How to Beat Procrastination
June 8, 2025 Self-improvement
This article is heavily inspired by How to Beat Procrastination — LessWrong from Lukeprog; indeed, I even stole the article’s name. This is my attempt to summarize, refine, and add personal experience on, “how to beat procrastination”. For all references kindly see the original post.
Let me start off by giving a little context, and what it is I’m interested in. I often think about three overlapping phenomena: motivation, akrasia, and procrastination. Here I’ll define motivation as a state of lacking the desire or drive to act, akrasia as acting against your better judgment, and procrastination as the act of delaying or postponing tasks (usually irrationally). Although these phenomena are distinct enough to deserve their own word (and separate article), I believe for this piece of writing it will suffice to disregard akrasia (and let one swap out lack of motivation with akrasia).
Evidence suggests procrastination seems like a lack of motivation, and can roughly be encapsulated with the following equation:
Keep in mind that this equation is only an attempt to concretize the abstract notion of motivation. It is, perhaps unfortunately, not yet the case that we can measure a halving of, for example, impulsiveness, and subsequently experience a doubling of motivation. Small intermezzo of elementary algebra: To increase motivation, we need to increase the numerator (things above the line) and decrease the denominator (things below the line).
Let’s start with the expectancy of success of the task one might procrastinate on. Two main techniques seem to reliably work for increasing your optimism for success.
Firstly, make use of success spirals. Effectively, when we achieve something, we gain confidence, and we want to keep going. Thus, we can design a series of meaningful, challenging but achievable goals, and then achieve them. To give a concrete example, let’s say you want to run a half-marathon in 3 months. Previously, you have struggled to stay consistent with running. Thus, your expectancy of success of you consistently training for 3 months and finishing the half-marathon is low. To combat this, you (or ChatGPT) can make many increasingly difficult, intermediate subgoals to get you used to winning. These will be very personal! For some their first subgoal might be running 10 km, and for someone else it might be jogging 1 km. As long as you spiral into a state of success. Once you start succeeding, it becomes a habit. Once something is a habit, it becomes extremely difficult to get rid of it.
Secondly, realize optimism and pessimism are both contagious. When you surround yourself with pessimistic people, you become pessimistic, and vice versa. Sign up to the thing where people are excited about doing the thing that you want to do but are procrastinating on. Perhaps more superficially, but definitely helpful at times: Watch an inspirational movie, read an inspirational biography, or listen to motivational speakers. Sometimes we need that bit of extrinsic motivation, as long as it’s not our only source of motivation.
At first, value seems slightly hard to increase purposefully. It’s hard to be motivated to do something that doesn’t have much value to us, or worse, is downright unpleasant. However, much of this is constructed and relative. If a task is boring, make it more difficult, right up to the point where it matches your skill level, and you will experience the task as more valuable.
More generally, one must find meaning. Can you backtrack most of what you do up the chain to your axioms of meaning, so that it’s connected to something you care about for its own sake? For example, if you run today you will get fitter so you have more energy so you feel better so you have a more fruitful life so {insert anything that you value deeply}.
I have less to say about impulsiveness and delay. Frankly, they feel a little vague to me, although I recognize the importance of them as an obstacle of motivation.
Regarding impulsiveness, commit now to doing stuff. When you feel particularly motivated, do a bug hunt, use RescueTime, get inspired by others getting lots done, and search how to make it easier to do the thing you are procrastinating on. More generally, close off tempting alternatives for when you feel less motivated. Realize your feelings are fleeting, and that you can set yourself up for success if you take control when you’re feeling good. More examples include making failure painful by setting up some punishment when you won’t do something. For example, a friend of mine and I agreed to buy the other dinner if we don’t write something every week (since we’d like to make writing a habit).
Regarding delay, I have even less to say. Try to make it a habit to do things you don’t want to do immediately. Procrastination ironically seems to have a reinforcing effect. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised at this, given that the longer we procrastinate, the more it becomes a habit. The more it becomes a habit, the more we do it.
Finally, I’d like to touch upon how important it is to have enough energy, as it seems to make every variable in the above equation change for the better. Sleep enough, exercise regularly, eat healthy, and drink lots of water. Also, when you’re tired, go for a walk or meditate instead of checking your phone.