We Spent a Week Experimenting and Came Away With 29 Truths About Curing Procrastination

Be kind to yourself, be kind to your to-do list, be kind to everyone you work with. That is about all the (chicken-soup) cure for procrastination amounts to.

Last week, the QDaily Lab recruited three veteran procrastinators to spend a week trying to beat the habit with one or more treatments. The three volunteers work in different fields, all of them hotbeds of procrastination: a tech reporter, a designer, and a project manager at an advertising agency.

We tried several methods: the "Tim Cook method," which means getting up at 4 a.m. to work; "painting therapy," in which you stare at a picture in an art museum for an hour to train your attention; the Pomodoro Technique, which treats 25 minutes as one block of focused time; the task-list method, which ranks to-dos by priority; and the time-management method, in which you record where every hour of your day went to spur yourself on.

During that week, the methods worked, more or less. All three volunteers even handed in their experiment reports on time for five working days in a row, and a few fellow sufferers who volunteered for treatment came to see sending us reports as a therapy in itself.

But here is the first cruel truth: a week later, almost nobody, whether among the three volunteers or in the WeChat group of more than 100 fellow sufferers, can say with confidence, "My procrastination is completely cured," or "My procrastination hasn't come back."

So we are back at the stage of "deeply doubting life." But we don't plan to doubt life alone. Drawing on the experiment and some reflection, we'd like to share the following truths with you. We hope they help.

1. Procrastination is really a kind of anxiety

Have you ever noticed that the opposite of one kind of procrastination is not getting everything done with great energy, but adopting a "life was slow back then" attitude? You have no time to see friends: you arrange to visit some of them, and years may pass between visits. You have no time to think: thinking one thing through may take months, with plenty of unrelated tasks in between. You have no time to sort out your wardrobe: buying one piece of clothing may take ages, because you weigh it again and again... Procrastination magnifies our anxiety about time, and "life was slow back then" happens to dilute it.

2. A clumsy way to test whether you really are a procrastinator

From the age of 26, Lyubishchev recorded what he did with his time for the rest of his life (good grief). By his records, a day held roughly 12 to 13 hours of gross time available for what he called non-standard activities: office work, academic work, social work, entertainment and so on. We're not asking you to keep records for a lifetime, but you can start by writing down a few things you consider important. Note that this isn't quite the same as a to-do list; it is more like sorting things out in a diary.

3. Know what you are actually doing, even when you're doing nothing

When we talk about beating procrastination, what we really want is for work time to belong to work and study time to belong to study, so that when you let yourself spend some time doing nothing at all, you won't feel guilty (really, this is very common).

4. Don't expect to become a high-speed working machine

The precondition, and the ultimate goal, of driving procrastination out of your life is to let you live like a normal human being, without so many extra burdens (the anxiety procrastination brings).

5. Getting up early really works, but if you're simply not built for it, forget it

The volunteer who stuck with the Tim Cook method for a week spent the following week unable to wake up properly. Anticipate the backlash: if you normally sleep until noon, forcing yourself up early will only leave you groggy all day, and you will still get nothing done.

6. Sticking with exercise makes more sense

It is kinder than getting up early, and it helps a little: at the very least you have done one thing, so a day of procrastination doesn't end with nothing done at all. But sticking with exercise is not easy either.

7. Don't obsess over how many to-dos you've ticked off

The point of the Pomodoro Technique is to train your ability to stay focused for a stretch of time. After all, collecting twenty tomatoes won't make you a pot of soup, and rather than sitting through Pomodoro sessions that achieve nothing, you're better off getting up, walking around and clearing your head.

8. You have to find the thing that truly sets you on fire

We are not merely rational decision-making machines. We are, basically, bundles of desires, beliefs, impulses and whims. At every moment, competing desires fight for control of our bodies and our thinking. Only something you truly want to do will make you willing to fight your instincts. In a sense, beating procrastination means fighting the nature we were born with.

9. You may be putting it off because you really don't want to do it

If you truly cannot force yourself to be interested, consider changing your job or your goal. If you have announced for three years running that you will sit the graduate school entrance exam, yet haven't even gathered the registration details, then before you put the exam on your procrastination list, ask yourself whether you are taking it because other people think you should, or because you really want to keep studying. Working out these big questions takes time, but it is absolutely worth it.

10. Veteran procrastinators might try fighting poison with poison

That is, list everything you have been putting off. For a moment you will feel utterly hopeless, but, as after a confession, you will also feel a little lighter. One volunteer listed at least 166 items, and said that in doing so she felt she had set down the burden of all these years, because "I always knew I'd put off a lot of things, but I'd never faced them head-on."

11. Try a few tasks you normally can't do at all

Then again, spotting such tasks is a skill in itself. If this one gives you too much grief, skip it.

12. Don't give yourself too many rules at first

Don't rush to set goals like "don't do X" or "no X allowed." Goals that bind you to nothing yet easily stir up negative feelings are often what trigger procrastination. Instead of telling yourself "no reading official accounts before bed tonight," agree with yourself first: "I'll go to sleep after I finish QDaily's report on procrastination."

13. Procrastinators spend too much energy blaming themselves

Or rather, procrastinators blame everything on "I'm a procrastinator." When something goes badly, the easiest, most direct and least stressful excuse is "Oh, it's all because I kept putting it off," rather than "there's a detail here I couldn't figure out for ages." Bravely admitting you may not do something well still beats never getting started, right?

14. A timetable is more trouble than it's worth; what suits you matters most

If you can't manage to plan a timetable, work to a looser schedule. A routine that prescribes "6:00-7:00 get up, 7:30-8:30 read English aloud" eats up a lot of energy. Energy should go into doing things, not into planning time.

15. Take a sensible view of the daily to-do list

The main purpose of the list is not to remind you what you have to do, but to let procrastinators cross off each item as soon as it's done. That eases the mind and makes us feel like people of action, which in turn gives us momentum. It's like learning math as a kid: if you got everything wrong, who would find it fun? Of course, even when you got it right, you might not have found it fun either.

16. There is no perfect plan, so stop thinking about it

If a perfect plan is what keeps you from starting, don't make one next time. A plan you can never finish sounds like this: "I have a perfect kitchen knife, but I have no follow-through, so it can't cut any meat..."

17. Then again, getting started doesn't always mean you've stopped procrastinating

Facing something urgent but busying yourself with trivia first to dodge the real challenge still counts as procrastination. Forcing yourself to work 15 hours a day is not the same as being tough on yourself. You have to work out whether you are spending your time where it should go. Time spent sharpening the axe is not wasted: before you start, think through what the task really is, or you will struggle to work efficiently.

18. So breaking tasks down sensibly is the most reliable approach

Splitting a grand, daunting task into smaller, less frightening ones may be the only solution. In our earlier notes we quoted the advice that "when you don't know how to write an essay, take it bird by bird, and when necessary, wing by wing." In plain terms: when you are truly stuck, start with the easiest point.

19. Well, music matters quite a bit

The right music can fire you up on the spot and help you "act now." That said, it varies from person to person. Some people concentrate better in a café; others can't.

20. Find someone to keep an eye on you, though fellow sufferers may not help

Mutual encouragement within a group that shares a goal does help somewhat, but think very carefully before joining a support group for procrastinators. The fragile, sensitive hearts of procrastinators are most easily cheered by the discovery that "they're all putting it off too," and then they keep putting things off.

21. The deadline is not the prime productive force

Some people believe they unleash astonishing potential every time a deadline looms, and since they always finish at the last minute, putting things off for now does no harm. The problem is that while you are putting things off, you suffer a "double task": you worry anxiously about the work waiting for you, while seeming to put it off with a clear conscience. It's like the feeling of worrying about summer homework as a kid: on the last day of the holidays you finish it and feel free, only to find that just one evening of play remains, because school starts tomorrow.

22. In fact, most people who were still rushing their holiday homework on the last day still struggle with procrastination as adults

We have tried to help procrastinators feel a little less guilty, but procrastination is a flaw, not a hidden virtue. Either you learn to live with it and stop letting it weigh on you, or you beat it and say goodbye.

23. We know there are plenty of self-help books, but don't treat them as a magic cure

We don't recommend that you keep reading books or articles with titles like "The Ten Signs of Procrastination," "The Psychology of Procrastination" or "The End of Procrastination." They will only teach you half-understood academic jargon to describe flaws you already know about, and stir up fears that something worse is wrong with you. Such reading only makes people anxious and self-loathing, and does nothing to help them beat procrastination. Besides, plenty of people's efforts stop at bookmarking these articles.

24. One method that may not work so well: finding a role model

Rather than hunting for the perfect theory or tool for beating procrastination, first seek help from people around you with exceptional drive. Their energy may inspire you, but it may also send you down the road to giving up on yourself.

25. Never make friends with someone who has beaten procrastination; they're capable of anything!

This is only a joke, of course. What we mean is that if you set beating procrastination as a goal, achieving it must bring an extraordinary sense of accomplishment.

26. If you run into group procrastination

This is where the old saying applies: "When poor, look after yourself; when successful, look after the whole world." Making sure everyone clearly understands what is required is the key to curing group procrastination. But "the bird that sticks its head out gets shot" is no doubt deeply ingrained, and unless you're the boss, nobody wants to shout "So what's next??!!" in a boring meeting. Still, if you happen to be the one who gets it, you can (try to) help everyone grasp what the shared goal actually is. If you're not the one who gets it, then... there's not much anyone can do about such a mess.

27. If you run into emotional procrastination

We've left this symptom until late because we see it as the ultimate form of "I don't know why I don't want to do it, I just don't." The human heart is unfathomable, so how would we know what to do about emotions! As a cure for the root cause, staying in a decent mood and being a bit more optimistic and cheerful seems to help with a lot of things.

28. We're almost done!

If you've read this far, congratulations: you have wasted another five minutes of your life on useless chicken soup. Procrastinating now and then is nothing to fear, just as not everything you do needs to mean something. Do something useless once in a while, and don't stress about it.

29. Goodbye!

Stop reading this article and go do what you're supposed to be doing. No amount of anti-procrastination methodology works as well as finishing the thing right now.

One more thing: this weekend we'll publish a complete guide to tools for beating procrastination, so remember to come back and read it! And remember to put it to use once you have!