Why you procrastinate on things you actually want to do

Below, Dr. Itamar Shatz shares five key insights from his new book, Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop. Itamar is an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge University. He helps people understand why they procrastinate and how to stop, using a practical system that he developed from more than 500 scientific studies. What’s the Big Idea? Procrastination isn’t a failure of time management or a sign that we don’t care. It’s a psychological tug-of-war between what we intend to do and what feels easier or better right now. To stop procrastinating, we need to understand what’s driving our particular pattern of delay and use strategies that address the real cause, rather than relying on willpower. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Shatz himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. Procrastinators care more, not less. Procrastination involves an intention-action gap between the beneficial things we mean to do and the problematic things we actually do. You’ve probably experienced this yourself if there was ever something you truly wanted and intended to do, but found yourself putting off, again and again, each time…