Why your brain loves procrastination

But getting a better understanding of why our brains are so prone to procrastination might let us find new strategies to avoid it. For example, psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a paper showing that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to procrastination are, overall, less compassionate toward themselves - an insight that points to ways to help.

Pychyl , a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has been studying procrastinators for some 19 years. I talked to him about why people procrastinate and how they can learn to stop.

Tim Pychyl: When a procrastinator thinks about themselves, they'll think, "Oh, I have a time management problem," or, "I just can't make myself do it. There's a problem with my willpower." And when other people think about procrastinators, they use that pejorative term: "They're lazy."

Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don't feel like it, but I'm just gonna get started."

TP: We know from psychological research by [Andrew] Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being. So the most important thing you can do is bootstrap a little progress. Get a little progress, and that's going to fuel your well-being and your motivation.