Procrastination
The Basic Idea
Have you ever found yourself desperately rushing to get a task done before a looming deadline, only to ask yourself why you didn’t get started on it sooner?
Unless you always get straight to work the second you sit down at your desk, you have likely been a victim of procrastination. Procrastination isn’t simply putting things off. We often are tempted to tackle small, menial tasks that shouldn’t be our priority before beginning the bigger, more important ones. Common forms of procrastination include cleaning one’s apartment or rearranging one’s desk. Despite the knowledge that we need to get down to business, we often find ways to distract ourselves.
Procrastination isn’t the same as laziness. Instead of inactivity, procrastination causes you to do something else before what is most important or urgent.1 While it is a trap that is incredibly common - behavioral science professor Piers Steel has said that 95% of people procrastinate to some degree1 - it makes us incredibly inefficient.
My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.
– Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
