theory, set out by Piers Steel and Cornelius König in 2006. Research also suggests that putting things off is often a way of making ourselves feel better in the short term, which is good news, because it means procrastination is something you can work with.

Why do you keep putting off the thing that matters?

You know it's important. You know it'll probably take less time than you think, and you know you'll feel so much better once it's done.

And still, somehow, you don't do it. The kitchen gets cleaned, the inbox gets tidied and the sock drawer gets sorted, while the one thing that really matters sits there waiting.

So you tell yourself you're lazy, which feels like the obvious explanation. But calling yourself lazy has never helped anyone get anything done, and the research suggests something quite different is usually going on.

What does the science say about procrastination?

Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary, published a major review of the research on procrastination in 2007, bringing together a large body of studies. The strongest predictors were how unpleasant the task feels, how far away the deadline is, how confident you are that you can do it, and how easily distracted you tend to be.

A year earlier, Steel and Cornelius König had brought these ideas together in what they called Temporal Motivation Theory. Put simply, your motivation for a task goes up when you expect to succeed and when you value the result, and it goes down when you're easily distracted and when the reward feels a long way off.

Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl added an important piece of the puzzle in 2013. They described procrastination as a kind of short-term mood repair. When a task makes us feel anxious, bored or uncertain, avoiding it makes us feel better for a little while, even though our future self ends up paying the price.

So procrastination is usually about the feelings a task stirs up, or about a first step that feels too big, and very rarely about laziness at all.

How does the Procrastination Killer work in PiViva?

The Procrastination Killer takes one thing you've been avoiding and helps you work on it directly. You name the task and say why it matters. You take an honest look at what it's costing you to keep avoiding it, and you picture how it'll feel when it's done. Then you break it down into next actions, each rated for impact, effort, importance and urgency.

Each of those steps connects to Steel's model. Making the first step small raises your confidence that you'll succeed. Linking the task to a goal you care about raises its value. Clearing away whatever's distracting you reduces the pull of everything else. And setting a nearer deadline than the real one brings the reward closer.

The most helpful thing of all is often to make the first action almost ridiculously small, and then to do it today, while the decision is still fresh.

What if you still can't start?

Then the first action is probably still a little too big, and it's perfectly fine to shrink it again. "Write the report" can become "open the document and type the title", which is something you can do in under a minute.

Once you've got that tiny step, a Pomodoro Timer can help you stay with it, and five minutes is plenty for a first go.

If the avoidance is really about fear, perhaps of doing it badly or of what might happen next, a Fear Audit can help you look at that fear more calmly. And if it keeps happening with the same kind of task, that pattern is worth exploring in Limiting Beliefs.

There's also a short audio track made for the moment itself. "Procrastination, broken now" sits on the Espresso shelf in Listen, and it's a gentle nudge to get you moving. The thing you've been putting off may turn out to be far smaller than it looked, once you finally take that first step.