You Beat Yourself Up for Procrastinating. Why Put It Off Again the Next Day?

Even while we procrastinate, we're actually getting something out of it.

So is that brief bit of relief the reason the same thing happens again the next day?

If so, what we need after putting something off may not be a stronger resolution.

There's something you need to do, and you keep putting it off. You should be opening the report, but you pick up your phone. You should be starting to study, but suddenly something else catches your eye.

Then night comes, and you think:

“Tomorrow I'm really doing it.”

And usually one more line tags along:

“Why am I so lazy?”

But psychologists who study procrastination don't explain it as simple laziness.

What matters may be less the task itself and more how you feel when you think about it.

What are we avoiding when we procrastinate?

When people procrastinate, what they avoid may be less the task itself than the uncomfortable feelings that surface along with it, such as overwhelm, worry, or tiredness.

When you think of the report, it's not just the report that comes to mind.

“When am I ever going to finish this?”

“What if I do it badly?”

“Where do I even start?”

“I'm tired just thinking about it.”

Thoughts and feelings like these rise alongside it.

Usually we don't sort them out one by one. We just lump them together as “I don't want to.”

But look a little closer and they're different.

It might be that you feel overwhelmed. It might be that you're worried you'll do it badly. It might be that the task just feels too big.

Instead of rushing to fix the feeling, you can simply notice it for a moment.

“Oh, it's not just the task I'm avoiding right now.”

Sirois and Pychyl (2013) described procrastination not as a simple failure of time management, but as something tied to trying to manage an uncomfortable mood in the moment.

You think of the task, and you feel uncomfortable.

So you check your phone. You do something else. You watch a video.

The task is still there, but for a moment you feel better.

This is where procrastination starts to look a little different.

Even while we procrastinate, we're actually getting something out of it.

A moment of relief.

The trouble is that the relief isn't free.

The report you avoided this afternoon gets handed to you tonight. The studying you avoided today gets handed to you the night before the exam.

Your present self dodges the discomfort, and your future self pays for it.

So the fix seems simple.

Just push yourself harder, right?

“Get it together.”

“Why did you put it off again?”

“This time you really have to.”

But this is where an interesting experiment comes in.

What did researchers have students read after a bad test?

In a 2012 UC Berkeley experiment, one group of college students who had just done poorly on a test read a short note saying, in effect, that they weren't alone, that this is common, and not to be too hard on themselves.

Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley tested how the way people treat themselves after a failure affects what they do next.

In one experiment, 86 undergraduates first took a fairly hard vocabulary test. The average score was about 4 out of 10.

Afterward, the students could study words for the next test for as long as they wanted. The researchers measured how long they studied.

Before that, one group read a self-compassion note like this:

If the test you just took was hard, you're not alone. Lots of students find tests like this hard. If you feel bad about how you did, try not to be too hard on yourself.

What's interesting is that the note never said “study harder for the next test.”

Another group read no note at all, and a third read a note meant to boost self-esteem, along the lines of “you must be smart if you got into Berkeley.”

So what happened?

The students who read the self-compassion note spent about 5 minutes, on average, preparing for the next test.

The students who read no note spent about 3 minutes 20 seconds.

The students who read the self-esteem note spent about 3 minutes 50 seconds.

The note didn't push anyone to study.

And yet the students who read “try not to be too hard on yourself” actually studied longer.

That said, scores on the next test didn't differ, and what was measured was study time, not procrastination. The difference from the group that read the “you must be smart” note was also too small to call clear. Breines & Chen, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012.

Which raises a question.

Why would that be?

Admitting a failure is not the same as attacking yourself

Admitting that you procrastinated means acknowledging what happened, while judging yourself for it means using what happened as grounds to put yourself down, so the two are not the same thing.

“I put it off again today.”

and

“Why am I so weak-willed?”

are completely different sentences.

The first says what happened.

The second uses what happened to pass judgment on you.

If we put the task off in the first place to avoid an uncomfortable feeling, then piling self-blame on top may just add one more uncomfortable feeling.

So in the moment you notice you've procrastinated, there's no need to immediately analyze yourself or scold yourself.

“I put it off again today.”

You can stop right there.

You don't need to pretend it didn't happen, and you don't need to talk yourself into thinking it was fine.

But one problem remains.

Feeling a little better doesn't mean you'll automatically start the task tomorrow.

So how do you decide what to do next?

“I'll do it tomorrow” is missing one thing

“I'll do it tomorrow” says what you'll do but leaves out when you'll start, so when the next day comes, there's no signal to begin.

We often make plans like this:

“I'll do the report tomorrow.”

“I'll start studying tomorrow.”

“This time I'm definitely starting.”

The problem is that we decided what to do, but not when to start.

The next morning is busy, after lunch you want a break, and in the afternoon something else comes up.

Then night comes, and you say it again:

“Tomorrow I'm really doing it.”

Psychologists have studied one fix for this, called an “implementation intention.”

The idea is simple.

Instead of

“I'll do the report tomorrow,”

you link a situation to an action ahead of time:

“When it's 8 p.m. tomorrow, I'll open the report file.”

In a meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) that pooled 94 independent findings, implementation intentions showed a moderate-to-large overall effect on turning goals into actual action.

The difference looks small.

But with “I'll do it tomorrow,” tomorrow's you has to make the decision all over again.

“When it's 8, I'll open the file,” on the other hand, has a built-in signal to start.

And there's no reason to make the start big.

Instead of

“I'll focus for two hours and finish it,”

just

“I'll open the file.”

is enough.

Finishing is a problem for later.

What can you do if you put it off again today?

If you put something off again today, you can try three things instead of blaming yourself: notice what felt uncomfortable, such as feeling overwhelmed or worrying you'd do it badly; stop at the plain fact, “I put it off again today”; and pick one moment to start, such as “When it's 8 p.m. tomorrow, I'll open the file.”

The studies we've looked at weren't testing a single “formula for beating procrastination.”

There's research on procrastination and mood regulation, an experiment on self-compassion after failure, and research on implementation intentions, each separate.

Still, put the three side by side and one direction comes into view.

Just because you put it off again today doesn't mean you have to turn on yourself right away with

“What is wrong with me?”

First, take one look at what felt uncomfortable.

Did starting feel overwhelming? Were you worried you'd do it badly? Did the task seem too big?

Then keep only the fact.

“I put it off again today.”

Next, instead of a grand resolution, pick one moment to start.

“When it's 8 p.m. tomorrow, I'll open the file.”

None of this will end procrastination in one go.

But what the research points to is worth noting.

Instead of adding self-blame, notice what you're avoiding, keep the slip-up at its actual size, and make the next step concrete.

For tonight, that might be enough.

In short

Procrastination isn't explained by laziness alone; it can be explained as a way of briefly escaping the uncomfortable feelings that come with thinking about an unwanted task, and the cost is paid later by your future self (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013).

In a 2012 UC Berkeley experiment, college students who had just done poorly on a test and then read a self-compassion note saying they weren't alone, that struggling on a hard test is common, and not to be too hard on themselves studied longer for the next test than students who read no note. However, the experiment measured study time, and scores on the next test did not differ.

Implementation intentions, which set the moment and action for starting in advance, such as “When it's 8 p.m. tomorrow, I'll open the file” instead of “I'll do it tomorrow,” showed an effect on turning goals into actual action in a meta-analysis of 94 independent findings (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

Taken together, the research on procrastination and mood, the Berkeley self-compassion experiment and the implementation-intention meta-analysis point to three actions after putting something off: notice what felt uncomfortable, stop at the plain fact “I put it off again,” and set one moment to start.