Why do I procrastinate?

What's stopping you (yeah you!) from doing the things you set out to do? Say, for instance, publishing your personal blog? I have cooked up a few theories based on personal observations.

Hypothesis 1: Identity and context

You don't follow through due to the kind of individual you are, often referred to as personality. There are many personality categorization theories out there, with varying parameters and objectives. One that is applicable to this discussion is the 16-personalities theory. (You didn't ask but scored as an INTJ-A consistently).

The person you undeniably are is bound to have a particular set of traits and behaviors. That is, because of how your brain operates, your likelihood of dropping or continue doing something may vary. Because, for example, a lot of things spark your interest and it's tougher to say no.

One could also argue that never before in human history has, an average Westerner, living in such a technocratic society, experienced the degree of stimuli we're subjected to today. The idea that a world that is incentivized to be filled with distractions and interactions at your fingertips could influence your propensity to procrastinate isn't far-fetched.

These are all very rational, but honestly fundamentally weak arguments. Weak because they're useless. They're useless because of their tautological nature —they're both true and inconclusive at the same time. That is to say, practically, they don't help you understand anything, they don't offer any insight into the problem because they are universally applicable and, therefore, they don't provide any substance to a hypothesis. This is the same reason that "luck" is usually a bad explanation for anything.

Hypothesis 2: Self-awareness

Being able to recognize when you're fooling yourself and falling prey to self-indulgence is key to fighting procrastination. It usually starts consuming areas of your life that are not critical for your survival, but generally critical for your overall well-being. This means that you're likely not to procrastinate eating, but you can very well procrastinate reading, exercising, talking to friends, meditating, etc i.e., activities that rely on discipline. Therefore, the procrastinator often shows up disguised as a reasonable and justifiable excuse — "Oh I have just shipped that feature, I can totally skip workout".

In other words, you would want to know yourself enough to understand precisely when you're trying to fool yourself, and when you you're being reasonable. Sounds like a tall order?

Touching base regularly with your priorities and evaluating past behaviors can be useful in these moments. Practice keeping the vision of where you're going clear and crisp and having someone to hold you accountable can also help quite significantly —these are the remedies I've found to be most effective.

Hypothesis 3: Fear and consistency

As noted above, procrastinating usually comes up as a response to something. You want really want to do X but you end up doing Y, "just-this-time". This experience happened enough so that I was able to learn more about its mechanics. Precisely because I found a way to reproduce it. This lead me to a simple conclusion:

Procrastinating is a response to discomfort.

Such discomfort can take many forms, but it is often a kind of fear. Not the "OMG I'm afraid of heights" type of fear, but the subtle, innate and raw immobilizing feeling. That one that makes you question yourself. Most of the time, that fear isn't evident or even easily consciously recognized because it usually is played by yourself, in your head. So you think that it is you. And yep, I've just introduced the (really cool) theory of our minds housing multiple consciousnesses. So, there are really multiple, conflicting versions of you sharing your attention in the present moment. And by the time you realized, you are three trains of thought past it and the procrastinator made them pretty convincing "this time".

Even though I was able to recognize that I was playing myself, it took me a while to realize that this feeling was, indeed, a kind of fear. I was quick to label it as self-indulgence, laziness, lack of energy, motivation, or a mix of those. Turns out, however, that it was mostly fear. It was the fear that triggered a procrastinating (i.e., escaping) response. Usually a fear of not being good enough to persist on a difficult task, fear of failing to meet my own or others' expectations, fear of not being able to handle some tough situation, fear of being devalued, fear that a particular situation would end-up in a way I didn't want, etc.

Some other times it was, indeed, just a lack of energy; significantly fewer times, though. But being able to recognize the fear/escape paradigm helped me see through otherwise opaque behaviors, in which I thought I knew what was going on. Well, mistaken I was.

Recognizing things for what they are is a powerful, underrated ability. That is only half of the equation, though —you still need to effectively act on it i.e., not escape and do what you intended. But this changed from "Oh, I may need to be more energetic, time to brew another espresso!" and procrastinate while shaking, to "Oh, there it is that little fearful guy, why don't you sit down while I get this done?". The procrastinator now holds less sway over me. That isn't to say that he is gone; I think we're in this for the long run 🥰

I was only able to understand the behavior better because I could truly slow down and inspect (debug?) my mind. And the reason for being able to do that started like 5 years ago when I decided to start meditating. While I haven't meditated every single day since, and my consistency resembles a sine wave, I am confident that I am way more mindful of my mind than I ever was before I started practicing.

In a nutshell, meditation is a 2500-year battle-tested training that makes you more familiar with yourself.

If you're looking to improve your ability to remain present, you can't overlook it; if you ever see yourself pondering, give it a shot! Your experience will obviously vary depending on how and with whom you practice, but at the very least it should relax you. I am a (satisfied?) Waking Up customer —it has a unique, principled approach to meditation that goes way beyond the "meditate to relax" school of thought. It is thoughtfully designed to help you establish a practice, and guide you through the process of becoming more familiar with your mind. Lots of talks, different types of meditation, it's great.

Thanks for spending these minutes with me. I hope this was useful, if not, you can reclaim your 5 minutes back at the counter.