Why You Procrastinate
- Do You Procrastinate?
- Why You Procrastinate
- How to Stop Procrastinating
In order to make time for the things that matter to you most, you need to be able to do the intimidating, boring, and unpleasant tasks on your to do list without wasting hours working up the nerve to do them. You need to be able to get stuff done.
You can think of the process of getting stuff done as a process of driving a car from Ideatown to Accomplishmentville. If you’re procrastinating, you’re not arriving in Accomplishmentville with enough time to park, breathe a contented sigh, and have a night out on the town.
Somewhere along the way, you’re getting stuck or sidetracked.
The usual solution: more motivation and discipline
A lot of people will try to help you get to Accomplishmentville by revving up your engine, motivating you. They’ll hype you up about how awesome Accomplishmentville is, shame you about how terrible it is to be stuck on the Doomscrolling Highway, or scare you about what will happen if you don’t arrive in Accomplishmentville by the time rent is due.
The belief here is that if you aren’t making progress on your drive, it’s because you don’t want to go to Accomplishmentville badly enough.
But that’s not true. How do I know? Because people who don’t care about getting to Accomplishmentville don’t spend their time reading my website.
You’re not weak or lazy; you’re conflicted
The fundamental misunderstanding is that people think motivation is all on one scale, from “I don’t care” to “I want it so bad I can taste it.” So they think your car’s speedometer reflects how motivated you are.
But in reality, part of you wants to go to Accomplishmentville, and another part of you is resisting. Maybe it thinks Accomplishmentville will be scary, or that the drive will be too hard; there can be all kinds of reasons.
You can think of the part of you that wants to go as your gas pedal, and the part that resists the drive as your brake pedal. When you’re at a standstill, it could be that neither pedal is engaged at all — you truly don’t care.
But it could also be that both pedals are pressed all the way down, and they’re canceling each other out. In that scenario, you care a lot! But you’re conflicted.
This conflict creates a lot of tension! You might feel it as muscle tension, stress, angst, anger, guilt, or overwhelm. You’re not getting anything done, but it’s worse than that — you also feel awful.
Just as running the gas and brakes in a car simultaneously would eventually burn out your transmission, so holding down both pedals in your life will burn you out. Hyping or shaming or scaring you into pushing through your resistance will bring spurts of productivity here and there, but it will hurt you and slow you down in the long run if you don’t address this conflict.
You don’t need more gas, you need less brake
So the real solution is, not to keep overcompensating for the brakes with more and more gas, but to release the brakes.
Procrastination is not caused by too little motivation, but by too much fear.
Note that you won’t always feel scared, because the mind goes so quickly from the fear to the solution to the fear. So you might just feel like you’re too hungry, or tired, or distracted, or excited about cleaning your house to do your work.
Want to find out what fear is driving your procrastination? Take the What’s Your Procrastination Type? quiz and enter your email to get your full procrastination type profile, complete with the most common fear for that type.
Now what?
But if the issue is fear, how can we get rid of that fear? Find out in the next post in the series, How to Stop Procrastinating.