Don't Wait Till You're Dead! The Psychology of Procrastination

How Your Unconscious Causes You to Irrationally Delay Key Tasks, Plus a Scientific Program to Stop Procrastinating & Get Your Life Back

Procrastination can be debilitating—interfering with many of the key tasks of modern life. Chronic procrastination afflicts about 20% of us. Run-of-the-mill procrastination is a problem for about 85% of college students, according to research done at Toronto University.

You don’t have to have a chronic case to suffer from procrastination at least to a small degree and to want to put a stop to it. There are many good reasons to try to overcome your procrastination. Procrastination causes damage to your mental and physical health, leading to depression, stress, and decreased well-being generally. It can cost you money and hurt your reputation at work. Finally, it can lead to a downward spiral of self-perpetuating self-regulation failure that can condition us to learned helplessness.

The causes of procrastination are becoming better and better understood by the psychologists who study it, but what’s been learned may be news to you. According to the latest psychological theory—the “dual-process” theory of human psychology—the self is like an elephant with a monkey on its back. The elephant goes where it wants and the monkey says, “I meant to do that.” Little did you know, your elephant wants to procrastinate.

Like an addict who wants to quit—but can’t—you feel out of control when you procrastinate. You say to yourself that you are going to do X, but then you do the opposite of X. It does not feel good to be so much at odds with oneself. The science reported on in this book strongly suggests that strategies which foster automaticity, via habit and ritual rather than utilizing willpower, will be the most effective at preventing procrastination and increasing productivity. Tricking the elephant to going where we want will work better than the monkey fruitlessly pulling on the reigns.

In order to overcome procrastination, you'll need to realize that conscious will is your weakest faculty. Instead you should foster automaticity by setting up habits that get you started on work with less conscious effort required. In this book, I get straight to the point. I have not fluffed up the page count with made-up anecdotes or personal history. I simply lay out the research on what causes procrastination and what it’s costing us. I spill the beans on science-backed strategies to counteract those causes.