Why You Keep Procrastinating (And What to Do About It)

Say you live in utopia, a place where you feel zero resistance to live out your ideal life. You (would) do things when you are to do them, and deliver the best version of everything you set your very capable mind. You (would) never procrastinate.

But… you live in reality.

Wonderful as it can be, living in reality means being subject to resistance. Put simply, resistance is everything (in your environment) that makes it difficult for you to do things. It could be a pandemic. It could be a toxic spouse. It could be a having close to zero zeal to do anything. Of all the things resistance can cause, perhaps the most insidious is inducing a feeling to do the absolute definition of nothing.

You can argue it's impossible for a living person to do nothing, but anyone who has said "I'm feeling down today" or "Today, I don't feel like doing anything" is familiar with the feeling of not wanting to do anything, and the sense of discomfort that sometimes accompanies the feeling.

One of the things unarguably possible is to zoom in on the discomfort experienced at points when the sense that you are doing nothing arises. At the heart of the discomfort is a sense you would be better off doing something other than what you are doing. When this feeling dominates, the template of self-talk is usually simple: You are supposed to be doing X but you are here doing Y.

X and Y could be anything:

You are supposed to be drafting a memo due tomorrow but you are watching cat videos on Instagram. You are supposed to be composing your original song but you are ruminating you said bello to cute Trevor in accounting instead of hello. You are supposed to be preparing for an interview but you are re-watching Arcane on Netflix, for a third time. To be fair League of Legend Arcane is a great movie but the point is: at moments when you are engaged in doing Y there is (often) an unpleasant tug at the back your mind demanding you do something else - something more important - X.

For the most part, resistance is a problem of which you can do little. You can't, for example, dictate the direction of a pandemic. And for you interested in getting things done, the discomfort experienced by the feeling of doing nothing can be a source of agony.

Fortunately, there is hope.

In his bestselling book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author, Steven Covey, makes a distinction about things. There are things you can do something about and there are things you can do nothing about. Effective people devote their resources to things they do something about.

While it might be impossible to do something about existence of resistance it is possible to solve the problems resistance leaves in it wake, and a useful place to start is dealing with the feeling to do nothing. The resistance inducing feeling to do nothing is important because it robs you of the intrinsic resources (will, ability, focus, etc) to apply the currency required to make shifts from where you are to where you see as ideal: Effort.

Resistance robs you of resources required to apply effort and effort helps you get rid of resistance.

So, what if the vision of utopia isn’t one with an absence of resistance but one where there is (uncompromising) devotion to application of effort? This, on the subject of dealing with procrastination, is worth exploring.