The Science of Procrastination—and How to Really Get Stuff Done
In the first episode in a new miniseries about getting stuff done, retired psychology professor Tim Pychyl joins to talk procrastination and what to do about it
Today’s episode is the first in a new miniseries about getting stuff done. This episode in particular is about NOT getting stuff done.
I consider myself an exceptional procrastinator. There are many times when I sit down at my computer to accomplish one task—say, answer my email; write five paragraphs—where I’ll immediately get swept into a text conversation, which will lead to some snooping around ESPN, which will remind me I should check The Atlantic homepage, where I’ll open three articles in separate tabs, and those articles will birth even more tabs, but they’re long articles and I want some coffee as a companion so maybe I should make some coffee, so I listen to a podcast while I do that, and I might as well check Twitter while I’m listening to the show, and three hours later, I’ve written absolutely nothing.
I’ve spent way too much time thinking about procrastination, which is why it was such a pleasure to think about it out loud with an actual scientist: Tim Pychyl, a retired professor of psychology at Carleton University and a longtime productivity researcher.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Tim Pychyl talk about why we procrastinate and one of the most useful tools to tackle procrastination.
Derek Thompson: Certainly I am a procrastination expert by virtue of the fact that I’m an expert in doing the thing of procrastinating. You are an expert in procrastination by virtue of the fact that you study procrastination. And I’d first like to ask, How did you arrive at that research focus?
Tim Pychyl: Well, I didn’t do that as my graduate work. Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was doing graduate work on goal pursuit. So I was very much interested in what we call personal projects or personal strivings, the goals we have in our lives and how they were unfolding. And so I was looking, particularly with my own doctoral work, to see if we could predict someone’s well-being based on personality, which of course we know we can, but on top of that, the doings in our lives. If we think about personality as the havings in our lives, the doings, our projects, would they account for some of the variants in our well-being? And lo and behold, what emerged, both in the qualitative data and the quantitative data, was that if your goals weren’t going well, you weren’t making progress. Particularly if you were procrastinating, I could predict your well-being, and it was awful.
And then I turned a corner. I remember my external examiner saying to me, at the end of my defense, he says, “So what’s next, Tim?” And I said, “I’m going to stop studying what people are doing and start studying what people say they’re going to do and never do because there’s a huge story there.” So that’s where I got started. It was serendipity in that regard.
Thompson: There’s a saying that wisdom is the ability to follow through on our own advice, and I wonder whether you consider all failures to follow through on our advice procrastination. So, for example, take the issue of diet. If somebody says, “I don’t want to eat dessert during the week in the year of 2023. I never want to have dessert during the week,” but then the next Tuesday, they find themselves reaching into the freezer for Ben and Jerry’s again. Now, that’s a failure to adhere to one’s goals. And I suppose it’s possible that the self-talk in that person’s head is “Well, next week I’ll start this goal.” Is all failure to adhere to one’s goals best thought of as akin to or a kind of procrastination?
Pychyl: Well, you’re such a philosopher. One of my favorite philosophers, Sam Harris, he’s the most recent person to have said what you just said. Wisdom is the ability to follow one’s own goals. That’s a tough question. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. Would I consider all of those instances procrastination? No, but I would consider all instances of procrastination an example of that. I think there’s other ways that we can work against our own best interests. The Greeks called it akrasia, doing something that’s actually not in our best interest. But I think procrastination, you have to have an intention, first of all. And just having an idea that I shouldn’t eat such and such anymore, that doesn’t mean you actually made an intention. And so I want to keep procrastination quite deliberately defined or narrowly defined, as we did in research, to say it’s the voluntary delay of an intended action, despite expecting to be worse off with the delay.
So I think it’s really important to do that because otherwise everything gets included. Every form of delay gets included under procrastination, and then it collapses under its own definitional weight.
Thompson: I want to start with a research project that you did three decades ago, in the 1990s, which in other interviews you’ve described as an inflection point in your career. You gave students pagers and journals, and you pinged them to ask them about their emotional state. Tell me about this study.
Pychyl: Yeah. Well, Derek, I’m so pleased you’re going back to that because you’re a young guy, and I don’t know how old you were when I was doing this study, but—
Thompson: I was very much around in the 1990s. I’ll say that.
Pychyl: Yes. OK. Well, it was really unique on our campus at that time. Nowadays, of course, these experience-sampling studies are very easy to do because everyone’s running around with phones and the software has become quite sophisticated. But I actually had to buy these little pagers, and for listeners that don’t even know what I’m talking about, you’ll see them in older doctor shows. They’re just a little clip-on device that actually vibrated. It would tell you to call a number. In our case, it just vibrated. And at that point, as you said, the participants each had a small binder, and they’d open that binder and they were asked a bunch of questions. “What are you doing?” “Hanging out in the coffee shop with my friends”. So let’s appraise that now. They didn’t say it exactly like that. “How much fun is that? How difficult? How stressful? How are you feeling? Is there something else you should be doing?” “Oh, yeah.” “What’s that?” “Oh, I’m supposed to be doing my stats assignment.”
So then the same ratings. “How difficult? How stressful? How enjoyable?” And we also did a series of studies like this. And in a different study than that one, we actually asked people, “What are you thinking about?” And I’ll come back to that too, because you started with feelings. Now, the interesting thing is we did this experience sampling about four times a day over a period of a week. And if I just summarize it, I’ll say on Monday we got that typical “Yes, I should be doing my stats assignment.” But let’s move to Thursday night. “What are you doing?” “I’m doing my stats assignment.” Oh, this is a moment of truth. “How difficult is it? How stressful? How enjoyable?” Now, this didn’t turn out to be the most fun thing that everyone was doing that week, but it wasn’t as difficult, it wasn’t as stressful, and it was more enjoyable than they anticipated, statistically significantly different.
Again, acknowledging that it was in no way fun and that people didn’t go, “I’m so glad I’m doing this right now.” But to go back to that student who did a study where she asked, “What are you thinking?” Early in the week on Monday, students were saying things like, “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow. Oh, there’s lots of time left. I work better under pressure.” Now, on Thursday night, no one spontaneously said, “Oh, I’m so glad I waited till now because I work so much better under pressure.” Instead, we got people saying things like, “Why didn’t I get started earlier? I could do such a better job if I had, and this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” So yeah, you’re right. It was a watershed moment, because from that came one of my first personal mantras, which is just get started. And we can come back to that if you want, because it’s problematic in its own way. But it is key to defeating procrastination, recognizing that getting started is everything.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Tim Pychyl
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
