SPENCER: Itamar, welcome to the Clearer Thinking podcast.

ITAMAR: Nice to be here, Spencer.

SPENCER: Almost everyone procrastinates sometimes. I know that I do, but on a scientific level, what is procrastination defined as?

ITAMAR: Procrastination is when we put something off, even though we don't intend to, and even though we can expect it to be bad for us. So when we tell ourselves, "I'm going to write this paper soon," or "I'm going to work on this project soon," and then we keep putting it off by saying, "I'll do it maybe a bit later," or "maybe tomorrow," or "maybe after a few more videos," and that happens again and again, even though we know that's not good for us, we're procrastinating.

SPENCER: So if we simply put something off, but we're glad we did it, that would not be procrastination.

ITAMAR: For the most part, no, unless we're fooling ourselves in a sense. So there's a bit of a fuzziness there around what happens when we think the delay is good for us, but in reality it's bad, and there it's a bit difficult to determine whether it's procrastination or not. One kind of murky definition that you can use is: Could we have expected this to be better for us?

SPENCER: How common is procrastination?

ITAMAR: Very common. Approximately 20% of adults procrastinate chronically, and 50% of students, and many more procrastinate occasionally. For all these people, it becomes an issue that can pervade every area of their life.

SPENCER: In a recent Clearer Thinking survey, we asked our listeners and users about different issues in their lives and what kind of challenges they want to work on. Procrastination was actually one of the top challenges people listed. I thought that was really interesting.

ITAMAR: Absolutely, yeah, it's super common, and one of the important things to understand is that it's common, not just because there is a perception of procrastination as something that only happens to people who don't care enough, but in reality, you have it among people who care a lot, among people who are highly conscientious, and among people who genuinely are productive and really do want to have a strong and meaningful impact.

SPENCER: Are there multiple types of procrastination, or should we think of it as kind of one unitary thing?

ITAMAR: Absolutely, multiple types, and it's important to think about it as a multi-dimensional construct because that's what it is. There is a broader question of which types exist, and which types are actually useful to think about. But yes, thinking about procrastination as just one thing, one thing that only happens to students, for example, causes us to miss, first of all, the issue when it happens for other people, and that also makes it harder for us to deal with the issue in practice. Because a student who's procrastinating because of distractions is being driven by different issues and requires different solutions from an executive who's procrastinating because of burnout or an artist who's procrastinating because of perfectionism and anyone else who has different reasons for their procrastination.

SPENCER: To what extent is anxiety a kind of fundamental part of procrastination?

ITAMAR: So that's one of the interestingly contentious things in the research literature around the cause of procrastination. But overall, I would say it's a pretty fundamental aspect, especially when it comes to tasks that are anxiety-inducing. So what basically happens is there is something we need to do. For some people, that could be maybe publishing a post that could be criticized; for other people, it might be making a phone call, whatever it is. If we find the idea of doing it anxiety-inducing, we can then assume that if we do that task, if we engage in that activity, we will find it painful. And then our brain says, "Wait a second! I don't want to have that pain." And then we push it off. That's basically where anxiety causes procrastination.

SPENCER: It seems like one of the fundamental aspects of anxiety is that it makes us want to avoid things. That's sort of the purpose of it, in a sense. You feel anxious about the possibility of something bad happening. You avoid going to the watering hole because you saw a tiger there the other day, and you don't want that to happen again, and that protects you. But of course, when anxiety is going a little haywire or is excessive relative to the danger of a thing, that could cause us to avoid things. I imagine it can also cause procrastination.

ITAMAR: Yeah, absolutely. And the interesting thing, though, to highlight here is that there are two sides to this. So often, if just thinking about a task makes you extremely anxious, it makes it difficult to even engage with it. That causes procrastination. The same thing happens when we expect the task to be painful. Anxiety in lower amounts can actually be a bit adaptive in the sense that it pushes you to take action. That basically happens when, for example, what you're worried about is the consequences. So maybe you need to study for something or do an assignment at work or whatever it is, and you're actually anxious not about the task itself, but about the consequences of not performing that task. In that case, feeling a bit of anxiety can actually push you to take action instead. So there's a duality there to factors like anxiety, fear, and perfectionism. At the same time, there is the caveat that even when it drives you to take action, it does so in a way that is not ideal. It's still causing stress. It's still causing you to feel worse about your work, so it's a very dangerous motivator to rely on.

SPENCER: It's fascinating how, in very similar situations, people can behave so differently. For example, imagine two people who are very worried about a test. They're worried they're going to get a bad grade, and one of them is really motivated by that anxiety and ends up studying, maybe excessively to the point of perfectionism. A second person avoids studying. It stresses them out even thinking about studying, so they don't study until the last minute when they really have no other choice. They are both driven by fear, and they both even have the same fear, yet they have such different reactions to it.

ITAMAR: Yeah, and there are various factors underlying the differences. In some cases, it can be "What are they actually anxious about? Are they anxious about the task itself," or "Are they anxious about the consequences of not engaging with the task?" Another question is, to what extent do they feel anxiety? A bit of anxiety, as we said, can potentially motivate you. Tons of anxiety, regardless of what it is directed at, can usually just paralyze you instead. Then there are other considerations, like how do you feel about your ability to actually perform the task? If you feel that anxiety and you don't feel that you can actually perform the task, if your self-efficacy is very low, then it might just end up paralyzing you. As opposed to saying, "Okay, yes, I feel stressed about this, but I know that I can handle the task, and this stress is an indicator that it's important to handle it."

SPENCER: Are there common instances of procrastination that don't involve anxiety at all? It's just a completely different mechanism.

ITAMAR: Yeah, absolutely. So anxiety is one type of procrastination or one factor involved in procrastination. You have others that are adjacent, like we've mentioned, perfectionism and fear. But there are also ones that are entirely different. For example, we're sitting there, we want to work, and then we check just one more tab, or we check just one more video, one more notification, and whatever that digital distraction is, it is constantly pulling us away from what we should be doing. That's one brand of procrastination that is separate from anxiety. Another brand of procrastination is burnout, where we need to do something, but we've already worked too hard or have done things that are too draining, and we struggle to bring ourselves to do what we need to because we don't have enough energy. That can also tie into anxiety. For example, when we feel too anxious, that makes us feel more burnt out. But it can happen separately from that. If we don't feel anxious at all, but we've just worn ourselves thin from working too hard again and again.

SPENCER: Okay, so we basically talked about three types: anxiety-driven. We also have ones that are more like you're getting pulled into something else. Maybe it's driven by some other short-term reward that's pulling you away from it. And then we talked about burnout, where you've kind of used up all your energy, so you have trouble doing tasks at the end of the day. Are there any other kinds of meaningfully different types?

ITAMAR: Yes, there are other types. Another one that I touch on in my book that's coming out now, Solving Procrastination, is what I call the zigzagger, and that's more related to ADHD and impulsivity, where basically we're switching from one thing to another because we struggle to focus on one thing for any long period of time, and that can tie into what we talked about earlier with distractions, but this particular type is more around internal distractions as opposed to external ones.

SPENCER: When people try to solve procrastination, what do they usually do that doesn't work? What are the common mistakes they make?

ITAMAR: The biggest mistake, in my eyes, that people make when they try to solve procrastination is falling for the self-control fallacy. That's basically the belief that next time we're going to be able to do what we need to if we just try harder. What we're saying is, "Okay, the reason I failed is that I wasn't trying hard enough, I wasn't exerting enough willpower, and next time I'm going to do that because I know that's the right thing to do, and therefore I'll be able to do what I need to." The insane thing is that we can fall for this belief again and again, even though every single time we see that it doesn't actually work. There are lots of reasons we fall for this. We have the bias blind spot, which makes us not very good at identifying our own biases. We have the empathy gap, where when we're thinking about what kind of actions we're going to take in the future, we tend to be in a cool emotional state. We're thinking very rationally, and then we mispredict how we're going to act when we're in a hot emotional state. When we actually feel afraid, or when we feel anxious, or we're facing a temptation, the main problem with this belief is that it gives us a very tempting silver bullet because there's a very simple solution on the surface, and that prevents us from seeking out more effective solutions that will help us in reality.

SPENCER: Yeah, I can see how this happens so often where you think, "Okay, I know the last 10 times I didn't study until the last minute, but this time I'm fully committed to starting on time." Then, of course, you don't do it. The reason you don't do it is for exactly the same reason you didn't do it in the past, and you didn't do it the time before that, etc. Basically, you can think about it like if nothing has changed, then the outcome will not change. You'll do the same thing exactly. Something has to shift to have a different outcome.

ITAMAR: I talk about that in the book through the story of someone who's very excited to work on a passion project. I emphasize that because procrastination is not just about things that we dread or things that we don't like, but also things that we genuinely want to do for our own sake. This person, let's call him John, has a plan to work on his project this weekend. Every week he's looking forward to the weekend. He gets to the weekend, and then he sits there intending to do the work, and it doesn't happen. Maybe he spends a few minutes on social media, and then he does this, and somehow he ends up at the end of Saturday realizing another day has gone by. Even though he was sitting there intending to do this, he did not make an inch of progress. Then there is this sort of pre-slip optimism when he's sitting in bed and says, "Okay, I don't know what went wrong today, but tomorrow is going to be different. Tomorrow I'm actually going to do it, and tomorrow's the day." This is the same plan he had the previous weekend, and then he wakes up in the morning and does the whole thing again on Sunday, and that repeats itself again and again. When you hear this story happening to someone else, it becomes very clear. You know it's going to happen again because he's going into this with the same plan, so he's going to get the same outcome. But when it happens to us, our brain is really good at tricking ourselves into thinking it's not actually the case. This is a whole new plan. This time it's going to work.

SPENCER: There's something I do that's a little bit weird, which is I try to model myself in the future not as me but as someone just like me. So if I'm thinking about, "How to get Spencer in two weeks to do this thing?" I try not to think of it as, "Oh well, in two weeks I'll just exert willpower to do it." I try to think about what would help someone just like me do that thing in two weeks. Can I set a reminder? Can I do a social commitment, tell someone else that I plan to do it then? Can I put in place some kind of reward for doing it, etc.? If you think about it, you wouldn't assume for someone else that just wanting to do it is going to work. You would think about what would actually help that person achieve it. I find that a useful switch to think of myself as only having free will for the next few seconds, and then after that, I have to think of myself as more like I'd think of another person.

ITAMAR: Yeah, absolutely. One of the misconceptions about procrastination is that it's a matter of time management, and we can have excellent time management and still fail because the issues that drive procrastination are not about time management. The reason I bring this up now is one of my core arguments is that we should focus on distance management instead. What you're describing is a beautiful example of creating psychological self-distance in order to figure out what kind of solution will work for you. Instead of thinking what should I do here, what should Spencer do here, you're saying, "Okay, what should you do here? What should this person do here? What should my future self do?" When we do this by using second or third person pronouns, or by using our names instead of saying I, or by thinking about what advice you would give to a friend, we're creating psychological distance that helps us engage better in what is called wise reasoning. It helps us see through the situation, avoid our biases, and figure out what is actually going to work for us.

SPENCER: Let's think through the different types that you mentioned and what they could do to procrastinate less. Suppose someone is a really anxious type procrastinator, right? They get anxious about doing the task, so they avoid it until the last minute, or they put it off altogether. They never do it. What could that person do differently the next time they're thinking about that task?

ITAMAR: My number one tip in this case is to decatastrophize the situation. Catastrophizing is basically when we overestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen and overestimate how badly they will affect us. So, let's say we want to send out our book to publishers or agents, and then we say, "Okay, if I have a single typo in the proposal, that agent is going to blacklist me, and then they're going to tell everybody else to blacklist me too." That is basically our inner pessimists going out of control, and this can make our fears seem much worse than they actually are. The way to deal with this is decatastrophizing by questioning what the issue is. The way to deal with this is by looking at what we're afraid of and asking ourselves, "Okay, how likely is this to actually happen? How likely are they to actually blacklist us? That's crazy. They're not actually going to do that for a single typo." We should question both how likely this situation is to happen and how likely it is to affect us, and what we can do to move on if it happens. In this case, if there is a single typo, it's unlikely the agent will care. It's unlikely the agent will notice. If they do notice, it's unlikely they will care much. They're definitely not going to bother blacklisting us or asking all the other agents to blacklist us. Even if, for whatever reason, it doesn't work out with that particular agent, we'll be able to reach out to others instead. The goal of this is to take the situation and put a check on our inner pessimists by making the situation seem less frightening.

SPENCER: I like that strategy. I will also say I feel there's an almost opposite strategy that can also be useful in these kinds of situations. I'm someone who's quite prone to anxiety, so this is the kind of procrastination that I'm more prone to compared to the others. What I find useful is noticing, wait, this thinking about this task brings me anxiety, and then I just sit with the feelings. I literally just sit with the feelings and say, "Okay, I notice what it feels like as I think about it in the past. As I walk up to my computer to do it, I notice what it feels like," and then I just do it anyway. It's kind of a little bit silly, but it actually helps compared to just being in default mode, where you're not really thinking about what's going on. I guess you could call it metacognitive awareness. You're thinking about the situation. You're noticing that when I think about this task, "When I begin to start on it, I start feeling anxious. I have this urge to move away,

and then you just let yourself experience those feelings, and then you just do the thing, which is almost like a non-tactic in a way. But I actually find it helps.

ITAMAR: Yeah, that's classic mindfulness in my view, and that falls under the umbrella of using self-compassion to help with procrastination. One part of that is, as you've mentioned, basically saying, "I'm feeling this emotion right now. I'm acknowledging it. I'm not trying to suppress it. I'm not letting it blow out of proportion. I'm not trying to turn it into something that it isn't, but I am acknowledging that it's right there, whether that's anxiety or stress or guilt or whatever else we're feeling. That's one core component of self-compassion, which is super useful. There are two other components that you can use: one is self-kindness, and that can be based on something like the question of how would I treat a friend if they came to me with the issue that I'm experiencing right now, because we tend to be much more supportive toward our friends than we are toward ourselves. One more thing we can do in this regard is focus on what is called shared humanity. Issues like procrastination and anxiety can feel very isolating because we tend to think, "Okay, this is something that only I struggle with, or this is something that someone in my position should not have." By looking at shared humanity, we're basically saying, you know what? That's actually not true. Tons of other people have this obstacle too. That doesn't make it any less frustrating, but it does mean that it is part of the shared human condition and something that connects me to others, as opposed to something that isolates me.

SPENCER: Yeah, I agree. Self-compassion can be really useful, especially when you tend to beat yourself up, where you get in a spiral of delaying on the task, and then you start feeling bad about the fact that you're delaying it. Then you have even more intense emotions, and it makes it even harder to work on it. So that can be really useful there. I also find a certain mental flip useful, which is that anxiety kind of wants you to avoid a task. That's sort of the nature of the emotion, but this mental flip says, "Okay, I'm feeling anxious, and I'm going to do the task." Treating it as anxiety is not a reason not to do it. I can actually do it no matter how anxious I am, and I can just start." I could at least do the first minute or whatever. I find that kind of mental flip of, "Yeah, I can do it, even though I'm anxious," doesn't have to be a reason to not do it.

ITAMAR: Yeah, and I think there's even a study on this. I don't remember what it is exactly, but they taught people to reframe anxiety as excitement. You tell yourself, "I'm excited about this," and instead of trying to deal with anxiety as it is, you're trying to shift it and reframe it in your mind.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's interesting to think about that. If you're experiencing a negative emotion like anxiety, and it's telling you to avoid something, and it may be really powerfully making you want to avoid it, one option is you try to just notice the feeling and do it anyway, which is kind of what I'm describing. Another option is you reframe the feeling and say, "Hey, you know what? This anxiety is kind of like excitement, and maybe if I interpret it that way, it's a more useful lens for me." I think there's a study on maybe public speaking where they got people to reframe their anxiety as excitement, and maybe that makes it easier for people. Then you can do other things like try to reduce the anxiety, which I think your first technique is more around that, like maybe I can challenge catastrophizing, and if I address those thoughts, maybe it will actually bring down the anxiety. I realize there's not as much to be feared. It's almost like three different ways of looking at it: you could try to reduce the fear, you could try to do the thing even though you're afraid, and you could try to transform the fear into something else. They're all different perspectives.

ITAMAR: There isn't a single right solution. The optimal solution depends on tons of factors, like what kind of problem you're dealing with, specifically what flavor of anxiety, what your personal preferences are, what your circumstances are. The way I view this in general is that you should treat this as a toolbox that you can select from based on your needs at any particular moment, and then just experiment to see what works for you in particular.

SPENCER: For those who are anxious procrastinators, I think it's also important to note that anxiety tends to create anxiety. By procrastinating whenever you feel anxious, that actually reinforces the fear. The mechanism of that is that as soon as you say, "I'm not going to do that right now," usually your anxiety declines. You're kind of learning that when you procrastinate, you feel better, and you get this reinforcement loop. The nice thing to understand about that is that when you do the reverse, it can start unwinding it. If you feel anxious, you do the thing anyway instead of avoiding it, it can help actually reduce anxiety in the future. It effectively acts as a form of exposure. I think that's really useful to note.

ITAMAR: Yeah, in that sense, procrastination serves as a sort of defense mechanism where we're saying, "I feel stressed or anxious about this thing I should be doing, so I put it off to avoid those painful emotions." As you've said, that makes you feel good in the short term, but it makes you feel worse in the long term overall, because by putting it off, you didn't really solve it. You just meant you're going to have to face it again and again or face consequences that are even worse.

SPENCER: Talk about the second archetype you mentioned, which I believe are people who kind of get sucked into other things. Maybe you're working on your project or about to start, and you say, "I'll just check social media," and then an hour later, you're like, "What was I doing? Oh, I forgot what I was working on." What would you recommend for people who are this archetype?

ITAMAR: First of all, I would recommend figuring out what is driving you to procrastinate, what is distracting you. In some cases, the answer is fairly clear. I know notifications going off on your phone, or the fact that you're working on your computer, and the distraction is also on the computer, so it's always a click away. But sometimes, what we think of as an external distractor is actually an internal one. What I mean by this is, we need to work on something, and if we're worried that it will be frustrating or boring, or if we are working on it and it starts feeling frustrating or boring, we then go to check and do something that feels more enjoyable immediately, that is more immediately gratifying. There we can start thinking, "Okay, when I procrastinate, I go to social media. Therefore, social media is distracting me." That can be the case sometimes. But what might also happen in other cases is that what distracted you or what drove you to social media in the first place was that internal cue, feeling bored or feeling frustrated. To be able to deal with those cues, you need to first figure out what they are. So what I would say is, first of all, start noticing when you jump between things. When are you doing this? Where are you doing this? How do you feel the moment you are doing this? Try to figure out what is driving you, and once you figure out the why, you can then figure out how you can deal with this. In terms of how you can deal with it, there are a few solutions. One is basically changing the amount of friction in the environment, and when it comes to distractions, that means adding as much friction as possible that stands in the way between yourself and temptations.

SPENCER: If you're feeling tempted, put an app on your phone to make it harder to check it or to block it.

ITAMAR: So my main tip would be to add friction between yourself and the kind of temptations that are drawing you away from what you should be doing. The goal of this is to give yourself enough time to overcome that initial impulse to procrastinate while also making those temptations less tempting. If we give the example of being on your phone, one thing you could do is turn on airplane mode while you should be working or use an app that blocks access to the apps that distract you. Put it on silent, leave it in a different room. Maybe also go to the library where there's more social pressure against opening your phone, and basically make it so that opening your phone and engaging with it when you shouldn't be is as unappealing as possible. Give yourself as much time as possible to stop and say, "Wait, this is not what I wanted to be doing. I should actually get back to what I want to be doing." You don't even have to use an external tool for this. You can decide that before you engage with your phone or check social media, whatever it is, you're going to count to 10 out loud. It sounds a bit silly, but it puts enough friction there that you can overcome that initial impulse to procrastinate whenever you're feeling bored or whenever that notification draws you in.

SPENCER: I have an app on my phone. I really like that every time I check social media, it adds extra time for me to wait. So the first time it will be fast, then it will take two seconds, then four seconds, then six seconds, and it just adds increasing friction because my goal is not to check social media zero, but I don't want to check it excessively, and that kind of creates more friction.

ITAMAR: Yeah, absolutely. That sounds like a good way to do it.

SPENCER: So, other than creating friction, what would you recommend to that group that is jumping into other things that are drawing their attention?

ITAMAR: Another thing that is very useful is basically adding structure and concreteness to the things you should be doing. The less structure, the less concreteness, and the more uncertainty we have, the easier it is to get distracted. When we have a huge task like, I don't know, write a book or build something from scratch, it's very easy to get lost figuring out what the actual next step is, and that is difficult in practice. That can also make whatever we need to be doing feel very intimidating in our head, at least. A way to deal with this is to unpack whatever we need to be doing into clear, manageable steps. So rather than saying, "Okay, I need to write a whole paper," we say, "I need to create an outline," or "I need to create just the beginning of an outline. I need to write a single sentence," or even a micro step, "I just need to write a single word, and that's all I need to do right now in order to get started." By making things feel more concrete and by making things clear and more manageable, you make it easier for yourself both to get started and then to keep going, even if you do get distracted along the way.

SPENCER: Let's go on to the third archetype where we're talking about people who procrastinate out of burnout. They get in situations where they're working all day, they're tired out, they're overstressed, and they're finding that they can't get things done. What would your advice be to that group?

ITAMAR: My advice is going to be the thing that many people with burnout hate hearing, which is if you're burned out from working too hard on things that are too draining, you probably need to do less. You need to be more deliberate about prioritizing taking care of yourself, which in practice means being more deliberate about what you do and, more importantly, about what you don't do. Part of that is saying, "For me to function well and be productive, I need to make sure I get enough rest. I need to make sure I get enough sleep, I get exercise, I eat right, and all these things that we know we should do." Often, it becomes very tempting to let them take a backseat, and it's very easy to forget them, especially in the heat of the moment where we have a high-pressure task at work that we really want to get done right. It's always easy to say, "Okay, I'll just skip a bit of sleep here. I'll skip a bit of sleep there. Maybe I'll skip doing the kind of things that used to recharge me because they're not as high priority," especially if you're very interested in impact and really care about doing things right. The problem is that over time it compounds. You're borrowing wellness and productivity from your future self. Even if it works in the short term, you get more and more burnt out over time. What happens then is you start entering a cycle where you're used to performing very well, but now you're burnt out, so you perform worse. You compensate by working even harder, and then you become more burnt out, and then it becomes worse and worse. The only way to really solve this is by, at a certain point, saying, "Okay, right now I'm going to prioritize taking care of myself because that's what I need to be productive."

SPENCER: It seems to me that burnout is itself kind of multifactorial. You can have people who burn out just literally by working too many hours. Maybe they love their work, maybe it's meaningful, maybe it's exactly what they want to be doing, but they just can't do it at 80 hours a week. That's just too much. You have other people who maybe they're not overworking so much, but they really don't like the moment-to-moment work; they just hate doing this task, and it's very grueling. You can also have people for whom it's more like a mental health challenge that's weighing them down. Maybe they're very depressed, and they find that they're very slowed down, and it's very hard to get themselves to do things, so they end up having work pile on because they're only able to take it on at a slow pace. How would you think about the different types of burnout and how that might connect to procrastination?

ITAMAR: I think, as with other things, it's really important to understand that burnout doesn't have a single cause, and you've basically touched on that already. The default lay conceptualization of burnout is working too much, too hard, and that can mean working too many hours. In reality, you can work a reasonable number of hours, but on tasks that are particularly stressful, on tasks that feel pointless, or on tasks that drain you in another way, and that makes you more likely to get burnt out. The crucial thing to understand is that even if you're not working too many hours, you could still get burnt out, and it's still something to watch out for. To solve your burnout, it's not just about reducing the amount of work you do, but making that work less draining, either by prioritizing getting rid of tasks that you find particularly draining or changing those tasks in some way to make them feel less draining.

SPENCER: Yeah, obviously, sometimes people are stuck in situations. They're trying to feed their family, and there's only one job they can do, and it's hard to get another job. But I think many people have more flexible situations where, if they really hate doing a task, but their colleague likes it better, they can swap with them, or maybe they could adjust the amount of hours they work every week and reduce their pay equivalently, or whatever. It obviously depends a lot on the circumstances, but sometimes there's more you can do than you think, or maybe you just do a different job. Sometimes that's the answer.

ITAMAR: And to be clear, yes, absolutely, there are going to be cases where people are in bad situations, and these tips can only take you so far. If you're in an environment that is abusive, for example, or in an environment with poor working conditions, these tips can only help you so far in terms of avoiding burnout. But there are cases where it can make a difference, and there are also situations where you might not be able to control which kind of tasks you do, but you can shift your perception of them in a way that makes them less draining. An example of that would be: you get a task from your boss, and it feels utterly pointless. You're looking at it. You know that it is the wrong thing to do. You know that it's not going to help, but you still need to do it. That is obviously a very frustrating situation to be in. But one thing that might help in that kind of situation is to say, "You know what? I know that this particular task is pointless, but I'm a person who gets things done. So I'm going to get it done not because I think it's an important task to do, but because it's important for me to be the kind of person who finishes things well."

SPENCER: You can reframe it to give the work more meaning or significance, even if it doesn't inherently have that to you.

ITAMAR: Exactly, and it's a way of trying to find meaning in tasks that would otherwise feel meaningless to you.

SPENCER: And what about the zigzagger archetype you mentioned? I guess it's more of a kind of attentional issue where their attention flips between things, or maybe they're very easily distracted. I imagine that's associated with ADHD, but probably not everyone in the archetype has ADHD. What would you recommend for that group?

ITAMAR: Same thing as we discussed before about eliminating distractions and interruptions from your environment, so figuring out what your triggers are, what are the kind of things that pull you away from what you should be doing, and then trying to minimize them as much as possible in the case of where you should be working. Beyond that, adding structure to your work is ideal, and also accountability. That could be a partner that you make promises to that you then keep. That could be someone that you do a check-in with once a week. It could be someone you study next to. Basically, things that help you stay on track, with the important caveat that, especially in the case of ADHD, it's also worth looking into therapy and medication because sometimes that could be the ideal solution.

SPENCER: Not everyone feels this way, but I find even the amount of clutter in my environment can impact how much I can focus. If there's a lot of clutter, or even some kind of movement, like if something's moving around my peripheral, I find it very hard to focus. Whereas if I'm just staring at a white wall, I'm actually much more focused. Different people are different. Some people can't stand noise; noise will prevent them from working. Other people actually find going to a loud café is great for them. They can kind of settle into the din of the coffee shop. Do you have any advice around setting up your environment?

ITAMAR: My advice for this, which might be a bit annoying, is that there isn't a single right solution, and you need to figure out what works for you. The one thing that is right is that environment matters for everyone. Different people are affected to different degrees. There are people who can be in an empty room and still procrastinate, and there are people who can be in a very distracting environment and still get the job done. But for most of us, environment tends to be a major factor that affects whether we take action or procrastinate. At the same time, it really varies in terms of what distracts us and what helps us concentrate. As you've said, some people work really well when there's white noise. Other people work really well in silence. What matters is that you figure out what works for you and then try to structure your environment to match that as much as possible. If you're the kind of person who needs white noise, either play it in the background or go to a coffee shop or do whatever else you need to get the kind of white noise that works for you. Whereas if you're the kind of person who needs to work in silence, try putting some insulation in your room. Try working from a quiet location like a library. Try having noise-canceling headphones and whatever else will get you the kind of environment that you need.

SPENCER: Essentially, I thought it might be fun to do an example. I could give you a real example from my life, and you could walk me through how to avoid procrastinating on it. Does that sound good?

ITAMAR: Absolutely.

SPENCER: So one thing I hate doing is legal paperwork. This happened recently, where I had a legal agreement that I had to read really carefully, and then sign it, or if I didn't sign it, I had to send it back with edits. It's the kind of task that I typically put off for as long as I can until the deadline is right upon me, and then I'll finally get around to doing it. So, what should I do in this situation? Where would I start?

ITAMAR: Where I would start is by asking yourself why this happens. Why do you think you're putting this off every time?

SPENCER: I think it's because I find reading legal paperwork very effortful. I have to keep really intense focus, but it's also really boring. It's like you have to maintain perfect focus on something that you find very difficult to focus on because it's so uninteresting. I think it creates a kind of momentary burnout when I do it, especially for a long agreement. If it's 20 pages, just maintaining that focus is very annoying.

ITAMAR: Yeah, and I think that's very common. That's a very good example of the kind of thing that is a bit unnatural for us as humans to need to do. Our brains were definitely not evolved for it, but we still need to be able to get it done.

SPENCER: And what I would say is funny because I know some lawyers that really enjoy it, but I think they're unusual. I think many people, most people don't enjoy this kind of thing.

ITAMAR: Yeah, I think so too. What I would say are a few things you can try. One, you talk about the effortful issue that it basically requires deep concentration. Do you find that you concentrate better during certain times of day?

SPENCER: Yeah, I think in the evening is when I tend to focus the best.

ITAMAR: Okay, so one thing you could do is say this is an effortful task. It requires deep engagement. I'm going to schedule it for my peak time. Even though technically maybe it's best if I do it early in the day, what would actually make me more likely to get it done is if I schedule it for the evening when I concentrate best. You can also try to do other things. For example, I decide I'm intentionally not going to schedule any deep work before or after that, so that my mind knows that I can dedicate all my resources just to this thing. That would be one thing that I would recommend here. Another one you could do is you've mentioned, especially with a long contract, it becomes more and more difficult. Does it actually have to be something that you do in one go, or is this something you can structure to do, let's say, a third of the contract one day, and then another third the next, and more the next day? Is this the kind of task that you actually have to finish in one go, or can you decide to do half one day and then half the next?

SPENCER: It's a good question, and I think that's partly why I struggle with work because I actually think you need to do it in one go. If you don't do it in one go, you have to partially reread the first half again, just to remember what this term means and what that term means. You have to boot it in your memory. I think the other thing which I didn't mention is that it's not just that I find it boring and hard to focus on; it's also high stakes. Missing an important clause might come back to bite you really badly in six years. So it feels like there's an intensity to it tied in with the boredom.

ITAMAR: Yeah, in some cases we want to tell our mind you're overreacting, and in some cases situations really are high stakes, like in this case. The idea of breaking it apart sometimes doesn't actually work, as mentioned here, because the cost of trying to do that doesn't pay off. But maybe another thing you could do is break it apart within the same session. For example, you could say, "I'm going to work on this for 10 minutes because 10 minutes of concentrated work is my limit, or 15 or 20 or whatever your limit is, and then I'm going to take a five-minute break to do something that helps me recharge, and then I'm going to keep going." By doing that, every time I feel that I've reached my limit, instead of trying to push through and making it more difficult, I'm going to give myself a moment to recharge and then get back to it.

SPENCER: I think that would probably work because you could still keep it in your mind for five minutes, even when you're taking a break. I also like your suggestion, and I think this is part of what you're pointing to, of right before it, not scheduling anything intensive, maybe scheduling a break right before it, and then maybe scheduling a break right after it too, so that when you're done, you can relax and you don't have to go right into something else effortful.

ITAMAR: As you do this, you can also do something called temptation bundling, which is where you take an activity that you enjoy. In this case, we want something that is not too cognitively effortful. Watching funny cat videos or whatever it is can help you relax and is still enjoyable and something that you would look forward to, and then bundle that in with the tasks that you're doing. You can decide, "I'm going to read the contract for 20 minutes, then I'm going to take a 10-minute break to do something enjoyable, which gives you the ability to recharge and makes engaging with the contract as a whole less aversive."

SPENCER: Let's dig a bit more into the connection between procrastination and perfectionism. My understanding is that they're quite correlated with each other. Is that right?

ITAMAR: Yes, with a big asterisk. This is another one of those cases where it's more contentious in the research literature than I initially expected, or maybe than most of us intuitively expect. The main reason for this, in my eyes, is the fact that perfectionism is not a unidimensional construct. We say perfectionism, but there are different types. Sometimes perfectionism is about what we expect of ourselves. Sometimes it's about what we think others expect of us. Sometimes perfectionism is about really wanting to do a good job. Sometimes it's about being terrified of making mistakes, and some of these things, like being terrified of making mistakes, tend to be correlated more strongly with procrastination, and those kinds of things can drive us to procrastinate. Whereas other things, like the desire to do a good job, actually drive us to get our work done on time and not procrastinate, even though they're still a bit risky because they drive us to do that in a way that can be stressful.

SPENCER: So maybe by bundling all of these different things together, it kind of muddles it up, and then the correlation is not as clean as it could be.

ITAMAR: Yeah, exactly. And then when we separate them out, we see that there are different types of correlations that essentially cancel each other out.

SPENCER: So overall, is there a significant correlation, or does it actually get to zero once you combine them all?

ITAMAR: With the caveat, again, research is ongoing and there are uncertainties. It gets to zero, but for the most part, it gets close to zero at least. But I don't think that's very informative because if you're a perfectionist who's suffering from the more maladaptive sides of perfectionism, who's terrified of making mistakes, who has such unattainable standards that you're frozen because you know you're not going to achieve whatever it is you need to do, it doesn't matter that other people have a positive side of perfectionism because for you in particular, the perfectionism is still driving you to procrastinate. It's still driving you to delay in a way that is not good for you.

SPENCER: Yeah, one might think that there's no inherent connection because perfectionists want to do a really good job. Maybe they're not willing to put their work out in the world until it's at an exceptional level, or at least they perceive it to be at an exceptional level. But that doesn't necessarily make them avoid it. So what's the kind of connection when they are really linked? What is the psychological factor linking the two together tightly?

ITAMAR: So I want to first maybe push back on something, which is one aspect of perfectionism that can drive procrastination is basically saying, "I'm terrified of making mistakes, so I'm not going to get started at all." But another type can actually involve a lot of engagement that is unproductive and unending. So maybe you have a book and it's ready to be sent out for feedback or an article or whatever it is, you should send it out to get feedback from others. But because it hasn't met your unattainable standards, and it's never going to because they're unattainable, you just keep revising it, even though that's pointless. That is also a form of procrastination, even though we're engaging with a task, because what we're procrastinating on isn't the engagement, but the sending it out part. So perfectionism, even in those cases, is still leading us to procrastination, even if the procrastination looks a bit different in terms of the underlying mechanism. Again, there are a lot of uncertainties there. I would say two main things come to mind. One is this whole cluster of fear and anxiety, where you're so worried about making mistakes that you're basically saying, "I'm not going to deal with this. I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to touch this. It's going to be painful if I do. So I'm just going to put it off." And the other one is more about self-efficacy and your belief in your ability to do what you need to. If the standards that you have are so high that you can't reach them, then it feels, "I can't reach those standards, so why try in the first place?" Both these factors can potentially cause perfectionism and procrastination. Essentially, both of these aspects of perfectionism can lead to procrastination, just in different ways.

SPENCER: Yeah, that makes sense. If someone is struggling with procrastination mainly out of self-efficacy, they kind of think, I'm not going to be able to do that, or they doubt their ability to do a good job with it. What would you advise them in that case?

ITAMAR: So, if your self-efficacy is low, what I would advise is essentially building your self-efficacy, figuring out how you can increase your belief in your ability to do what you need to, obviously without going into overconfidence and unreasonable directions. The main way to do that is by starting with small and consistent victories. Show yourself that you can do what you need to, and maybe if we're going back to the writing example, if you want to convince yourself that you can write a book, maybe start by writing one word. Everybody can write one word, then go to writing one paragraph, one page, and just build it up gradually each time, showing yourself that if you were able to handle the previous stage, you can handle the next stage too. Another thing you could do is look into external examples from other areas of your life that show your competence in a way that relates to what you're currently procrastinating on. For example, let's say you're an executive, you're very assertive in meetings, you can push yourself to work hard, but you haven't been able to exercise so far. You've never had much experience with physical exercise. It's something that you care about. You want to feel good, you want to feel healthier, but you've never been able to bring yourself to do it. What you can do is say, "You know what? If I managed to get to the position that I'm in now as an executive, if I managed to push through these obstacles, if I managed to figure it out there, then I can also figure it out here." What you're doing is showing yourself that you're competent in other areas, and then trying to connect it in your mind to the area you're currently facing.

SPENCER: The thing is, from the point of view of someone who has really low self-efficacy, they'll think, "No, but I'm actually bad at the thing, right? Those are for people that are actually good and they're just confused. But I'm bad at it."

ITAMAR: It also leads to impostor syndrome. But I think the important thing here is, I would say the important thing is it's actually okay if you're bad at something. We're not trying to convince ourselves we're amazing at this. We're not lying to ourselves about our abilities. It's about whether you can get to the next step, and if it's actually unrealistic that you can get to the next step, I would argue that it's maybe not procrastination at that point. You need to rethink what your next step should be. But let's say you've never exercised in your life. You could rightly say, "I am going to be terrible at this because you are. You've never exercised. You don't have that skill yet. But if the goal you're setting for yourself is, "I am going to go on a five-minute walk. I am going to do a single push-up." That is something that you are capable of. What you're doing by building your self-efficacy there is first figuring out what kind of achievements are attainable at your current level, convincing yourself that you can actually achieve them, which you rightly should be able to if you've set the right kind of victories in mind, then basically structuring it so that you can advance from those successes to others.

SPENCER: Are you familiar with the Procrastination Equation?

ITAMAR: Yeah, temporal motivation theory.

SPENCER: Could you explain what that theory is? How does it work? And then I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. What does it get right? What does it get wrong?

ITAMAR: Yeah, absolutely. Today there are two major theories of procrastination. The first one is what we call the Procrastination Equation, a book by Piers Steel. The Procrastination Equation is based on something called temporal motivation theory, which is a theory of procrastination that focuses more on the behavioral economic side of things. It basically says the reason we procrastinate is that the further away outcomes are from us, the more we tend to discount them, whether those are rewards of taking action or the consequences of procrastination. The more sensitive we are to this kind of gap between now and the future, the more we tend to discount that, and the more we tend to focus on things that are immediately gratifying. I'm simplifying a bit. There are additional considerations, like hyperbolic discounting, which is that we don't just increasingly discount things the further they are in the future, but rather the biggest difference is between the immediate and things that are in the future.

SPENCER: I can feel better right at this moment, by procrastinating, that beats the kind of benefit of not procrastinating, which is going to accrue to me later on.

ITAMAR: Exactly. So the difference between now and tomorrow is huge. The difference between a year from now and a year from today is essentially meaningless. That is the idea behind temporal motivation theory. That is one of the dominant theories of procrastination. The other major one is emotion regulation theory, which we've touched on a bit earlier. It's also called short-term mood repair theory, and that is more around the psychological research literature. It focuses on basically saying, "I'm trying to do the kind of things that will make me feel good now, as opposed to caring about what will make me feel good later." They also operationalize the gap between the immediate and the future, but they focus on the concept of temporal disjunction, which is the gap between my present self and my future self. It arrives at a similar sort of conclusion, just from a different angle. And that's really similar.

SPENCER: Is it just about thinking of yourself as one entity that has discounting over time versus drawing this distinction between me now and another me that's in the future?

ITAMAR: A lot of the distinctions are more in the nitty-gritty nuances in terms of how it's dealt with. Temporal motivation theory has the equation that includes the amount of discount or sensitivity to delay and factors like this, and it approaches it from a more mathematical direction. In a sense, it's assuming that we have sort of rational processing to an irrational input. Our brain takes these factors and says, "Okay, at this very moment, I shouldn't be focusing on whatever I should be focusing on because I'm discounting it." Emotion regulation talks about the same thing, but as the name implies, more from the perspective of emotions, more from the perspective of saying, "I will make myself feel good right now." So it's coming at similar conclusions from different directions, essentially.

SPENCER: And where does motivation fit into those theories?

ITAMAR: Motivation is primarily discussed in the context of temporal motivation theory, which, as the saying implies, focuses on motivation. The output of the equation is around motivation and how strongly we feel motivated by whatever it is we need to be doing. In the context of emotion regulation, it comes into play in a different way. Emotion regulation theory talks about two types of issues with regulation: one is underregulation, and the other is misregulation. Underregulation is when we know we should do something, and we still don't do it because we can't bring ourselves to it at the moment because our willpower is hindered, for example, by burnout, or because we're impacted by another factor. Misregulation is when we do something at the moment because we expect it to make us feel better, even though it won't really. When we should be doing something meaningful, and instead we turn to an instant dopamine rush that will make us feel good right now, that is basically misregulation.

SPENCER: So in one of the theories, are we assumed to be rational actors, and in the other theory, not assumed to be rational actors?

ITAMAR: In both cases, the assumption is that procrastination is an irrational behavior. One of the criticisms of temporal motivation theory is the idea that it still assumes there is rational processing of an irrational input, and the criticism there is that, given that procrastinators are often well aware of the downsides of their procrastination, and given that they very strongly want to stop, we would expect that if they were being rational, over time we would be able to just overcome procrastination. We would be able to tell our brain this is not the right process for this kind of thing. You should not be discounting future outcomes in this way. Let's change things so we can focus not just on immediate gratification. I'm a bit worried. So both of them say that it is irrational. The criticism then lies in where this irrationality comes into play, and there is a lot of murkiness around what "irrational" mean exactly, and this also ties into the original discussion we've had, for example, where if somebody genuinely believes that procrastinating right now, that delaying right now, will be good for them, even though it will be clear to every other person but them that it's going to be bad for them. Do we consider that irrational? Under some views, we would say, "Yes, because we should assume they have perfect information. We should assume that they understand that it's bad for them, and they're just ignoring that." But under other views, we can say, "Well, given what they currently know, they're assuming this is the optimal course of action, and therefore we shouldn't view it as something irrational." All this is to say, in many words, in both cases we assume that it is an irrational behavior. But there is a lot of uncertainty around what irrational really means.

SPENCER: Of these theories, if either, do you subscribe to, or do you take a different viewpoint altogether?

ITAMAR: Both, and the latest theories attempt to combine these two theories into a single framework. One example of this would be the temporal decision model, which attempts to connect temporal motivation theory and emotionl regulation theory into a single equation, and is trying to say this factor matters. This discounting of future outcomes matters. All the factors that go into temporal motivation, such as the level of efficacy that we have and the level of delay that there is, all matter. But at the same time, factors like emotion and the worries that we have in our desire to feel good right now also matter. Basically, trying to combine them, and in my work, I try to focus on both factors.

SPENCER: So, you think basically the two theories are both on the right track? They're just incomplete, and if we combine them, that will be kind of a fairly complete model? Or do you think those will still be missing important elements of procrastination?

ITAMAR: So, one of my favorite quotes, which I've included in the book as well, is from George Box, who said, "All models are wrong; some models are useful." I think this is very much the case here. We will never have a perfect model of perfectionism or procrastination because the map is not the territory, and the models that we're trying to use to capture this are never perfectly accurate. At the same time, I think the current theories are pretty good. They do capture a very good portion of this behavior and explain it fairly well. And I think that when we combine them, we help connect a lot of the missing pieces, essentially, and get a better model than when we just look at one of the theories on its own.

SPENCER: What are some of the open questions about procrastination, or is it pretty well understood at this point?

ITAMAR: I think it's fairly well understood, but there are still a lot of open questions. In my eyes, the most interesting one is around the variability. How does procrastination differ for different individuals? We touched on that when we were talking about the duality of perfectionism, the duality of anxiety, and factors like that. One of the things that currently gets in the way of understanding procrastination and other phenomena like it is that we tend to treat it as one construct. We tend to treat it as one problem, when in reality it is much more complicated than that, and when we condense all that richness into a single construct, often the effects cancel out or get hidden. What I would love to see is a better understanding of what procrastination looks like for different people. How do factors like anxiety, for example, affect people? How do they affect procrastinators under different circumstances and with different types of anxiety? Basically, diving into that richness so we can develop a better understanding of what causes this problem, and then also what we can do to solve it.

SPENCER: And before we wrap up, what do you want people to remember from this conversation?

ITAMAR: The most important thing is to understand that next time won't be different. If you go into it with the same plan, you're going to do the same things and get the same results, and that's okay, as long as you understand that's the case. Once you do, you can start experimenting to figure out what works in your particular situation, and then you can iterate on your plan until you figure out what helps you stop procrastinating in practice. If you found this interesting, and if you procrastinate or know someone who does and want to help them, I go into much more detail about why we do it and what kind of things we can do to stop it in my new book, which is coming out now with Penguin Random House. It's called Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to Finally Stop.

SPENCER: Itamar, thanks for coming on the Clearer Thinking podcast.

ITAMAR: Thank you very much, Spencer.