Why we put things off

Putting off a task is usually explained as laziness or poor time management, and both explanations are easy to disprove. People who delay a report they dread will often spend the same afternoon doing something demanding that they do not dread, such as cleaning a kitchen thoroughly or answering forty emails. Energy is not the problem, and neither is the clock.

What the research points to instead is mood. A task that makes us feel incompetent, bored or exposed produces an unpleasant feeling the moment we think about it, and turning to something else removes that feeling immediately. The relief is real and it arrives within seconds, while the cost of the delay arrives days later and lands on a version of ourselves that does not feel quite like us yet. Measured that way, putting the task off is not irrational at all. It is an excellent short-term decision.

This explains why advice built on willpower tends to fail. Telling someone to try harder leaves the unpleasant feeling exactly where it was, and adds guilt on top of it. What does work is making the first step small enough that it produces almost no feeling to escape from. Opening the document and writing a title is not frightening. The useful trick is that the feeling usually weakens once work has begun, so the hard part is not the hour of work but the first ninety seconds.

A second approach attacks the timing rather than the feeling. Because the cost of delay is far away, it carries little weight, so bringing it closer restores the balance. A deadline that somebody else will notice does this; so does agreeing to show a colleague a draft on Thursday. Students who break a long assignment into parts with separate dates finish more of it than students given the same total time and a single final date, and the difference is not in how much they work but in when.

There is one form of delay that should not be treated as a problem to fix. Some tasks are put off because they are the wrong tasks: unclear, pointless, or somebody else's. The feeling of resistance is then information rather than weakness, and the right response is to ask what the task is for. It is worth separating this from the ordinary kind before reaching for any technique, since applying a technique to a task that should not exist only means doing the wrong thing on schedule.