3-Bullet Summary

You’ll benefit more from reading the article the whole way through. But, if you’re pressed for time, here’s a condensed version of The Ultimate Guide to Overcoming Procrastination For Good:

• Procrastination is one of the most significant issues plaguing students today.
• Fortunately, procrastination boils down to four core pillars: expectancy, value, sensitivity to delay and delay.
• To beat procrastination for good, we simply need to get these pillars working in our favour by making the completion of the task easy, making the task more rewarding, making the task the only thing we can focus on, and making it so we can take action and receive feedback quickly.

“I’ll Start in 20 Minutes”

The clock’s ticking; the assignment you need to complete — the one you’ve delayed completing all week — is now just one day away from needing to be submitted.

Surely you’re working on it, right? I mean, you’ve barely got 24 hours to get it done. The urgency must be high.

But… you’re sitting there… on your phone.

You know that the task needs doing, but for some reason you can’t find the willpower to do it.

You keep on rationalising your behaviour: “I’ll start in 20 minutes,” you convince yourself.

20 minutes later…

Okay, it’s time to start now. You told yourself that it’s time to get grinding right now, so you’re going to get that assignment done now. Go you!

Yet, you’re frozen. You’re staring blankly at the wall. From an external eye, you look like you need new batteries. Yet, internally, a war is raging.

One voice in your head says that you need to work. The other voice says that the task is going to be hard and uncomfortable, and that you should stay on your phone for another 20 minutes.

You’re calculating rapidly, pondering over which decision to make. Task completion vs comfort. Light vs dark.

You just can’t bring yourself to get started, all whilst time ticks on.

Introduction

If there’s one issue that all students face, it’s procrastination.

A meta-analysis (a study that analyses lots of other studies) found that 80–95% of students procrastinate regularly¹. Scarily, the study also found that 50% of students are chronic procrastinators, meaning they consistently and unnecessarily postpone decisions or actions in several areas of their life.

Hence, there’s a good chance you are a chronic procrastinator. (Dun dun dun!)

Don’t feel ashamed, though. Procrastination is almost ingrained in society nowadays.

We’re surrounded by hyper-addictive substances and technologies which make the things we procrastinate — often the less sexy, difficult tasks — seem dull and unenjoyable in comparison. Why study when video games exist? Why go for a walk when you’ve got endless entertainment on social media?

Simply put, in a society of stimulation, we yearn for easy things and procrastinate the harder things. Overcoming procrastination is therefore no easy task.

But, what if I told you that there‘s a handful of tools you can employ to make overcoming procrastination easy?

I bet you’d be sceptical, right? Well, in this article, I’m going to give you the tools so you can beat procrastination in your life today, and prove to yourself otherwise.

Trust me when I say that these tools are like the infinity stones of productivity. They helped me, a person who used to play video games for 8 hours per day, to achieve 3 A*’s at sixth form, rank at the top of their university, and muster the productive power to tutor other students to beat procrastination!

However, before we get to the tools, I must let you in on a secret…

To actually use the tools effectively, you need to understand one key thing: what procrastination is.

Why? Simple, if you know what procrastination actually boils down to, then you’ll better grasp why the tools are so powerful. In turn, you’ll then be able to apply them more effectively and get much better results.

So, if overcoming procrastination is your goal, then it’s time to finally learn…

The Science of Procrastination

Procrastination seems quite intuitive, right? It’s basically postponing doing stuff that we should actually be doing.

Nonetheless, this definition forgets something huge: what causes us to postpone being productive in the first place.

Now, there are lots of theories out there that attempt to explain why we procrastinate. But, I’m not going to lecture you on the different perspectives that exist in the scientific field. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the most relevant and updated theory that’ll actually give us some good insights…

Temporal Motivation Theory

Remember that study from earlier? The meta-analysis? Well, that study looked at a whopping 691 other studies on procrastination. In it, the researcher identified 4 variables that impact utility, referring to how desirable a task is to complete, and, therefore, how likely we are to do it.

1. Expectancy of the task (E) — The perceived chance a certain outcome will come about. (“Will I complete this task?”)
2. The value that task holds (V) — How rewarding the task is while performing it. (“Will I get something out of this task?”)
3. Sensitivity to delay (F) — The importance of the delay to a person. High sensitivity = greater chance of procrastination. This includes things like distractibility and impulsiveness: things that make you more prone to delaying tasks. (“What are the factors stopping me from doing this task?”)
4. Delay (D) — When the task can be performed. Tasks that can be performed immediately, and which give us rewards or punishments soon after being performed, have short delays and high utility. (“When will I know if I’m doing things right or wrong?”)

He actually put these variables into a formula:

Figure 1. The Utility Equation. Figure from: Steel, P. (2007) ‘The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure’, Psychological Bulletin, 133(1). DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65.

Knowing this, if we manipulate these 4 variables in our favour and start making our tasks higher utility, then procrastination is all but destroyed.

But how do we do this? The answer is actually quite straightforward: identify the best-case scenario for each of the variables:

1. Expectancy of the task (E) — Make it seem like the task is easy to complete. (“I reckon I could do this.”)
2. The value that task holds (V) — Make the task seem intrinsically (i.e., internally) rewarding, rather than attached to an outcome you don’t truly care about. (“I want to complete this task.”)
3. Sensitivity to delay (F) — Make delaying the task impossible and painful by improving your ability to focus on it. (“There are no factors distracting me.”)
4. Delay (D) — Make it so the task can be started as soon as physically possible, and you get quick feedback. (“There’s nothing stopping me from starting and I’ll get feedback soon.”)

Now that we know what genuinely causes procrastination, we’ve got one last thing to do: learn the strategies we can use to destroy the causes!

Overcoming Procrastination for Good

If you’re anything like me when I first saw this study, your mind is blown. I mean, how crazy is it to think that we actually understand the things that plant the seeds of procrastination in our everyday lives! (Great job, scientists!)

Moreover, I bet you’ve got loads of ideas buzzing around in your head. You’re trying to think about the strategies you could utilise to swing these variables on your side and start overcoming procrastination.

However, because I’m kind, I’m going to walk you through exactly what you need to do, step-by-step. The strategies I’m about to show you correspond to each of the 4 variables listed in the previous section. This means that we’re going to cover all the pillars of procrastination and leave no stones unturned.

You don’t have to anything except read through the strategies I’m about to share with you, take notes, and act on them.

Right, let’s stop procrastinating. Here are the 4 pillars to overcoming procrastination for good!

Pillar 1) Make Completing the Task Easy

If we want to get hard work done, then we need to make completing it as frictionless as possible. In other words, we must increase our self-efficacy — the belief that we can actually make progress.

Studies have shown that people with more self-efficacy demonstrate better task performance and are more likely to get tasks done². Simply put, the more belief we have in ourselves that we can get tasks done, the more likely we are to do them.

Now, you could listen to the advice given by most articles on self-efficacy and shout positive affirmations at yourself in the mirror. I guess that could increase your self-efficacy a bit. But, in my opinion, that’s totally impractical.

Instead, we’re going to increase our self-efficacy by breaking down the task we’re procrastinating into small chunks. It’s not hard to understand why this increases self-belief. The less daunting the task feels, the more realistic the possibility of accomplishing it becomes, and, therefore, the more motivated we are to get working on it.

Breaking Down a Task

To do this, you’re going perform two actions:

1. Turn your task into an outcome goal (i.e., the event experienced when you finish the task).
2. Reverse engineer the process goals (i.e., the actionable habits that go into achieving the outcome goal).

In The Ultimate Guide on How to Set Goals and Secure Success, we went through the process of this bit-by-bit. I’m not going to go into too much detail about how to do it in this guide, but, in short, you need to identify the fields related to your outcome goal (i.e., the areas you need to focus on to achieve it), the actionable strategies within those fields, and the process goals stemming from those strategies.

For example, if your outcome goal was something like this…

‘By the end of the week, I will have at least written 1000 words for my essay, but no more than 2000.’

Then…

• The fields would be the big pillars of essay writing, like researching, writing and proofreading.
• The strategies would be the actions related to those fields. For instance, in the researching field, a strategy would be finding academic sources to use for your essay.
• The process goals would be the actions stemming from those strategies. For instance, ‘This week, I will research my essay topic for at least 1 hour, and eventually progress this to 2–3 hours’.

By reverse engineering the steps required to achieve an outcome goal (i.e., finish the task), you make it seem a whole lot more digestible.

Put another way, it’s much easier to write an essay if you know what you need to do and how long for, than if you go in blind and say to yourself “I’m going to work on my essay today”.

Be specific and break your task down as much as you need to. Doing so really increases your chances of overcoming procrastination.

Pillar 2) Make the Task More Rewarding

You’ve got two options:

• Bask in the glorious summer sun whilst sipping your favourite cold beverage.
• Sit indoors at your desk and study.

Which option are you more likely to choose?

I’m going to guess that you probably chose the first option. You did this because you have mentally framed the activity in option A (i.e., going outside and drinking something you like) as more desirable than the activity in option B (i.e., studying indoors).

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, we’re never going to make super hard tasks more enjoyable than ones we’d do for the sake of doing. However, we can make them more intrinsically (i.e., internally) satisfying, and therefore important to complete.

To do this we must understand the concept of purpose.

Your purpose is your why. It’s the reasoning behind your actions.

Most people fall into one of two purpose boats:

• They don’t know why they’re doing things in the first place — These people are what I call drifters; they casually float through life without any meaning underlying their actions.
• They’re doing things for external reasons — In essence, they act because of an external reward or demand: status symbols, wealth, material goods, deadlines, etc.

The issue is that both these boats are counterintuitive to overcoming procrastination.

On one hand, if you don’t have a reason to complete the task you’re procrastinating, then unless you’ve got a tonne of willpower, you’ll keep procrastinating it.

On the other hand, although extrinsic (i.e., external; reward-based) motivation has been shown to be more effective at overcoming procrastination than having no motivation at all³, it’s still ineffective in the long term in isolation (read that again). Think of it this way, if you keep doing something for some external reason, then you’ll never find a way to genuinely make the thing you’re doing satisfying for you at a personal level. Basically, you’ll be the person who gets the good grades and owns the big house, but hates their life.

So what should you do?

The answer isn’t sexy, but it’s crucial for overcoming procrastination: develop intrinsic motivation.

Developing Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation basically means doing something for the sake of doing it. If you’re intrinsically motivated to run, then you run because you love running and want to master the craft.

Studies have found that students who develop intrinsic motivation for studying, and combine this passion with extrinsic motivation, are significantly less likely to procrastinate than purposeless students and those with pure extrinsic motivations⁴.

But how can we turn the hard tasks that we, as students, must complete to be successful (i.e., studying, revising and writing) into things we want to genuinely improve at?

There are multiple possible solutions to this problem. However, two stick out in particular.

First, you could attach hard tasks to something you genuinely love doing.

For example, let’s say that you love competing with yourself and improving. You could integrate this into studying or revising by turning the tasks you need to complete into games. These games could be related to getting more questions right, trying to beat the number of flashcards you studied last time, or even framing textbook chapters as levels to be finished in return for XP — anything that aligns with your deep desire.

Don’t know what you love doing? Answer this question that Mark Manson recommends to his readers who are searching for purpose: ‘What makes you forget to eat and poop?’

Every human being has something that they love doing so much that it puts them into a flow state — a feeling of pure focus; athletes describe it as getting ‘in the zone’. It’s not often an activity, per se, but rather a core aspect of an activity. For example, it’s probably not video games that you get flow from, but rather the process of levelling up, or leading your teammates. Once you find your flow state activity, if you can combine that with hard things, they instantly become intrinsic motivators.

The second solution to the intrinsic motivation problem is to put the task in the bigger picture. By this, I simply mean putting it in the context of your biggest goals.

For example, if your dream was to be a self-published writer, you could start framing the things you’re procrastinating as meaningful steps in the road. Each essay is an opportunity to receive valuable feedback on your writing technique. Each flashcard you revise is building your reading and learning skills.

By doing this, you make small actions seem like big levers to pull on your journey. Everything you do starts to take on meaning. If it doesn’t help you to move towards your goals, it gets cut. If it drives you forward towards your end goal, you attack it with full focus.

So, before moving onto the next section, spend some time thinking about the things that put you into a flow state, as well as where you want to go in life and how the things you’re procrastinating could help you move in the right direction.

Pillar 3) Make the Task the Only Thing You Can Focus on

This pillar centres around one key idea: bullet-proofing your focus.

Answer this question: if you’re surrounded by distracting, stimulating things, are you going to find it easier or harder to get hard work done that’s far less glamorous? Go ahead; I’ll wait.

…

Obviously, you’ll find them much harder to accomplish. So, this means that a key part of overcoming procrastination is improving our focus.

Lucky for you, I’ve written extensively on this topic. There are two guides that stick out in particular.

• The Ultimate Guide on How to Focus for Maximal Productivity — Uncover the 6 “D’s” of focus that’ll transform your ability to get hard work done.
• Environment Design is the Secret to Effortless Success — Master the art of creating a distraction-free work environment.

If you read through both articles in your own time, you’ll swiftly learn how to destroy distractions for good.

However, if I was to give you just one piece of advice in this article that would have the biggest impact, it would be the following:

Do not, I repeat, do not, work with any technology around you that isn’t directly related to your work task.

Your phone stays out of your sight, on aeroplane mode, and with notifications and lift-to-wake off whilst you’re working. Turn all games consoles, televisions and monitors (which you aren’t using) off at the socket. Disable notifications and distracting websites if you’re working on a laptop/PC.

There’s no excuse to have distracting technology on or around you when you need to work. You won’t do better with it, and it’ll simply drain your focus.

TL; DR: eliminate distractions so that the task you’re procrastinating is the only option.

Pillar 4) Make It So You Can Take Action and Receive Feedback as Fast as Possible

As the title of this final section implies, there are two components of delay from the utility equation that we must consider if we want to annihilate procrastination. These are the ability to take action and time before feedback.

The Ability to Take Action

The first step is always the hardest. No matter what you’re doing, getting started seems infinitely daunting and never gets easier. Part of the reason for this is because we make getting started so freaking hard!

I want you to picture two people trying to lose weight.

• Person 1 goes in thinking purely about the outcome. They’ve got pictures of their dream body plastered around their room, and set the intention of ‘I want to lose weight and look better’.
• Person 2 goes in thinking purely about how they’re going to get 1% better than they already look each day. They’re diverting all their focus to taking baby steps towards their goal, rather than focusing on the far away end destination.

Who do you think is going to be more likely to get started on their weight loss journey? Easy, right? Person 2.

The reason for this is because they’ve brought their starting point down to a manageable level. Instead of just thinking about the end goal that’s many months of dieting and training away, they’ve realised that they just need to make incremental progress every day.

So, why do so many students do what Person 1 does, but in relation to studying, revising and writing? Barely any of them — maybe even you — make taking action achievable. Simply put, they just focus on outcomes rather than the steps to achieve them, and wonder why they’re procrastinating.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: progressive habit overload.

If you followed the advice for Pillar 1, then you’ll have transformed the thing you’re procrastinating into an outcome goals and relevant process goals. Process goals by nature make getting started easier, as they give you some practical action steps. But, some people still struggle to do them consistently.

Progressive habit overload, which I outlined in The Ultimate Guide on How to Achieve Goals and Forge Habits, is the solution. It simply refers to identifying the lowest possible starting point of whichever process goals you’re procrastinating, and gradually increasing how much of it you do over time.

Let’s say you’re procrastinating revising for an exam, despite identifying relevant outcome and process goals. Specifically, you’re procrastinating this process goal:

‘Every week until my exam is done, I will study my flashcards for at least 1 hour per day, and eventually progress this to 2 hours per day.’

If this is too daunting for you, just make it easier:

‘Every week until my exam is done, I will study my flashcards for at least 15 minutes per day, and eventually progress this to 1 hours per day.’

Now, you’ve made getting started as easy as possible, and given yourself a lot of room to grow. Moreover, there’s a good chance that you’ll end up revising for more than 15 minutes, because you’ll gradually settle into the task once you’ve started.

TL; DR: Start doing a habit for as short of a time duration as you need, and progress this over time as you build consistency.

Time Before Feedback

Once you’ve started, however, there will be a point in your journey when the motivation wanes and you’ll be incredibly likely to procrastinate (or even quit). It’s the point at which you’re not getting any feedback, and don’t know whether you’re making progress. This is a concept I call the grey zone, based off a famous graph called the emotional cycle of change.

Figure 2. The Emotional Cycle of Change. Adapted from: Kelley, D. and Conner, D.R. (1979) ‘The emotional cycle of change,’ in Jones, J.E. and J.B. Pfeiffer (ed.) The 1979 annual handbook for group facilitators. San Diego: University Associates, Inc.

The grey zone claims many victims. Unless you have a lot of discipline, which many people don’t, it can be difficult to keep doing something if you don’t get any feedback. I mean, how many people do you know who started something, only to go back to their old ways after a few months, weeks or days? Lots, I can imagine. The reason they stopped was probably because they didn’t get quick results. They stopped going to the gym because they weren’t in great shape after a few weeks. They stopped studying every day because their grades didn’t immediately improve. You get the idea.

So, if we know that the grey zone is where we’re going to be most likely to procrastinate, and we stay in the grey zone until we get feedback, why don’t we just make it so we get feedback quicker, escape the grey zone and overcome procrastination?

Here’s the best part: doing this couldn’t be any easier.

Because feedback, in the case of task procrastination, basically means rewards or punishments, just reward or punish yourself more quickly!

However, rather than use both, we’re specifically going to focus on rewards (i.e., positive reinforcement). We’re going to skip out on punishments because they can create negative associations with the task we’re prone to procrastinating. I don’t know about you, but if I’m procrastinating something and finally get going, the last thing I want is to be told that I’m a worthless shell of a human being after my first attempt at it.

So, because it’s probably wiser to get some extrinsic motivation that can’t deter us in the long term, we’re going to focus on quick rewards for not procrastinating done the right way. To do this, literally just attach a reward to the completion of a process goal, rather than an outcome goal. This contrasts what most people do, but, based on science, it’s more effective.

For example, rather than rewarding yourself with a big treat after finishing the essay you’re procrastinating, give yourself mini rewards after completing the process goals going into that essay, such as writing a certain number of words, or completing a certain number of hours of research. If you make these rewards short and sweet, then you’ll have a constant source of extrinsic motivation, which, when coupled with the intrinsic motivation you developed in Pillar 2’s section, makes procrastination borderline impossible.

Please, though, make sure these rewards won’t sabotage progress towards your goals and make future you frown in disappointment. (Read that again.) Giving yourself huge spikes of dopamine from super big rewards will make returning to the much more plain, everyday task needlessly painful. So, rather than rewarding yourself for writing 1000 words of your essay with a 2-hour TikTok binge, why not do something that you really enjoy and which will actually benefit you? Go for a walk in nature with a friend. Have a piece of your favourite fruit out in the sunshine. Play with a pet.

Whatever you choose to reward yourself with, just make it both satisfying and (somewhat) good for you.

Final Thoughts: The Ultimate Guide to Overcoming Procrastination Forever

Imagine if going up one point on a 5-point scale lost you $15,000 (£11,927) per year in salary. You’d want to avoid doing the thing that causes you to go up on that scale like like the plague, right?

Well, three researchers identified procrastination as that thing⁵. Yep, procrastination is literally a curse to your long-term wealth.

I could go on and tell you about all the other bad things that procrastination does to your life, but there’s no point.

Why?

We’ve got the solution to beating it!

In this guide, we’ve covered the four pillars of overcoming procrastination: expectancy, value, sensitivity to delay and delay. Moreover, we’ve covered actionable strategies for each pillar, and learned exactly how to integrate them into our daily lives.

With this information, you now have the power to quite literally do whatever you set your mind to. So long as you always have these tools in your arsenal, you’ll be able to behead the procrastination dragon when it arises.

If you enjoyed this article or received any valuable information, hit one of the social icons below and share it with a friend. It would mean the world to me and the person you’re helping. Overcoming procrastination is something that all students could benefit from.

Also, because you’ve read this far, I’ll let you in on a secret. Well, 10 actually. For no cost whatsoever, you can claim your copy of The 10 Secrets of Strong Students. It’s loaded with tactics that’ll take you from wherever you are now to new levels of success. Don’t take my word for it; download it and see for yourself.

Right, for now, that’s all. You have my permission to reward yourself — just keep it small and sweet.

😉

Stay Strong,

Sam.

Founder, Strong Students.