A client is sitting across the virtual table, visibly squirming. Weeks ago, he promised — enthusiastically, urgently, this-matters-for-my-whole-business urgently — to do this one task. Since then, he has done an impressive amount of everything else. Just not that.

Another client has been promising herself the treadmill for weeks now. She has not yet to set foot on it. Not even once.

Procrastination — five syllables, and somehow every one of them sounds like an accusation. I try not to use the word, in coaching or in life, because it does real damage for no real benefit. Call someone a procrastinator and you’ve filed them under lazy, or not a go-getter, case closed. And yet people do it to themselves constantly. “I procrastinate!” they announce, like a diagnosis. “I’m a procrastinator,” like a personality type.

Not just those two — all of us procrastinate sometimes, some more than others. When a client uses the word about themselves, I ask one question: “Have you ever accomplished anything in your life on time?” You already know the answer. Everyone does. So let’s quit the labelling. Calling yourself a procrastinator doesn’t let you off the hook.  It just gives you permission to keep being one. Try this instead: think of the moments you weren’t procrastinating, even small seemingly insignificant moments, and ask yourself what was different. Try it now, actually — I’ll wait.

One clarification, because these two get mixed up a lot — rescheduling and procrastination. If you skipped the dishes last night because you were exhausted, and did them the next morning, that’s rescheduling, not procrastination. That’s just Tuesday. I define procrastination as perpetual delay — leave the dishes for days, quietly working around them each morning, and that is procrastination.

The tasks that get procrastinated tend to have a few things in common, if you look closely. They’re harder. They take more effort. You might not even know exactly how to start them, or they need a kind of concentration you’re not ready for — just yet. And often, they’re open-ended: no fixed moment they have to happen by. Which is exactly why they never do.

That’s not coincidence. It’s not a character flaw, either. It’s just your brain, doing exactly the job it was built for.

It’s not laziness, it’s present bias

Economists Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin have a name for this: present bias. We’re wired to weigh an immediate reward — relief, ease, a good scroll — far more heavily than a future one, even a much bigger one. It’s especially vicious on tasks with no fixed deadline, because nothing ever forces the decision today, which means “right now” wins the argument again tomorrow. And the day after that. And, unfortunately, the day after that too. My client knows, logically, that the business task matters more in six months than whatever felt easier to reach for today. In the moment, though, logic doesn’t get a vote — you’re negotiating with a version of yourself that’s built to discount the future, especially when nothing is pinning you down to an actual moment to act.

What actually helps

A few things reliably help. And watching my clients try them, separately and together, I’ve come to think they work best as a set — not as a menu you pick one from.

The first is reducing friction: removing the small points of resistance where “later” usually wins its case. Fewer decisions to make in the moment means fewer chances to talk yourself out of it.

The second is pegging the task to a specific time, on purpose, in advance — not “sometime this week,” but an actual hour on an actual day. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer found that simple “if-then” plans, decided ahead of time, more than double the odds you’ll actually follow through, compared with just hoping willpower shows up when it’s needed.

Let’s call her Deborah, to protect her privacy. Every year, she signed up for a yearly gym membership, ambitious to get fitter, and told herself that paying up front would motivate her — otherwise, what a waste of money. For a few years running, she went a handful of times, then gave up. The same Deborah has been going to Pilates three to four times a week for the past couple of years. Same person. Same discipline. Wildly different outcome. At the gym, she could go any time, which is another way of saying she could always go tomorrow. Nothing was pinned down, and nothing removed the friction of deciding. The Pilates studio does both jobs at once: booking ahead pegs her to a specific time, and the cancellation fee — plus a class she just has to show up and follow — removes the friction of deciding what to do, and whether today’s the day.

The third is making the task itself concrete, as few decisions left inside it as possible. For a small task, that’s often just naming a clear next action. For a bigger, open-ended project, it means breaking it down to the task level and giving each piece its own time and an instruction that leaves nothing to interpret. “Work on the marketing report” is vague enough to avoid for a decade. “Pull last quarter’s numbers from the database, Tuesday at 10am” is not. Same idea applies to the treadmill: not “exercise more,” but sneakers and socks laid out the night before, and the workout booked for whenever is genuinely easiest.

One more thing helps, almost as a bonus round: how you treat yourself when the system slips anyway, because it will. Fuschia Sirois, who’s researched this closely, found something that surprised me the first time I read it: people who are kind to themselves after procrastinating are less likely to procrastinate again, more than people who go the self-flagellation route. So the useful move after a slip isn’t harsher self-talk, it’s a kinder one. Not because you deserve a pass, but because kindness gets you back to the task faster than shame ever does.

Neither of my clients has this fully solved. Both are making progress, though — even if it isn’t steady yet, and progress like this rarely is, not before the new behaviour has had time to become habit. I lean more on the system now, for myself and for my clients: build in fewer moments where “later” gets a vote, instead of counting on willpower alone. Willpower still has to show up. It just doesn’t have to be the only thing you’re relying on, or working as hard, once the structure is carrying its share.

Related reading: if this kind of delay has crept beyond your to-do list and into bigger life decisions too, Waiting for Nothing to Happen goes there.