There is a particular kind of person who can spend 30 minutes preparing to do something that would take 15 minutes to complete. You open your laptop, check your email, respond to one message, remember that you have not checked WhatsApp, check it, see something interesting on Instagram and tell yourself you will only spend five minutes there. Thirty minutes later, you suddenly remember the task you were supposed to do. At that point, you decide that you are no longer in the right frame of mind and promise yourself you will start tomorrow. Tomorrow, of course, becomes another day.
I have always found the conventional conversation about productivity slightly amusing. We are told to wake up at 5am, create a detailed schedule, divide our day into precise blocks, colour-code our calendars, maintain elaborate to-do lists and somehow become a completely different person by Monday morning. But what if you are the sort of person who hates schedules? What if the sight of a timetable with every hour accounted for makes you want to run in the opposite direction?
After reading a few books on habits, productivity and our complicated relationship with time, I have begun to wonder whether chronic procrastinators actually need more discipline. Perhaps many of us simply need to make starting easier.
James Clear, in Atomic Habits, repeatedly returns to the importance of reducing friction. The easier a behaviour is to begin, the more likely we are to do it. This sounds obvious, but it has surprisingly powerful implications for procrastination. Consider writing a report. If starting means finding the document, locating the relevant emails, opening several attachments, deciding where to begin and then staring at a blank page, you have created a small obstacle course before the actual work has even started. Remove the obstacles. Leave the document open, put the relevant files in one folder, write the heading before you stop working and leave yourself a note saying exactly what needs to happen next. The objective is to make tomorrow’s starting point so obvious that there is almost nothing to negotiate.
This brings me to one of the most useful principles for procrastinators: do not make starting a major event. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we need to be completely ready before we begin. We need the right mood, enough time, a quiet room, a cup of coffee and perhaps a little inspiration. Most of the time, we need none of these things. We simply need to begin badly.
The idea of producing an imperfect first attempt is particularly useful for people who disguise perfectionism as procrastination. A blank page can be intimidating because we know what we want the final product to look like. The gap between the perfect version in our heads and the imperfect version we are capable of producing immediately can become paralysing. Write the terrible first paragraph. Create the ugly presentation. Draft the email badly. You can edit something that exists; you cannot edit a blank page.
Another useful idea comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. One of the most important distinctions in his approach is between having a vague task in your head and identifying the next physical action required. ‘Work on proposal’ is not really an action; it is a burden. ‘Open the proposal and write the first three headings’ is an action. This distinction matters because our brains are remarkably good at avoiding things that feel enormous and remarkably willing to tackle things that feel manageable.
Perhaps that is why the advice to ‘just do five minutes’ works. The purpose of five minutes is not necessarily to finish anything; it is to overcome the psychological resistance to beginning. Once you start, you may discover that the task was never as dreadful as your imagination suggested. And if you still hate it after five minutes, at least you have moved from thinking about doing the work to actually doing it.
There is another strategy that I find particularly useful: instead of waking up and asking, ‘How am I going to accomplish everything today?’, ask yourself, ‘What is the one thing that would make today feel worthwhile if I got it done?’ This idea sits comfortably alongside Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, which challenges our tendency to treat everything as equally important. We cannot give our best attention to everything, and some things matter more than others.
This is especially relevant in modern professional life, where being busy can easily be mistaken for being productive. You can answer 30 emails and still avoid the one decision that actually mattered. You can attend five meetings and accomplish nothing important. You can spend an entire day moving between tasks without completing the task that required your deepest attention. Sometimes productivity is not about doing more; it is about identifying what deserves to be done first.
Then there is the slightly more amusing strategy of simply refusing to negotiate with yourself. Mel Robbins popularised the ‘5 Second Rule’, the idea that counting backwards from five can interrupt hesitation and prompt immediate action. The science behind every aspect of the technique is more complicated than the catchy slogan suggests, but the underlying behavioural principle is useful: prolonged internal negotiation often strengthens avoidance.
We all know the conversation. ‘I should probably start.’ ‘Let me just check something first.’ ‘I’ll start after lunch.’ ‘Actually, I am tired.’ ‘Tomorrow I’ll have more time.’ The longer the conversation continues, the more persuasive the excuses become. Sometimes the best response is simply to stop negotiating and take the first small action.
Of course, procrastination is not always about laziness. Sometimes it is about discomfort. We procrastinate because a task is boring, difficult or uncertain, or because we are afraid of doing it badly. Sometimes we postpone difficult conversations because we are afraid of the response. Sometimes we delay applying for opportunities because rejection is easier to tolerate when we have never tried.
And sometimes we procrastinate because our brains prefer immediate rewards. Tim Urban’s famous explanation of procrastination describes the ‘Instant Gratification Monkey’ that suddenly takes control whenever something more interesting appears. It is an amusing metaphor, but anyone who has found themselves watching unrelated videos when an important deadline is approaching will recognise the creature immediately.
The solution is not necessarily to eliminate every distraction from our lives. That would be exhausting in itself. Instead, we can create small pockets of friction around distractions and small pockets of ease around the work we need to do. Put the phone away for 20 minutes, close unnecessary tabs, keep the document open, start with the easiest part, work beside someone who is also working, or use the waiting time before a meeting to make that phone call you have been postponing. These are not dramatic productivity systems, and that is precisely why they may work.
Perhaps the most liberating idea comes from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. His central argument is that our time is finite and that we will never manage to do everything we want to do. This is uncomfortable because much of modern productivity culture suggests the opposite. It promises that if we find the right system, we can somehow fit everything into our lives. We cannot. There will always be unanswered emails, unread books, unfinished projects, missed opportunities and things we intended to do but never got around to doing.
The goal, therefore, cannot be to become perfectly productive. Perhaps the goal is simply to become better at choosing what deserves our limited time. For chronic procrastinators, that may mean abandoning the fantasy of becoming a perfectly organised person overnight. You do not need a new personality. You may only need a smaller first step.
Open the document, write the first sentence, make the call, send the email, read the first page or give yourself five minutes and see what happens. The point is not to conquer your entire life in one afternoon. It is simply to stop allowing the size of the whole task to prevent you from taking the next step.
Productivity was never supposed to be about making our lives look perfectly organised. It was supposed to help us spend our limited time on the things that matter. And perhaps, for those of us who have perfected the art of saying ‘I will do it tomorrow’, the most productive thing we can do today is to stop waiting for tomorrow to become the person we could be today.