What Is Procrastination?

Take our Procrastination Test

Find a therapist near me

Procrastination is a valid—and necessary—way to manage tasks and deadlines.

Rest, procrastination, and time-outs are essential parts of motivation and creativity.

Sadly, procrastination is overwhelmingly treated as a problem or a pathological state.

Luckily, you can engage your procrastination abilities intentionally and access your deep creativity.

In my series of posts about the motivational emotion of anxiety, I’ve focused on a valid and purposeful approach to motivation (following Mary Lamia’s seminal work) that is focused on deadlines but is unfortunately called procrastination—as opposed to motivation that is focused on tasks, which is mistakenly considered by many to be the only correct way to get things done. (If you’d like to know whether deadline-oriented procrastination is your preferred motivational style, see the short checklists in this post.)

We’re usually told that procrastination is a character flaw that we must wrestle with, while endless books and coaches sell us plans for how to stop procrastinating, knuckle down, and complete our tasks in the allegedly right way.

But what if procrastination is a perfectly valid way for many of us to do our best work? What if deadline-oriented procrastination is equal to—and sometimes more useful than—task orientation?

The pathology paradigm blocks our view of procrastination’s genius

Procrastination is viewed by most people (and sadly, by most procrastinators themselves) as a form of pathology that needs to be fixed. Usually, natural procrastinators are trained (or shamed and pushed) to become task-oriented, which interferes with their natural ways of working and their innate motivational capacities.

In my work, I’ve found that I can often identify natural procrastinators by their continual sense of shame, of being “wrong,” and of not........

© Psychology Today