Pragmatic procrastination
Why the smarter you are, the better you procrastinate and a pragmatic way out
The wrong problem
The things you procrastinate on are rarely the hardest things on your list.
Most people think that procrastination is a discipline problem, maybe a lack of willpower. That “I’m lazy”, “bad at time management”, that “I didn’t organize myself well enough.”
So you try harder, build better systems, set artificial deadlines and you still procrastinate. Yet you can sit down the night before a deadline and produce in four hours what you’ve been postponing for weeks. It's clear that the common understanding points at the wrong problem and, therefore, leads to no solution.
I propose a different perspective, a pragmatic approach.
Procrastination is not an action. It’s the avoidance of an action. And the reason you avoid an action is because it brings up something uncomfortable. The real problem with procrastination, then, is discomfort.
“Why”, you think, “I know what I need to do and I just need to do it.”
If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that what you’re trying to do triggers a situation you don’t want to be in, a conflict you’re resisting, a skill you’re not good at, a job that takes away time from something more exciting, and all of that is uncomfortable, a threat. Your brain is designed to manage threats and the most effective way to do so is by avoiding them.
That’s why you can have the capabilities, the time, good planning and a good reason to do it, but if the work brings up more discomfort than you can handle, you avoid it.
The procrastination mechanism: avoiding discomfort
You have a full day ahead and nothing scheduled until noon. You could sit down with that idea you’ve been putting off for weeks, work on the strategy doc, the investor update.
But by lunch time you’ve checked in with three people, opened ten new tabs, scheduled two calls and saved a Twitter thread. You feel busy but also self-aware of what you haven’t done. The guilt is more comfortable than silence, sitting with uncertainty, or being alone with your thoughts.
So you avoid it. You don’t have the capacity for it yet.
You’ve been working for months with the product manager and there’s been no strategy nor growth. You know you have to let them go. You run a performance review, give them a probation period, onboard someone else to support them even though you know it won’t work.
You know the damage of delaying this decision but justifying it feels more comfortable than everything that comes with letting them go. Managing internal comms, coordinating the paperwork, and especially, facing the fact that you hired wrong and now have to go through a months-long hiring process to hopefully not find yourself in the same situation again.
So you avoid it. You don’t have the capacity for it yet.
You’ve been invited to an event and you appreciate the invitation, it’s a good opportunity, in fact, you should probably go. It’s good for the business, it’s good for you. But you ghost them instead. You feel horrible for how you managed it so you don’t understand why you did so bad when you knew what you had to do. The discomfort of going to the event is greater than the ghosting.
Most often you have a hard time seeing it because it’s masked underneath a voice telling you “You should be able to do this.” “You’re being silly.” “You should just push through.” But that voice invalidates the reality of being the center of attention, answering questions, being disliked, giving explanations for leaving early, putting on a mask. You’d rather ghost and disappoint one person than bear the discomfort of that situation.
So you avoid it. You don’t have the capacity for it yet.
If you look at the ways you procrastinate, the problem is in what the work forces you to face.
What procrastination does is route the discomfort toward anything that offers relief.
You want to do A
A is uncomfortable
You do B instead
Sometimes the work is as simple as replying to a message, filling a form, sending an email or reading a doc. And the avoidance is as simple as opening Youtube, scrolling Twitter, or doing chores.
But others it’s harder to catch. It looks productive and defensible.
Procrastination traps
That’s how a deadline overrides procrastination. The discomfort of failing someone is greater than the discomfort of doing the work.
That’s also how productive procrastination works. You procrastinate on one task by doing another more tolerable one that you were also avoiding.
The smarter you are, the more convincing your avoidance becomes.
Action traps
Prioritizing urgent tasks over important ones because urgency justifies the avoidance
Infinite planning or research, generating a sense of progress without the discomfort of action
Comparison and benchmarking, staying close to the work without risking judgment
Preparation in isolation, remaining in the space before action indefinitely
Metawork, optimizing systems, workflows, or yourself as a proxy for doing the actual work
Signaling, announcing, networking, talking about it, calling it work in progress without working on it
Avoidance through stimulation, opening Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit, filling every gap with a call, a check-in, or busy-work instead of the work
Chasing the next shiny thing before finishing the current one
Refusing to iterate using either/or and binary arguments instead of testing and letting it evolve
Using false dilemmas like debating between many starting points to avoid starting the work
Mental traps
Making the problem bigger or more complex so it becomes too big to start
Existential questioning, “maybe this isn’t for me” that cannot be resolved
Telling yourself you should be able to push through instead of finding a smaller version of the work
Telling yourself “just do it” or it’s not that bad yet to change your approach
Believing there’s only one acceptable outcome while not working toward it
Treating the goal as something to protect rather than pursue
Questioning whether to raise or lower your standards instead of doing the work
Self-shaming and self-criticism to the point of paralysis
Ruminating on past decisions instead of acting on present ones
Waiting for clarity, the right conditions, or permission
Keeping the goal deliberately vague or engaging in many projects to preserve optionality instead of focusing on the work
None of them are the work. So how do you do the work?
The pragmatic approach
Given that procrastination is the avoidance of an action, the only way out is to do the action.
The pragmatic approach works this way:
You want to do A
A is uncomfortable at full size
The answer is A1, a version of A at your capacity
A1 builds toward A
Think of it like exercise. You can only improve cardio by doing cardio, or build stronger hamstrings by training hamstrings. If you do B, you won’t train A. If A exceeds your capacity, you’ll either fail or injure yourself.
The goal is to find the version of the work that fits inside your capacity. Not B, that’s zero reps on A, but a smaller version of A. One rep, one set or one session of the work at your capacity.
The smarter you are, the better you become at convincing yourself that B is A1.
The pragmatic approach to the strategy doc, the investor update, writing or sitting down with an idea is a small thirty minutes focus block, an outline or one paragraph.
If you need to have a difficult conversation, it’s to send the message to schedule the call. If you need to go to events, the answer is to have a coffee with one person instead of forcing yourself into a room with a hundred.
Discomfort is part of the work. And by virtue of doing the work, you build the capacity to bear the discomfort more easily.
Doing the work
The things you procrastinate on are hard. The way out is through honesty. Honest with your traps and your capacity.
What’s one rep, one set or one session of the work you’re actually capable of?
Everything I write comes from the work I do with founders and engineers at https://inner.foundation as their coach and all the people I have the honor to talk to.
I’d love to hear your story and learn what parts of this post resonated with you the most.
great post! i think that the most important takeaway from the whole post is "just do the thing, even if its a small or simplified version of it".
One rule I try to always go by is: even if i'm having a really bad day where I can't find my focus, I'll allow myself to work on something for only 30 minutes and then drop it and do whatever else I want. The usual outcome is that I do find my focus and end up putting in the work, since I was able to start with small steps and build confidence.