How to stop procrastinating: why you delay and what works

To stop procrastinating, make starting easier than avoiding: shrink the task to a first step you could do in two minutes, start a timer, take away the one distraction you always run to, and be kind to yourself when you slip. Procrastination is mostly a way of escaping an unpleasant feeling about a task, not laziness, so fixes that make the task feel smaller work better than fixes that pile on pressure.

That is good news, because feelings about a task are easier to change than your character. The fixes below are in the order you would reach for them on a hard morning.

Why do we procrastinate?

Think of the last task you put off. It was probably unclear, boring, hard, high stakes, or some mix of those. Opening it brings a small wave of something unpleasant: dread, confusion, self-doubt, plain tedium. Switching to something else makes the feeling go away at once. That relief is the reward, and the brain learns from it. Next time, avoiding comes a little faster.

Psychologists who study procrastination, such as Tim Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois, describe it as a problem of managing moods rather than managing time. You aren't choosing the inbox over the report because you think the inbox matters more. You are choosing how you feel in the next five minutes over how you will feel next week.

A few things follow from that:

• Procrastinators are often busy. Tidying, answering easy email, reorganizing the folder: avoidance often looks like productivity.
• Pressure tends to make it worse. Telling yourself the task is important makes it feel bigger, which makes the bad feeling bigger, which makes avoiding it more tempting.
• Unclear tasks get put off most. If you don't know what the first move is, starting means facing that confusion. Often that is the whole problem.

Shrink the first step until it is easy

The single most useful change is to stop thinking about the task and think only about the first physical action. David Allen, who wrote Getting Things Done, calls this the next action: something concrete enough that you could do it now, without deciding anything first.

If the first step still feels heavy, it is too big. Keep cutting until it feels slightly silly. Silly is fine. Silly gets done.

The two-minute start

Promise yourself just two minutes on the task, with full permission to stop when they are up. Two minutes is too short to dread. Most of the time you keep going, because the hardest part of a task is usually the minute before you begin. When you don't keep going, you still did two minutes, and the task is no longer untouched.

This is the habit version of the two-minute rule, which James Clear made popular in Atomic Habits: start anything new with a version that takes two minutes. Allen has an older rule with the same name (if it takes under two minutes, do it now). That one helps with small jobs, but watch that the small jobs don't swallow the morning while the big one waits.

Use a timer, and remove one distraction

A timer gives the session an end, and an end makes the start easier. Twenty-five minutes is a common choice. In recent versions of macOS, open the Clock app, click Timers and set one. When it goes off, stop, stand up, and decide whether to do another. Strung together with short breaks, that is the Pomodoro technique.

Then deal with the one distraction you always reach for. Not every distraction, just the one that wins most often.

• If it is your phone, put it in another room or a bag across the room. Out of reach works better than face down.
• If it is an app, quit it with Command and Q rather than hiding it. Reopening an app is a small step, but it is a step.
• If it is the rest of your screen, press Command, Option and H to hide every app except the one in front.
• If it is one website, Screen Time can put a daily limit on it. With Screen Time turned on, look in System Settings > Screen Time > App Limits, where recent versions of macOS let you add websites as well as apps.

You will notice the urge to switch. That is normal. Let it pass, and look back at the first step.

How do you stop procrastinating when you feel overwhelmed?

Overwhelm is procrastination's favorite fuel: too many things, all unclear, all urgent. Trying to start any of them feels like starting all of them.

1. Get everything out of your head. Write every task down, on paper or in the Reminders app, without sorting. A list on the desk is less frightening than a list in your head.
2. Pick one. Not the most important, necessarily. The one with the clearest first step will do.
3. Ask a question if you are stuck. A lot of procrastination is really missing information. One email asking "what format do you want this in" can unblock a task you have avoided for a week.
4. Lower the bar for the first pass. Write a bad first draft. Make an ugly version. You can't fix a page that doesn't exist.

Be kind to yourself after a slip

You will lose an afternoon sometimes. What you do next matters more than the afternoon.

Being hard on yourself feels responsible, but it adds to the bad feeling around the task, which is exactly what drove the avoidance in the first place. In a 2010 study at Carleton University in Canada, Michael Wohl, Tim Pychyl and Shannon Bennett found that first-year students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before one exam procrastinated less before the next. Self-forgiveness isn't letting yourself off. It takes away some of the weight that makes the task hard to face.

So after a slip, skip the speech. Notice it, shrink the next step, start the timer. If putting things off is constant and spills into every part of life, or comes with low mood, anxiety or a long history of struggling to focus, talk to a doctor or a therapist. Focusing at work with ADHD has more on the attention side.

A start button at the top of the screen

Notchpals won't do the task for you, but it can make the start harder to put off. Its Focus characters can run your timer. Put Bolt, the robot with zero patience for nonsense, in your crew, then find "Start a focus session" in the menu bar: it offers 25 or 50 minutes. Pick one and Bolt comes down to open it. Until the session ends, the water and posture reminders in your crew hold off, so the only thing left on the table is the first step you wrote down.

BoltSession started. Entering silent mode. This is my silent face. Go.

On weekday mornings Bolt also asks you to pick the one task for the day, which is a good moment to cut it down to its first step. If your escape route is a chat app or a game store, Bolt notices after 20 minutes in a row and asks you back. It watches only a fixed list (Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple News, Apple TV and Steam), so a news site in a browser tab won't set it off.

BoltScroll loop detected. Exit condition: you. Please run it.

Notchpals keeps no score: no streaks, and no record of the afternoons you pressed Later. After a slip, that is roughly the attitude to take with yourself.