How to stop procrastinating: 7 steps from two researchers

How to stop procrastinating comes down to seven steps in three stages: make the start small and decided in advance, get through the moment you want to escape, and forgive a slip so it doesn't feed the next one. The steps work on how a task makes you feel more than on how you manage your time, because the feeling is what drives the delay.

In the 1990s, before mobile phones, Tim Pychyl gave students pagers and beeped them through the days before an assignment was due. He tells it as a Monday-to-Friday story. On Monday, a student at a coffee shop would rate the statistics assignment they were avoiding as very stressful, very difficult and not at all enjoyable, and say they'd feel more like doing it tomorrow. On Thursday night, with the assignment due on Friday, they were finally working on it, and the ratings had dropped (Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, 15:37). Few, if any, said they were glad they'd waited, and many wished they had started earlier (Pychyl, Just Get Started).

Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, has researched procrastination since 1995 (Penguin Random House), and Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Durham University, has spent more than 20 years on its causes and consequences (APA Books). In 2013 the two argued that procrastination is short-term mood repair: we put a task off to feel better now, and our future self pays for it (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013).

How to stop procrastinating before you sit down

Resisting an urge in the moment is hard work, and changing your situation in advance acts before the urge has had a chance to build (Duckworth et al, 2018). So the first three steps move the decisions earlier, while the task still feels manageable.

1. Shrink the task to its next action

Pychyl's way into a task is a question from the productivity writer David Allen: what's the next action? On days when he doesn't feel like yoga, the next action is to roll out the mat and stand on it (Deep Dive, 10:58). He's wary of what he calls anemic intentions, such as "I'll do it at the weekend": when does the weekend start, and what exactly will you do? (44:16). The Put Off Procrastinating workbook from the Center for Clinical Interventions calls this grading: break the task into all its small steps (CCI).

So "do the job application" becomes "open the form and fill in my contact details". Aim for something you could do in five minutes.

2. Decide when and where, in one sentence

Pychyl is a long-time fan of Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intentions: plans in the form "in situation X, I'll do behaviour Y" (Deep Dive, 46:51). This step has the most research behind it. In a large review, people who added an if-then plan to a goal reached it more often than people who held the goal alone, an effect the authors rated medium to large (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Most participants were university students, and most of the goals weren't about procrastination. Pychyl adds Gollwitzer's own caveat: no plan helps if you don't care about the goal.

For the application, the sentence might be: "When I sit back down after lunch on Tuesday, I'll open the form and fill in my contact details." Our guide to implementation intentions covers how to write them.

3. Put the temptation out of reach first

Pychyl describes himself as naturally disciplined, and still says you can't depend on willpower; he suggests outsourcing it to your calendar and your surroundings (Deep Dive, 25:26 and 31:23). Before you start, put your phone in another room, close every window except the one you need, and turn off alerts. Our guide to the Pomodoro technique and the 2-minute rule covers the evidence for keeping temptations out of sight.

What to do when you feel the urge to escape

Even with a plan, there comes a moment at the desk when you'd rather do anything else. Pychyl says you can sometimes feel your body start to move away from the desk and toward the fridge, with "I'm hungry" as the excuse (Deep Dive, 57:38). Leaving would bring instant relief, which is exactly what the mood-repair account predicts.

4. Name the feeling, then take a few breaths

Pychyl uses an exercise from the meditation teacher Tara Brach called RAIN: recognize that you're resisting, allow the feeling, investigate it, and nurture yourself. Investigating might mean noticing you're anxious, or afraid the work won't be good enough (57:38). He pairs it with a line from the writer Parker Palmer, that you can have an emotion without being that emotion, and with two or three deep breaths first, because breathing goes everywhere with you (1:05:27). In his view, you have to deal with the feeling before any planning tool can help.

There's some trial evidence for training this skill. In a small German trial, mostly with working adults, about ten minutes a day of practice in tolerating and changing unpleasant feelings, for two weeks, reduced self-reported procrastination compared with a waiting list, though the effect was small (Eckert et al, 2016).

5. Work for five minutes

Pychyl's mantra, "just get started", comes from the pager studies. Once students had begun the task they'd avoided all week, they rated it as significantly less stressful, difficult and unpleasant (Just Get Started). He also says motivation follows action: waiting to feel like it is like waiting for a bus that no longer stops where you are (Deep Dive, 31:23).

"Once we start a task, it's rarely as bad as we think." Tim Pychyl, Just Get Started

Five minutes makes the start small enough to say yes to. The NHS Every Mind Matters service suggests the same "just 5 minutes" technique: set a timer, start, and see how you feel when it rings, because you may find you have the energy to keep going (NHS).

How to recover from a slip without feeding the next one

Slips will happen, and what you say to yourself afterwards matters. Criticizing yourself to get going tends to backfire: it makes the task feel worse, and putting it off is the quickest way to feel better again (CCI).

6. Forgive yourself for the slip

In a study Pychyl ran with Carleton colleagues, first-year students who forgave themselves for putting off studying for one midterm procrastinated less before the next, and the link ran through feeling less bad about the task (Wohl et al, 2010). It's one small study, and Pychyl notes the link appeared only among students who had procrastinated a lot the first time (Pychyl, Forgive Yourself). A kind line might be: "I put it off and I'm not happy about it. Lots of people struggle with tasks like this. Tomorrow at nine I'll do five minutes." Our guide to procrastination guilt shows how to forgive a slip without letting yourself off the hook.

7. Book the next start for the person you'll be tomorrow

Sirois points out how we talk about the future: tomorrow I'll be less tired and more organized. "Future me is a superhero," as she puts it (Your Parenting Mojo, 45:36), but tomorrow's you is still you, without any new superpowers. So before you stop, whether you managed five minutes or fifty, write down the next action and book it with the same if-then sentence as step 2. Pychyl puts everything in his calendar and looks back over the week to see what happened (Deep Dive, 54:05), and the CCI workbook says to expect "two steps forward, one step back".

The 1h Protocol to Stop Procrastinating builds a plan like this around the one task you keep putting off. If putting things off is dragging down your work, your studies or how you feel most days, a doctor or counselor can help you look at what's behind it (University of Maryland Counseling Center).

Start before you feel ready

On Thursday night, Pychyl's students found that the assignment they had dreaded all week was manageable once they'd begun, and many wished they had started on Monday. The seven steps make that Monday start easier: decide it in advance, keep it small, and forgive it if it slips. As Sirois writes, "you are not the first person to procrastinate, nor will you be last" (Greater Good).

Your start card is the short version. To build the plan around the one task you keep putting off, try the free first chapter of the 1h Protocol to Stop Procrastinating: a few short questions that find what's stopping you, and one thing to do before your next start. Start free

Frequently asked questions

How do I stop procrastinating right now?

Write down the next physical action on the task, something you could do in five minutes. Put your phone in another room, set a timer for five minutes and start. The NHS suggests the same "just 5 minutes" technique, and says you may find you have the energy to keep going when the timer rings.

Why can't I stop procrastinating?

Because putting a task off works in the short term: it relieves the stress, boredom or worry the task brings, and that relief rewards the delay, so the habit grows (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013). A to-do list alone doesn't touch that feeling. What helps is a start that's decided in advance and small enough to take, plus a plan for the moment you want to escape.

How do I stop procrastinating when studying?

Much of the research was done with students, so the steps apply directly. Before a session, write the exact next action (say, "questions 8 to 13 in chapter 4"), decide when and where you'll do it, and move your phone out of the room. Then set a timer for five minutes and begin.

Is procrastination a habit you can break?

Research suggests it can change. Across a dozen randomised trials, mostly with students, structured programs reduced procrastination by a small amount on average (Rozental et al, 2018), and a review of intervention studies found the reductions held up at follow-up (van Eerde & Klingsieck, 2018).

What is the fastest way to start a task?

Ask the question Tim Pychyl borrowed from David Allen: what's the next action? Make it physical and tiny, like opening the file or rolling out the mat, and do it for five minutes. In his studies, students rated a dreaded task as significantly less stressful and unpleasant once they had started it.

Sources

This article draws on Tim Pychyl's interview on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal and his Psychology Today posts, Fuschia Sirois's book, a podcast interview and an essay, and the studies and public guidance listed below.

• Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, S3 E11: Tim Pychyl, How to solve procrastination (podcast episode, 2022)
• Timothy Pychyl, Just Get Started (researcher's blog post, Psychology Today, 2008)
• Timothy Pychyl, Forgive Yourself to Stop Procrastinating (researcher's blog post, Psychology Today, 2010)
• Timothy Pychyl, Solving the Procrastination Puzzle (book, publisher page, 2013)
• Fuschia Sirois, Procrastination: What It Is, Why It's a Problem, and What You Can Do About It (book, APA, 2022; publisher page and sample introduction)
• Sirois & Pychyl, Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation (theoretical review, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2013)
• Your Parenting Mojo 170: Fuschia Sirois, How to stop procrastinating (podcast episode, 2022)
• Fuschia Sirois, Two Counterintuitive Ways to Stop Procrastinating (researcher's essay, Greater Good Magazine, 2022)
• Centre for Clinical Interventions, Put Off Procrastinating (clinical self-help workbook, Government of Western Australia)
• Gollwitzer & Sheeran, Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes (meta-analysis, 2006)
• Duckworth, Milkman & Laibson, Beyond willpower: strategies for reducing failures of self-control (integrative review, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2018)
• Eckert et al, Overcome procrastination: enhancing emotion regulation skills reduce procrastination (studies including a randomised trial, 2016)
• NHS Every Mind Matters, Tackling your to-do list (public health guidance)
• Wohl, Pychyl & Bennett, I forgive myself, now I can study (prospective study of 119 students, 2010)
• Rozental et al, Targeting procrastination using psychological treatments: a systematic review and meta-analysis (meta-analysis of 12 randomised trials, 2018)
• van Eerde & Klingsieck, Overcoming procrastination? A meta-analysis of intervention studies (meta-analysis of 24 studies, 2018)
• University of Maryland Counseling Center, Time management & procrastination (university counselling guidance)