Playing online games. Sorting my considerable collection of knitting yarn. Reading reviews of gadgets even after I’ve made a purchase. What do these activities have in common? They’re all things I’ve done recently to avoid whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing. When I’ve been procrastinating, in other words. Given that you’ve chosen to read this article – perhaps as a way to postpone having to get on with something useful – I’m assuming that you, too, struggle with procrastination.
It plagues most of us, to some extent. In fact, in my coaching work using philosophy to help people fight back against the debilitating effects of perfectionism, I’ve found there’s one problem that smart people of all stripes ask me for help with again and again, and that’s procrastination. Many of them are secretly convinced that nobody else procrastinates as much as they do. I feel their pain, because I’ve felt this way too. And, while I don’t think I’ll ever overcome procrastination, I think I understand it a lot better now, compared with before I started coaching. In this Guide, I’m going to share what I’ve learned.
Coaching hundreds of people has convinced me that most of us think about procrastination in a binary way that is unhelpful and misleading. Whenever we’re trying to make progress, we think we’re either working or procrastinating. It’s one or the other; never both. What’s more, when we judge that we’re working or that we’re procrastinating, this typically invites its own set of moral evaluations. If we’re working, then we’re acceptable, and we’re doing well. But if we’re procrastinating, then we’re rubbish, lazy, undeserving, weak-willed, a waste of space.
This mindset makes life much harder than it needs to be. Decisions about how to spend our time become unnecessarily fraught when it’s not just our productivity that’s at stake, but our moral worth. Besides, the idea that all work is good and all procrastination bad is simply incorrect.
I’m going to show you a different way to think about procrastination, one that will help you to understand your own behaviour better, which in turn will help you be kinder to yourself. The end result will be less self-judgment and greater progress toward what you actually want to achieve.
Key points
Most of us think about procrastination in an unhelpful way. We tend to think we’re either procrastinating or working, and if we judge that we’re procrastinating then a wave of unhelpful self-criticism often ensues.
Start thinking in terms of relevance and comfort instead. An activity is relevant if it helps you make progress towards your goal, and it’s comfortable if it makes you feel good while you’re doing it.
Tune in to your needs. Thinking in terms of relevance and comfort can help you make sense of some of the behaviours you might previously have dismissed as procrastination – for instance, scrolling on social media could be a sign that you’re trying to make yourself feel better.
Don’t think in either/or terms about relevance and comfort. It’s not the case that an activity is either relevant or comfortable. In fact, relevance and comfort come in degrees, and your behaviour as you work towards your goals can realise both, to varying extents.
Find your sweet spot between relevance and comfort. Think carefully about what you’re trying to achieve – be explicit and specific, then you’ll find it easier to judge the relevance of an activity.Now, you can tune in to your needs and find activities that have the right level of comfort and help you make progress too.
To plan your workday, visualise your options. To continue fostering a more satisfying relationship with your work, visualise your activity choices on a graph with relevance and comfort as the X and Y axes. Instead of following the unhelpful maxim ‘Must not procrastinate!’, consider how you can alternate between different activities to balance relevance and comfort through the day or even across the week.
Stop thinking about work vs procrastination, start thinking about relevance and comfort
I mentioned earlier that some procrastination can actually be good, and what seems like work can sometimes be bad. How can this be? The answer lies in two important values that motivate us whenever we’re trying to achieve a goal. The first is relevance: we want to do things that move us closer to our goal. The second is comfort: we want to feel good, or at least we don’t want to feel bad. Making progress requires doing what’s relevant, but we struggle to do that unless we’re comfortable too. Now, you might assume that procrastination is about comfort while work is about relevance, but that’s not always true.
Empirical work by the management scholar Jihae Shin and the psychologist Adam Grant has shown that, by allowing time for reflection and through encouraging a less focused mindset, moderate procrastination can foster creativity and help us produce better work when we do eventually get on with it. In other words, supposed procrastination activities are sometimes more relevant than they appear.
Conversely, many seemingly work-related activities don’t help us make progress: Joli Jensen, a media studies professor and author of the bookWrite No Matter What (2017), has argued that reading – even on the topic we’re working on – can sometimes be a way of unhelpfully delaying writing, for instance when it’s not strictly necessary and the time is overdue for you to begin writing. In these cases, the reading is comfortable, but not as relevant as it first seems.
I encourage you to ditch the usual ‘work vs procrastination’ binary, which can lead you to form mistaken and unhelpful assumptions about what you’re doing. Aim to think instead in terms of relevance and comfort. If you can make this shift, you’ll be less tempted to make negative judgments about yourself (‘I’m procrastinating’, therefore ‘I’m lazy’ and ‘I’m a bad person’). Avoiding negative judgments about yourself is a good thing: while lots of people believe that they need to judge themselves negatively in order to motivate themselves to improve, the psychologist Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion shows that the opposite is true. So, as you go about your working day, replace the question ‘Am I working or procrastinating?’ with the questions ‘How relevant is what I’m doing?’ and ‘How comfortable is what I’m doing?’
Tune in to your needs
Another reason to dump the ‘work vs procrastination’ binary in favour of relevance and comfort is that doing so will help you understand your behaviour better. Let’s say you catch yourself scrolling through social media – rather than castigating yourself, if you say to yourself ‘I’m trying to feel more comfortable’, you’ll be acknowledging the feelings and needs that are driving your behaviour. Comfort is, after all, a real and understandable need. By contrast, saying ‘I’m procrastinating’ doesn’t come with any insight about your needs. Nobody needs to procrastinate.
Tuning in to your feelings and needs is a necessary first step towards thinking about how you can accommodate them in a way that doesn’t sabotage your progress. In practice, this involves replacing the question ‘How can I work more and procrastinate less?’ with ‘How can I accomplish my goals without experiencing too much discomfort?’ We ask the first question when we’re preparing to do battle with ourselves: to bribe, force or trick ourselves to do whatever it takes to make progress, and to override our tendency to procrastinate without actually understanding or engaging with whatever is driving us to do so in the first place. By contrast, the discomfort question non-judgmentally recognises that we want to reach our goals and feel comfortable, and it prompts us to look for ways to do both – to find a sweet spot between the two.
Don’t think in either/or terms about relevance and comfort
If you’re used to the ‘work vs procrastination’ binary, then the idea of finding a sweet spot between relevance and comfort might strike you as contradictory: you might assume you’re either working (relevant, but zero comfort) or procrastinating (comfortable, but zero relevance). You might think this means you can’t have comfort and relevance. Happily, though, relevance and comfort are not like this. They come in degrees, and your behaviour as you work towards your goals can realise both, to varying extents.
It’s true that if your goal is to finish a piece of writing, then sitting down and adding words to the draft is highly relevant, but it might also be highly uncomfortable. On the other hand, unnecessarily looking up one more source for your project is not at all relevant, but it’s more comfortable than writing. However, it’s also possible for some activities to be somewhat relevant and comfortable, such as going for a walk and allowing your mind to wander and get your ideas flowing.
It’s not just intellectual tasks that we can tackle in this way. If your goal is to declutter your kitchen cupboards, then the idea of emptying all the junk out of all the cupboards onto the floor might fill you with dread. Tidying up a cupboard that is already pretty tidy is irrelevant to this goal, but it might make you feel a bit better. Inviting a friend round to sort through just one messy cupboard over coffee and a chat is both relevant and comfortable.
Find your sweet spot between relevance and comfort
So, how to find that sweet spot? Thinking through how well your various choices of activities realise relevance and comfort can help you balance your needs for each of these things. Moreover, since relevance relates to a particular goal, thinking carefully about relevance forces you to get clear about exactly what your goal is, which will also help you find your sweet spot.
Surprisingly, this is something that many of us avoid; instead, we work with vague ideas like ‘I should make progress on this writing project’ and ‘I should make a bit of space in the kitchen.’ Without clear ideas about exactly what we want to get done, we can’t form clear ideas about what we ought to be doing, and that makes it easy to convince ourselves that we’re making progress when we’re really not.
To get past this, ask yourself how you’ll know when you’ve achieved your goal. Is it when you’ve written a certain number of words? When you’ve published the thing you’re trying to write? When you’ve freed up one shelf in the kitchen, or two, or 10? Be explicit and specific, then it’s easier to identify which activities are actually relevant. In turn, this will help you find that sweet spot between relevance and comfort so that you can make meaningful progress.
For example, if you can’t bear to sit down and write, then going for a walk is a pretty good alternative. It’s a way of increasing your comfort without completely sacrificing relevance, because it will allow your mind to wander in a way that might benefit your writing. If you can’t bear to empty all your cupboards at once, tackle a small section with a friend there for support; you’ll enjoy catching up, and at least you’ll have accomplished part of the task.
We miss insights like these when we view things through the ‘work vs procrastination’ lens, and so we end up making unhelpful choices. We tell ourselves that if we can’t bring ourselves to write, then we should pointlessly look up more sources – that activity belongs in the ‘work’ bucket, after all – and we should definitely not go for a walk, because that’s procrastination. Similarly, if we don’t want to open the chaotic kitchen cupboards, then we should make unnecessary tweaks to a tidy cupboard instead – that’s at least similar to the ‘work’ we’re supposed to be doing, we tell ourselves, whereas inviting a friend over for coffee is just procrastination.
Don’t let the ‘work vs procrastination’ binary lead you into mindlessly doing work-like things like this. Instead, guide your decisions by tuning in to the relevance and comfort of your various options – that way, you will finish up closer to your goals.
To plan your workday, visualise your options
You can use the relevance/comfort framework to continue fostering a more satisfying relationship with your work. To do this, try visualising your choices by sketching a graph with relevance and comfort as the X and Y axes, respectively, and mark where your various options fall in that space. You can find an example, along with a blank graph, here. Then, instead of planning your working day according to the unhelpful maxim ‘Must not procrastinate!’, think instead about how you can balance relevance and comfort.
Perhaps you could start out with a highly relevant but somewhat uncomfortable activity for 30 minutes, before switching to something highly comfortable and somewhat relevant later on. Or you might choose to prioritise relevance today and comfort tomorrow. There’s no space, on this view, for concluding that you’re bad, or weak, or a failure. If you end the day dissatisfied with your progress, accept that you prioritised comfort over relevance. Seeking comfort is normal; it doesn’t make you bad.
How do you know where to put things on the relevance/comfort chart? Is it possible to cheat by exaggerating the relevance of the things you prefer doing? If you don’t trust your own judgment about what tasks are most relevant, try asking yourself the following question: if you could wave a magic wand and instantly complete just one task without any effort, which one would you pick? This shifts the focus from ‘What should I do next?’ to ‘What would I most like to have done?’ Your answer probably reveals something highly relevant (but maybe uncomfortable) – and then you can use this to help categorise the different activities you’re choosing between. As a bonus, by getting you to think of one thing you’d most like to have done, this strategy shifts focus away from the ominous prospect of the task as a whole, and towards a bite-sized part of it. Bite-sized tasks that we’ve identified as likely to give us a satisfying sense of progress are eminently doable, even when they’re uncomfortable.
Final notes
I’ve heard so many stories of people viewing productivity in terms of going to battle with themselves. With this approach, success means defeating the part of yourself that wants to hit the snooze button, scroll social media, and coast rather than strive. The problem is, that leaves you so busy thinking about all the ways in which that part of yourself is lazy, undeserving and shameful that you don’t pause and try to understand it. When you do – and I’ve seen this happen in coaching sessions – you’ll likely be surprised to find that this part of yourself is not the demonic self-saboteur that you thought it was. It’s just cautious and fearful, and it doesn’t like feeling bad. Battling yourself has its place – sometimes you really do need to force yourself out of bed – but it’s not the only strategy available. Very often, self-understanding opens up more effective and less exhausting paths to your goals. It’s time to retire your battle cry against procrastination.
