The ObservatoryProcrastination is not laziness
Why we postpone things we know are important, and why time planning is rarely the solution.
If procrastination were a time-management problem, better calendars and to-do lists would have solved it long ago. They haven't. We keep postponing things we know are important, things we even want to do, and we often do it fully aware that it will punish us. It is not the behavior of someone lacking planning. It is the behavior of someone fleeing something.
The researchers Tim Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois have proposed an explanation that changes the whole picture: procrastination is not a flaw in time management, but a way of regulating emotions. The task evokes something unpleasant: boredom, fear of failing, confusion about where to start, reluctance, a nagging sense of not being enough. Postponing it removes the discomfort. In the moment. The bill is sent to the future, to a self who gets both the task still there and a portion of guilt on top.
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Why does it work?
Builds on Pychyl and Sirois's research on procrastination as failed emotion regulation rather than a time-management problem. It is the same basis as the exercise "Procrastination is a feeling" in the library.
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