What Is Procrastination?

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Procrastination can reflect low conscientiousness, high neuroticism, or both.

Avoiding a task provides immediate relief, reinforcing the urge to put it off.

Starting with a laughably small goal can challenge your predictions about the task.

Have you ever put off a task for weeks, only to discover that it took you just 15 minutes when you finally sat down to do it? In addition to procrastinating on big, complicated projects, many of us also put off smaller tasks like scheduling an appointment, responding to an email, filling out a form, or making a phone call. Seeing these tasks on your to-do list is almost guaranteed to make you feel guilty, but that still doesn’t seem to get you started.

Then, when you finally do the task, you feel silly that it caused so much angst since it only took a few minutes to complete. In fact, many of the things we put off aren’t terribly difficult. So, why do we have so much trouble getting started?

Before we begin, we're responding to what we expect the task will feel like. We imagine it will be tedious or take forever. We might be concerned that it will be........

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