Life Kit - The reasons you procrastinate -- and how to finally stop

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Want to finally stop doomscrolling and actually do the thing you've been putting off? Itamar Shatz, author of the book Solving Procrastination, explains the evolutionary reason we avoid difficult tasks and the research-backed methods that can help you take action.Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekitSign up for our newsletter here.Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [e-mail] public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening and convenient playlists of popular help topics like personal finance, getting healthy, and more. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You can say I'm on a quest or I'm battling the dragon of procrastination, or you can visualize it as a journey. But the really important thing is to figure out what is going to motivate you. When I was a kid, my dad took us to the park and he just wanted us to learn that it's important to clean up your public spaces. And people would leave their trash in the park. And so we picked up the trash, but we were pretending that we were like pirates. So we'd pick up clothes hangers and be fighting with them like there were swords and we would have the plastic bags or whatever and tie them as bandanas. This is what I remember.

That then grew into a whole scene in my mind and made the task much more fun. Exactly. And ultimately you're doing the same thing, but you're getting yourself to feel much more excited about it. You're reframing it in a way that makes it feel much more fun. You're listening to Life Kit. I'm Mariel Segarra. And you just heard from Itemar Shats. He's a social science lecturer at Cambridge University,

an author of the book, Solving Procrastination, which it would be great to solve. Although if you do procrastinate, and who doesn't, right? Give yourself a break. There's an evolutionary reason you do it. Procrastination at its core is ultimately driven by our mind pushing us to pursue immediate pleasure and avoid immediate pain.

Let's say we have to do something like write an email. If we feel scared for some reason, maybe we're worried that it will go wrong, we're worried we'll be criticized for it. Our brain says, you know what? It would be better if instead of doing this, maybe you could just browse social media right now, or watch one more video, or do whatever else that will help you avoid doing this. The problem is that in the modern world, this kind of response doesn't work for us because we're not dealing with the problem that we should have been dealing with. On this episode of Life Kit, battling the dragon of procrastination.

Starting here, Itamar says one big reason we procrastinate is that the task itself seems unpleasant. So what we need to do is make it more pleasant and thus more appealing to take action. I think of this as the Mary Poppins principle. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way. One thing you can do to make a task more pleasant is something called temptation bundling. And that's when we take something that we really want to do, like listen to an audiobook, or listen to energizing music or something else that we find enticing, and pairing that up with a task we don't want to do.

So the way we might do this is say, you know, I really don't want to go running, but I really want to listen to my favorite audiobook. So I'm only going to let myself listen to this audiobook when I'm going running. Another thing you can do is trying to make tasks that we dislike less aversive. An example of this is let's say you decide you want to go exercising after you get home from work. and you noticed that even though you're really motivated to do it, in practice, once you get home, you kind of end up sitting there and maybe wasting a bit of time and your motivation ends up fizzling out. And in that case, what might be the issue is that before you go to the gym, you have to get your bag ready and pack everything up.

And that's kind of a bummer. And in that case, what you can do is say, you know what, I'm going to separate these two tasks. I'm going to deal with this bag thing the day before when I motivated and when I know that I know that I don't have to take it with me yet. And then the day after, when you're back home from work and you're feeling maybe a bit more tired, it's already there. Takeaway one, make it more appealing to take action. You can try temptation bundling where you basically give yourself a little treat, like watching your favorite show when you do the task. You can do some of the work ahead of time, pack for the trip, or wash those fruits and vegetables so the task doesn't seem so involved

when you have to do it later. And you can gamify. Try sprinting through the task. doing it as quickly as possible and seeing how much progress you could make. Or, you know, pretend you're a pirate, or that you can make your clothes levitate themselves back into your wardrobe. Coming up, we talk about perfectionism and how it can lead to procrastination. One reason I procrastinate is that I want to do a good job, and that seems like it's going to take too much energy, so I do nothing instead. Maybe the problem is not that I'm trying to do a good job,

but that I'm trying to do a perfect job. and I don't want to fall short of that goal. Itemar says, if this is true for you, if perfectionism is driving your procrastination. What I would recommend is figure out what specifically good enough means for you. Get yourself to be okay with it and then focus on achieving it. So let's see you want to share a book that you're writing with people. Perfectionism in this case can be sort of a defense mechanism where you're saying, I just got to keep revising it.

I got to keep revising it. I got to revise it again and again. And there it's protecting you from critical. criticism because it's giving you a reason not to share it. And what you can do in that case and say, you know what, my good enough point is when I go over it, not actually finding any changes to implement. And once you find that particular position, you can say when I get here, I'm going to send it out because that is when it is good enough. Yeah. I think about that too with speaking Spanish. I'm Puerto Rican on my dad's side, but I'm not a native speaker. So I can get in my own

head a lot about it and think, I'm never going to be perfect at this. I'm an outsider. And it gets to that point, though, of, like, aiming for good enough. What is good enough? It's being able to speak Spanish to my family and understand them. You know, it's being able to do ancestry research and maybe read some books in Spanish. Like, that's my goal. I would even say, for today, you can say, my goal today is to learn a word that and not to yesterday. My goal for tomorrow is to add one more word to that and just tackle it one step at a time

instead of looking at the very end goal, finding those steps that we can focus on along the way. If there weren't any mistakes and you knew everything perfectly, it wouldn't be really language learning. It would be just downloading the language. Take away to get comfortable with good enough and let yourself make mistakes. Okay, so we've been talking about ways

that we can make it more appealing to take action. What about if the reason you're procrastinating is that you think the task is meaningless? So when we evolved, most of the tasks were very visceral. It was get shelter or freeze to death. Find food or starve, run from this line or get eaten. And now a lot of the tasks feel much more meaningless or nebulous and there could be things like, gather all these receipts, send them to your accountant so that you don't get a letter from IRS in, I don't know, a year or whatever it is. and that's much harder for our brain to feel connected to and to feel excited about. And there are a few things you can do there.

One is to find the meaning. And that could be, okay, that's true that this whole task is a bit nebulous and meaningless, but let's think about the bad outcome here. That might be that I go to jail. That might be that I get fired. That might be that I feel bad. And basically trying to get yourself to think about the actual outcomes and make them feel much more concrete. And the other thing you can do in this kind of situation is to reframe the task.

So sometimes we get tasks that just feel meaningless, and there's not much we can do about them. In those kind of situations, what you can do is reframe it a bit by thinking, this task is meaningless. I'm not excited about it, fair enough, but I'm a person who gets things done. I am a reliable individual. I'm a productive person. So my goal for finishing this as quickly as possible isn't to show that I care about this task, but to show that I care about getting things done.

Takeaway three, when a task feels unimportant, see if you can find the meaning. Like, okay, I don't want to do this paperwork. It's a lot of bureaucracy, but I do want to grow my business and so this is necessary. Or if you can't find meaning in the task itself, find identity. I am a reliable, productive person who gets things done. After the break, we get acquainted with our future selves. I wonder, are there scenarios where we might decide that a task is something you actually don't need to do? In my eyes, the best thing is to connect to your future self and think about whether they will regret your decision.

So when you say, I really want to speak Spanish, but I'm kind of worried it will come off awkward or maybe I'll mispronounce words. Let's think about my future self. How will my future self feel if I do give this a shot, even if I make mistakes, or if I decide not to do it? And basically trying to visualize how much regret will your future self feel and empathize with them. There are certain things, too, that are like, it feels like you could do them at any time. Like, the stakes are not that high if I don't speak Spanish today. But then at the same time, if I don't speak Spanish any day, then I don't speak Spanish. You know?

And you could use that test and say, like, how would my future self feel about this? but my future self wouldn't care too much if I spoke Spanish today, but they'd want me to be practicing so that they had that tool available to them. Absolutely. Then you can decide to do it on two levels. One is, okay, what will tomorrow me think and what will me a month from now think? And try to think what both of them will care about. It occurs to me that this step also requires some imagination,

picturing your future self and empathizing with your future self. Yes. I've read one example of this is if you are not currently saving for retirement, that it can help to think about you at retirement age. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you probably look a little different then. And think about the freedom that you'll have if you set aside that nest egg now, the gift that you're giving to yourself. Exactly. And basically, the issue that can happen is that there is something called temporal disjunction.

or self-discontinuity, where we feel that our future self is separate from us. And that makes us care about them less, which in practice means caring about ourselves less. And empathizing with our future self is a way to overcome that. Yeah, it's almost this idea that you're like, well, I'm never going to get old. Or I'm never going to die. We know that these things happen, but we don't really believe that they're going to happen to us. Yeah. Imagining what retirement will look like in decades is not something our brains,

we're designed for. We were meant to focus on the immediate much more. But because that's no longer really an option for us today, it's important to get our brains to think about not just the immediate, but also about what will be better for us in the longer term. Takeaway four, empathize with future you. If you delay this task, will you regret it later? If you do it today, how does future you benefit? Remember, future you is you. Now so far in this episode we've been talking about procrastination, which Itimar says is unhealthy delay, pushing off a task even though that's going to harm you or make things more difficult. But sometimes it makes sense to delay. And sometimes, yes, we're putting off one task, but we're doing a different one that also needs to get done. That is called

productive procrastination. When I was writing the book, I actually did this a lot. So I structured the way I wanted to write the book. And it was very sequentially. And then sometimes I notice that when I'm writing, I just feel this inner resistance through writing a certain part. And initially I tried to force myself to write it and then I realized, you know what? What matters ultimately is that I make progress every single day. It doesn't matter if I write this particular part right now

or if I skip to a different part that I feel like writing today. And basically I gave myself permission to say, right now I should be working on chapter 15, but for some reason I woke up today and I feel like working on chapter 22. and then just gave myself permission to do that. And ultimately, that was much more productive than trying to stick to a strict schedule because the book still gets done at the same time. But it actually makes the whole process much easier and just feel much better as well.

Yeah, I get that. Because I also think, like, sometimes you're in the mood for or equipped in the moment for a certain kind of work and not for a different kind of work. And that's why two of my biggest tips. One is around ride the waves of your productivity rhythms. So figure out when you're ready to handle certain tasks and then schedule them tasks for those times. So maybe in theory you should open your day with emails, but actually you realize that in the morning before you've started, that's when you concentrate best. So you're going to schedule the deep work for that time when you're fresh and then do emails after.

Or maybe technically dishes aren't the first thing you should do when you get home, but really, realistically, you're so tired for the first half an hour that you might as well do something mindless, give yourself some time to unwind and just do it then. What is the most surprising thing you learned about procrastination in studying and in writing this? I think when I set out, the focus was really on overcoming procrastination. And the more I read and the more I learned, the more I realize it's important to sometimes know when to cut herself slack. And I think that's one of the things I've really shifted on in terms of how important is to give ourselves self-compassion, how important it is to realize not only when we should stop procrastinating, but also when it just doesn't matter.

And we can say, you know what, I'm procrastinating, it's benign procrastination, that's fine. Or I'm procrastinating, but I'm being productive. I'm still going to get to whatever it is I need to do at the end, but right now I'm going to do something else because otherwise I'm going to just waste time. And this basically all revolves around kind of planning. for the very imperfect humans that we are, as opposed to the perfect machines we sometimes wish we were. Itamar, thank you so much. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

Okay, time for a recap. Takeaway one, make it more appealing to take action. You can try temptation bundling, or do some of the work ahead of time, or gamify. Takeaway two, get comfortable with good enough, and let yourself make mistakes. Takeaway three, when a task feels unimportant, see if you can find the meaning, or if you can find the meaning. you can't find meaning in the task itself, find identity. I am a reliable, productive person who gets things done. Takeaway four, empathize with future you. If you delay this task, will you regret it? If you do it now, how does future you benefit? Remember, future you

is you, and they appreciate all you do for them. All right, that's our show. If you love LifeKit and you want even more, follow us on Instagram at NPR Life Kit. There you'll find videos featuring our favorite tips and musings, and you'll get to see our faces. Again, that's at NPR Life Kit. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Our digital editor is Malika Garib, and our visuals editor is C.J. Rikelan. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor, and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer.

Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Murray Schneider, and Margaret Serino. Engineering support comes from Travis Hagen. Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Col. I'm Mary El Cigara. Thanks for listening.