The Science of Getting Started: How to Beat Procrastination, Summon Productivity, and Stop Self-Sabotage

by Patrick King

One of the biggest weapons you have against procrastination is its natural enemy: making tasks almost impossible to skip over in the present moment.

“Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin.” - Victor Kiam

term “procrastination” was derived from the Latin pro, meaning “forward, forth, or in favor of,” and crastinus, meaning “of tomorrow.” Its literal translation can thus be taken to be the moving forward of something to tomorrow or favoring tomorrow as the ideal time. Action is never for today; it’s always another moment to be dealt with later.

For our purposes, procrastination is the act or habit of putting off something to a future time.

The Procrastination Cycle

It’s actually about understanding the cycle of laziness and disrupting it before you get sucked into it.

There are five main phases of the cycle that explain why you tend to keep sitting on your butt even though you know you shouldn’t

Unhelpful assumptions or made-up rules:

Increasing discomfort:

Excuses for procrastination to decrease psychological discomfort:

Avoidance activities to decrease psychological discomfort:

Negative and positive consequences:

Once you’re in the cycle, it’s hard to get over the increasing inertia keeping you from getting the task done.

Unhelpful Assumptions or Made-Up Rules

My life should be about seeking pleasure, having fun, and enjoying myself. Anything that conflicts with that shouldn’t be allowed.

I probably won’t do it right, so I just won’t do it at all. You may fall into the assumption that you must do things perfectly every time or else it will be labeled a failure. This is a fear of failure and rejection, and it also involves a lack of self-confidence. You also don’t want others to think less of you. And how do you ensure that neither of these things happen? You don’t do it. You don’t start it, and you don’t finish it. There won’t be failure or disappointment because you don’t allow the opportunity for judgment.

So what happens if you are told to do household chores but you possess the first two beliefs of “fun comes first” and “I need perfect conditions”? You’ll have fun first and then wait for a large set of preconditions, and the chores will go undone. The rest of the cycle is what keeps them undone.

Increasing Discomfort

When you are procrastinating, you’re not totally unaware of what you need to do, and thus tension and discomfort will be created.

The end result is that we are in an agitated state, and we don’t like feeling that way. Something will need to change.

Making Excuses

Excuses are the first way to make yourself feel better when you are ducking responsibility. You know you should do something, but you don’t want to.

And while you’re busy convincing yourself that these excuses are real and legitimate, you are smoothly transitioning into the next phase in the cycle: avoidance activities.

Avoidance Activities

Avoidance activities are the culmination of alleviating your discomfort and wanting to feel like you aren’t simply being lazy.

Typically, there are two types of avoidance activities. First, there are activities that simply distract you from the discomfort of choosing not to exercise your self-discipline or violate a belief or assumption. Out of sight, out of mind, and the discomfort is destroyed by going for ice cream or to a new superhero movie. This is distraction to the point of denial.

Second, there are activities that make you feel productive in some other way than the task at hand. For instance, if you work from home and are putting off a project, you will never have a cleaner bathroom than when real tasks are to be avoided. You might do an “easier” or lower-priority task.

These avoidance activities allow you to say, “Well, at least I did something and wasn’t totally unproductive with my time!” A fitting term for these activities is productive procrastination.

Negative and Positive Consequences

Avoiding is an art. But when you avoid responsibilities, there are always consequences. Somewhere, something is slipping through the cracks. The negative consequences are more obvious. They can include increased discomfort, guilt, anxiety, and shame. You know you’re not achieving (or taking steps to achieve) your goal, and this just makes you feel worse.

Other negative consequences are related to this very cycle, where your unhelpful or incorrect assumptions or beliefs remain unchallenged, you become overly effective at making excuses for yourself, and your tolerance for psychological discomfort shrinks even more.

Both sets of consequences contribute to furthering the cycle. Negative consequences make you want to continue avoiding certain tasks, while positive consequences inject just enough short-term pleasure to disguise what’s really happening. And they both lead you right back to the initial problem of sitting on your butt.

What are your assumptions based on? Are they legitimate? Are they realistic or far-fetched? Are they simply your anxieties and fears taking hold? Are you marginalizing the positives and amplifying the downsides? What excuses do you tend to make? Are they based in reality? Are they honest and true? Is their sole purpose to keep you from action? If your excuse was true, would it excuse you from action anyway? What actions do you tend to engage in? Do you really want to engage in them, or are they aimed at making you feel better about yourself? Is there something harder you should be doing instead? In an ideal world, what would you be doing right now?

Unfortunately, self-awareness is not a strong point for humans. But trying to acknowledge and buttress these entry points into the cycle of procrastination can help you succeed.

The Lizard Brain

Driven by Impulse Impulsivity means acting immediately on an impulse, whether it be a passing thought, a sudden emotion, or an instantaneous desire.

One strategy is to use the HALT method, a popular strategy originally taught in addiction recovery programs. Before acting or making a decision, first be conscious of any feeling of hunger, anger, loneliness, or tiredness you may have. If you’re feeling any of these, you’re more likely to make rash, misguided decisions and act on your impulses that may lead you right into trouble.

nine clinical subscales of prefrontal cortex executive functioning: (1) inhibition, (2) self-monitoring, (3) planning and organization, (4) activity shifting, (5) task initiation, (6) task monitoring, (7) emotional control, (8) working memory, and (9) general orderliness.

Let’s consider how each of these nine executive functions relates to procrastination.

Inhibition. This pertains to your ability to be “in control” of yourself, to resist impulses, and to stop your own behavior when it’s appropriate to do so.

Lack of inhibition is a key factor in procrastination. If you can’t control yourself enough to resist the impulse of going for an easier, more pleasurable activity, then you’ll always just be choosing to do virtually anything else other than what you’re supposed to be doing.

Self-monitoring. This refers to your ability to monitor your own behavior and its effect on you.

Impaired self-monitoring thus inevitably results in a severe lack of self-awareness.

When lacking such self-awareness and the ability to think about your thinking, you’ll be more likely to fall prey to destructive patterns of thought and bad habits, including procrastination.

Planning and organization. This comprises your ability to manage present and future task demands.

Together, planning and organization involve your ability to anticipate future situations and demands accurately and to take those into account as you lay out the steps necessary to achieve your goals.

If you lack the ability to set realistic goals and establish plans to meet those goals, you’ll fail to understand the work and time needed.

Lacking effective planning skills, you don’t break down the task into smaller portions and don’t set specific hours you’re going to work on it.

Activity shifting. This reflects your ability to easily move from one activity to another.

A deficit in activity-shifting ability is linked with procrastination. After all, getting down to work basically constitutes a shift from non-working to working mode.