Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change

you can delegate the activity but not the responsibility; you can share the praise but not the blame.

Let go of the misconception that our motivational state must match the task at hand. In fact, social psychologists have demonstrated that attitudes follow behaviors more than (or at least as much as) behaviors follow attitudes. When you start to act on your intention as intended, you will see your attitude and motivation change.

the most finite, limited resource in our lives is time. We only have a finite amount of time to live. Why waste it?

The main idea behind affective forecasting is that we have a bias when we predict future mood (affective) states in relation to positive or negative events. For example, a couple of years after winning a lottery, the winners were about as happy as they were before their win, despite the general affective forecast that they would be much happier if only they could win the lottery. This is also true of people who have suffered debilitating accidents. A few years after the accident, despite long-term effects such as paralysis, accident victims were about as happy as they were before this life-changing event—again, despite the general affective forecast that they would be much unhappier.

As I listened to psychologists present their research papers and therapists talk about the grieving process, I left each session more convinced of the importance of dealing with procrastination as a symptom of an existential malaise, a malaise that can only be addressed by our deep commitment to authoring the stories of our lives. To author our own lives, we have to be an active agent in our lives, not a passive participant making excuses for what we are not doing. When we learn to stop needless, voluntary delay in our lives, we live more fully. It is time to make a commitment to engaging in your life, achieving your goals, and enjoying the journey. Time is too precious to waste.

Meteorologists seem to be better at forecasting the weather (at least in the short term) than we are at forecasting our own mood in the future.

My current motivational state does not need to match my intention in order to act.

When we learn to stop needless, voluntary delay in our lives, we live more fully.