Why do I procrastinate, even when I know it will cost me?

You were meant to start the report at 16:00. You open your phone "just for a moment", answer a message, watch a video, and when you look up it's 17:10 and the report still hasn't been started. If you keep asking yourself why do I procrastinate, this is what it looks like.

Procrastinating is deliberately delaying something you intended to do, even though you know the delay will hurt you. The Spanish dictionary of the RAE sums it up in two verbs: "to defer, to put off".

What procrastination is, and what it isn't

The definition most quoted in psychology comes from Piers Steel, a researcher at the University of Calgary: voluntarily delaying something you planned to do, even though you expect to be worse off for the delay. Two details matter. Nobody is stopping you from starting. And you know it will cost you.

That's why not every delay counts. Leaving an email until tomorrow because you're missing some information today is being organised. Leaving it because you can't face opening it, knowing you'll have less time tomorrow, is procrastinating.

The word comes from Latin: pro, "forward", and crastinus, "of tomorrow". Literally, sending things on to tomorrow.

Why we procrastinate

In 2007 Steel published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin that brought together 691 correlations from studies on procrastination. These were the best predictors:

• The task feels unpleasant. The more you dislike it, the more you put it off.
• The reward is far away. An exam in a month weighs little against a series tonight.
• You don't trust yourself to do it well.
• Impulsiveness and being easily distracted.

Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl added another piece in a 2013 paper: procrastinating is a way of fixing your mood in the short term. The task makes you feel bad (bored, anxious, afraid of doing it badly) and putting it off brings relief in the moment. Your future self pays the price, and right then that self feels far away. Seen this way, procrastination has more to do with how you manage your feelings than with how you manage your time.

It's very common. According to Steel's review, between 80% and 95% of university students procrastinate, and between 15% and 20% of adults do it chronically. More than 95% of people who procrastinate would like to do it less.

If it happens to you

Understanding why you do it helps, but it doesn't sit you down in front of the report. You'll find the concrete steps in how to stop procrastinating. And if putting things off blocks you every day and makes you very anxious, talking it through with a psychologist can help.

What Ultimatum does

Ultimatum is an app for when you know what you have to do but don't do it: you choose what you'll do and when, leave a guarantee (between €0 and €20, a few days without TikTok or Instagram, or both) and prove it with a photo taken at that moment. If you keep your word, you lose nothing; if the photo check is unsure, a person reviews it and nothing is charged automatically. It isn't out yet, so join the beta.