WHEN YOU'RE A PRODUCTIVE PROCRASTINATOR

Learn why your home is never cleaner than when you're on deadline. Plus: How to break the “I'll-do-it-later” habit.

- NAOMI BARR

DESPITE OUR to-do lists and good intentions, it can happen to the best of us: We scroll through Instagram instead of writing that work memo, dash to the drugstore on the way to the party to get a birthday card, spend April 14 swimming in tax forms we’re going to finish, we swear... as soon as we scrub down the stove, and maybe clean the oven while we're at it.

If you're repeating this pattern habitually—avoiding the thing you really need to do and keeping busy while you don’t do it—then you may be among the estimated 1 in 4 adults experts call “chronic procrastinators.” The habit has nothing to do with laziness, poor time management, or incompetence. (Leonardo da Vinci may have taken 16 years to paint it, but when he was finished, it was the Mona Lisa.) Psychologists and researchers have some theories about why we may be prone to this often self-defeating behavior, as well as actionable advice on how to handle it. Seize the moment and read on.

Why We Procrastinate

One leading theory is fairly straightforward: We put off tasks because we're not sufficiently motivated. Human motivation is a complicated equation that involves four factors, says Alexander Rozental, PhD, who researches procrastination at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. They are (1) the amount of deadline pressure we're under, (2) the value we place on the task—that is, the reward we'll get when we complete it, (3) our confidence that we can accomplish it, and (4) how impulsive and distractible we are, meaning how likely we are to fall down rabbit holes of rabbit videos.

Another school of thought blames feelings—specifically, unpleasant ones—and our desire to avoid them.