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Habits24 September 2026 · 5 min read

How to stop procrastinating: what actually works, according to research

You’re not lazy. Why we put things off, and six things that make starting easier.

The tax return. The scary email. The chapter you’ve been “about to start” since August. You know exactly what you should be doing, and you’re reorganising your desk instead.

Good news first: you’re not lazy. Procrastination is one of the most studied self-control problems there is, and the research behind it is surprisingly practical.

Why we put things off

A large meta-analysis (Steel, 2007), combining 691 results from earlier studies, found that people procrastinate most when a task feels unpleasant, when the reward is far away, and when they doubt they can do it. Being easily distracted makes it worse.

Psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl (2013) add an important twist: procrastination is a form of short-term mood repair. Avoiding the task makes you feel better right now, and hands the bill to your future self, who now has less time and more stress.

That’s why another to-do app rarely fixes it. The trick is to make starting feel a little less bad, and putting it off a little less easy.

6 things that actually help

1. Shrink the first step

“Write the report” is a mountain. “Open the document and write three ugly sentences” is a step. The first few minutes are usually the worst part; once you’re moving, it tends to feel less awful than you expected. Make the first step so small it would be silly not to do it.

2. Decide when and where

“I’ll do it this week” is a wish. “If it’s Tuesday at 9:00, then I open the tax form before my inbox” is a plan. A review of 94 studies (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006) found that if-then plans like this clearly improve follow-through. A much larger review of 642 tests (Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, 2024) found a smaller effect, but still a real one. Cheap trick, decent odds.

3. Forgive yourself for last time

It sounds soft, but it’s practical. In a study with students (Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett, 2010), those who forgave themselves for procrastinating before their first exam procrastinated less before the next one. It was a small study, but the logic holds: beating yourself up makes the task feel even worse, and feeling worse is exactly what drives avoidance.

4. Bring the reward closer

Distant rewards don’t pull very hard. So add a near one: the good coffee after the first 25 minutes, or a podcast you only allow yourself while doing the boring admin. Pairing a “should” with a “want” (temptation bundling) got people to the gym more often in an experiment by Milkman and colleagues (2014).

5. Make escape a bit harder

Phone in another room. Inbox closed. One tab open. You don’t need iron willpower if distraction is one annoying step further away than the task.

6. Tell someone what you’ll do by when

“The draft goes out by Thursday at 5” is much harder to quietly drop once someone else knows about it. A meta-analysis of 138 studies (Harkin and colleagues, 2016) found that monitoring your progress helps, and helps more when it’s reported to others. Working side by side helps too: in experiments by Carr and Walton (2014), simply feeling that you’re working together made people stick at a task longer. Our guide to co-working and body doubling shows how to set that up.

Procrastination, or something else?

Sometimes putting things off is a signal. Maybe the goal isn’t really yours, the task is too vague, or you’re simply exhausted. And if you’ve been avoiding nearly everything for weeks, feel low or can’t concentrate at all, it can be part of something bigger, like burnout, depression or ADHD. In that case, talk to your doctor. That’s not a failure of willpower either.

Start with someone

The simplest anti-procrastination tool is a person who asks, kindly, “so, did you send it?” Pactful pairs you by hand with someone who’s working on a goal of their own, ideally close by. We’re starting in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. You check in on each other, and the scary task gets a deadline with a face.

Join the waitlist. You can even do it right now, instead of later.

Sources

We checked these sources ourselves. Where a study is small or not peer-reviewed, we say so.

  1. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
  2. Sirois, F., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011
  3. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
  4. Sheeran, P., Listrom, O., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2024). The when and how of planning: Meta-analysis of the scope and components of implementation intentions in 642 tests. European Review of Social Psychology. doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2024.2334563
  5. Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A., & Bennett, S. H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803–808. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029Small survey study with first-year students; shows a link, not proof of cause.
  6. Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A., & Volpp, K. G. M. (2014). Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management Science, 60(2), 283–299. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1784
  7. Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., et al. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025
  8. Carr, P. B., & Walton, G. M. (2014). Cues of working together fuel intrinsic motivation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 169–184. news.stanford.edu/pr/2014/pr-motivation-walton-carr-091514.htmlLink: Stanford press release about the study.