A brief history of procrastination – and how you can overcome it | The Formula To Life With Hannah Fry

Back in 1830, what would later become one of French literature’s most famous novels was just a whole load of blank pages. A year earlier, Victor Hugo had been commissioned to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but instead had frittered the time away with other pursuits, and now his publishers had just given him a six-month deadline to finish the book.

To force himself to knuckle down, he locked away his own clothes – apparently apart from a large knitted shawl – leaving him unable to go out in public, meaning he had no other option than to stay home and write. His sartorial strategy worked: The Hunchback of Notre Dame was published two weeks ahead of schedule on 14 January 1831.

Short attention span, procrastination or just simply not in the right mood: we all sometimes fall foul of not being able to motivate ourselves to complete a certain task at hand. Piers Steel – one of the world’s most foremost researchers on the science of procrastination – defines it as “willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off”. Over the millennia, Hugo is far from the only person to find himself at the mercy of overthinking rather than doing. There are references to procrastination found in some of the earliest records available, stretching back more than 3,000 years, and mentions of it can also be found in early Roman and Greek military documents.

The ancient Egyptians felt the stress of a colleague dawdling through the team’s workload, as a 1400BC hieroglyphic translated by Ronald Leprohon, an Egyptologist at the University of Toronto, was revealed to say: “Friend, stop putting off work and allow us to go home in good time.”

About 700 years later, Hesiod, one of the first recorded poets of Greek literature, also warned against dilly-dallying in his writings in Works and Days: “Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.” Meanwhile, three centuries on, in the 700-verse Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, declares: “Undisciplined, vulgar, stubborn, wicked, malicious, lazy, depressed, and procrastinating; such an agent is called Tamasic.” Tamasic people, it noted, rather than being reborn, instead go to hell.

Procrastination might have existed wherever work was required, but some people believe it may be getting worse. There are a few factors that give credence to this view. The modern world – filled with social media, apps and internet-enabled phones – has been deliberately designed by teams of exceptionally clever people with the single-minded aim of capturing and holding our attention. As Bo Burnham put it in his song Welcome to the Internet:

“Have a look around / Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found / Could I interest you in everything? / All of the time?”

If we have more distractions than ever, there has also been a profound change to the work we do. The tasks we are focusing on day-to-day are no longer matters of survival as they perhaps once were – and it’s much easier to procrastinate if your existence doesn’t depend on the job at hand. And easier still if you can just quickly nip on a website to do some research about your next holiday, or muck around on email to your friend, all while looking to the outside like you’re working. Is it any wonder businesses are concerned about the phenomenon known as “cyberloafing”?

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Feel free to enjoy JoP – the joys of procrastination – with Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold6 as the Galaxy AI features mean multitasking and organising your life are all a simple swipe away. From Transcript Assist, which can easily turn meetings into detailed notes, colour-coded for each speaker, to Note Assist, which boasts a spot-on translation service as well as making things look aesthetically pleasing through creative formatting on any notes jotted down with the S Pen, all the tools needed to get a job done well are in your palm. There’s no guarantee it can sort your whole life out, but it’s a very good place to start.

In the past, the prevailing belief was that procrastination was to do with self-control and poor time management, but more recently a number of studies frame it instead as a problem with controlling our emotions.

A 2013 study found that participants who procrastinated were actually managing negative moods around the task – whether that was because it was boring them, they were stressed at finding it difficult, or they were fearful of failure – and chose the short-term gain of neglecting the task in order to minimise their distress, rather than completing what was required of them. Unfortunately, that moment of relief which registered when people did the procrastinating, makes them more likely to do it again.

And you can see how the vicious circle continues; we procrastinate to avoid negative feelings, but end up feeling worse because of it.

So how can we fix it? Well, tech may be part of the problem, but it also offers a solution. For instance, smartphone apps such as Forest, which encourage users to plant a virtual tree when they want to stay focused – browsing elsewhere on the phone will see the tree die – have been specifically designed to overcome procrastination. Generative AI can even be used to overcome creative blocks.

Ultimately, don’t beat yourself up if you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of vintage reality TV memes instead of finishing a presentation. The key here is a bit of self-compassion and to allow yourself the space to procrastinate. An occasional bout of distraction can enhance self-worth, foster positive emotions such as curiosity and personal initiative and, perhaps conversely, boost motivation. And when you do get back to work, start with the smallest possible task there is to ease yourself into the discomfort. And remember, if it’s taken the entirety of series three of Suits or two hours on TikTok to get the job done: a delayed journey still gets to the same destination, in the end.