Why We Procrastinate & its Strategies

We all have been here. Procrastination before an assignment or a task we know we ought to do yet we drag it till the evening of the deadline and finally end up submitting it.

Of course, this is considered ironically ideal for us and there are many days where we don’t even submit and miss the deadline completely.

It’s even worse when you think about the fact that we do this knowingly sometimes as well. We know there’s a deadline yet we simply don’t do it despite it having negative consequences for us.

In the end, we find ourselves with a pang of guilt brought by ourselves, no one else.

But you are not alone, 20-25% of adults are chronic procrastinators and this isn’t even considering the share of adults who procrastinate occasionally as well.

Procrastination is a very human-condition, unlike any other creature, so why do we have this problem?

Procrastination is a feature, not a bug. Things aren’t this way because you’re bad but things are rather, meant to be this way.

We procrastinate because of the contradiction between short-term pleasures in our daily lives such as watching TV or playing video games over our long-term goals we assigned to ourselves such as our career.

This fundamental mismatch though, occurs because we can’t really cover the distance between short-term self and long-term self. The clear answer is to make a fair compromise.

You can’t expect the human mind to be fine with a blurry future over the present-day benefits. We were meant to be this way. From a perspective of evolutionary psychology, it makes perfect sense.

If our cave ancestors focused on the long-term solution of being as minimalistic and efficient as possible about his food resources, chances are, he wouldn’t be alive today and neither would you ultimately.

It’s also important to withdraw from the mindset that procrastination is an evil and something to fight with but rather a feature we accidentally turned on since we don’t have the user manual of ourselves.

All or Nothing Mindset

It is not unsurprising though, the more fear and anxiety we have about the task at hand, the more we end up delaying it.

The clear solution, however, isn’t to have an all or nothing mindset on this. The moment we see things as such, we quickly realize life doesn’t work this way.

For example, you might set a reasonable goal for yourself to wake up at 5:30 a.m every single day. This is perfectly reasonable as long as you have a good reason to do it such as uninterrupted time for your cardio or studies.

But the problem occurs when you expect life as black and white as though everyday is a perfect carbon copy of each other.

When you think as such, you are successfully hating yourself when things go wrong if that’s the primary goal.

Let me explain. On the previous night, you had an assignment to finish and the deadline was yesterday so you sat the entire night finishing it.

You might argue and say this occurred due to lack of planning and if it was you, you would have planned it so well that you would never delay till the last day.

That’s a perfectly valid argument but there will definitely be times when it doesn’t work as such regardless of your planning.

It’s not only better for your mental health but also for your productivity if you drop the ‘All or Nothing’ mindset and instead believe that ‘Perfection is the enemy of good’.

It’s better to be somewhere rather than nowhere although it’s unpopular to do so.

The all or nothing mindset sounds flavorful but in reality, it’s probably one of the worst pieces of advice you can realistically get in your journey of self-improvement.

2 Minute Rule

Considering the human and financial interests to make content on procrastination, there has been, of course, a variety of strategies and methods to deal with it.

Some are good. Some are bad while some aren’t even related. The one I found most applicable and useful was the ‘2 Minute Rule’.

The main or the most common problem in procrastination as far as I have seen was getting anxious and as a result, falling into a vicious cycle of delaying it and numbing ourselves through pleasures such as stress eating.

A good rule of thumb against this: The measurement of your goal is your worst day, not your best day.

Performing easily on your worst day means that the majority of the days will likely be successful, unlike the opposite we usually use as a benchmark.

Being consistent with lower output always beats being inconsistent with relatively higher outputs. That’s because any habit or task is a long-term game.

You are likely to continue your habits for years so you will eventually beat out by being consistent over a long shot.

But regardless, planning paralysis is real. While this essay makes sense so far in theory, in order to overcome your paralysis, the best way is to set yourself a milestone goal.

Don’t go ahead and aim for studying an hour just before starting it. That instantly kicks in your procrastination habit.

Instead, tell yourself that you will only study for two minutes and if it exceeds the timer and you’re comfortable to study more, study more. If you aren’t however, stop yourself.

Usually, you will end up studying rather than not and if you procrastinate five days out of ten days and this habit brings down procrastination to three days then it is considered successful.

The goal is to simply convert days you usually procrastinate to days you won’t. Whether that’s one day or five days depends on your personal circumstances.

That being said, however, two minutes is a simple target. For others, even the idea of a minute sounds awful whereas for few, ten minutes isn’t sufficient so pick your timer.

While you might appreciate my essay, it’s important to note that what strategies will be useful completely depends on you.

Some strategies that help only 1% of the population might work for you since you’re among them whereas a strategy that helps a few dozen percent of the population won’t help you.

The 2 Minute Rule was mentioned since it seemed to be a strategy that would work well to most people in varying degrees but as for the result, don’t get discouraged.

You’re not the problem, this is simply trial and error. If this doesn’t work, try another. There’s no loss in knowing a method doesn’t work, it frees up space to try another method.