Posted by You’ve got an important project to tackle. You know you need to start. And yet, somehow, you’re twenty minutes deep into LinkedIn, watching colleagues celebrate their latest wins. By the time you close the app, your own work feels both overwhelming and pointless, and you’re still no closer to getting started.
It’s easy to think of procrastination as a character flaw that needs willpower, grit and determination to overcome.
But what if it turned out that your environment, your social context, and the people around you are setting you up to procrastinate before you’ve even had time to think about it? This week, I want to explore how the social side of procrastination can either add fuel to your delays or help you overcome them.
The comparison trap
Let’s start with that LinkedIn example. Every day, our feeds are filled with curated snapshots of other people’s successes, and suddenly your own goals feel a bit pathetic in comparison.
Your brain’s doing a number on you here: you see someone else’s polished final product – a great new website, their perfect presentation, a flawless panel appearance at an event you didn’t even know about – and you compare it to where you are right now. It’s apples and oranges; you’re comparing your messy starting point to someone else’s glossy finish line.
So the end result is that you don’t even begin. What’s the point when so many other people are already doing it better?
This comparison trap is particularly vicious because it dresses itself up as motivation. You might tell yourself you’re ‘doing research’ or ‘looking for inspiration’ when you’re still scrolling after half an hour, but actually, you’re paralysing yourself with ridiculously high standards before you’ve even got going.
But you have to remember the reality here: you never see the behind-the-scenes struggle. You didn’t see the first eight terrible versions of the website, where nothing worked. You didn’t watch someone stay up till 3am working on their slide deck (or see their panic attack 10 minutes before the presentation). You weren’t actively looking for events to attend, let alone sending email after email trying to get on a discussion panel. You only see the highlight reel, and it’s setting you up to procrastinate (as well as tapdancing on your envy buttons).
When starting feels harder than the task itself
There’s a version of procrastination that goes beyond delay or avoidance, where you don’t just put something off, you freeze completely. It’s called task paralysis, and it’s worth naming separately, because the fix is different.
You might have noticed it kicking in if a task ever felt too big or too high-stakes. Your brain, faced with too many possible starting points, simply refuses to pick one. If you’re a perfectionist, this is really common, and the comparison trap I described above is a classic trigger. You’ve already decided your output needs to match someone else’s polished finished product, so the bar already feels impossibly high before you’ve typed a single word.
The most effective way to beat this is to make the first step almost stupidly small. Not ‘write the report’, but something like ‘open a blank document and write one sentence,’ or rather than ‘sort out my finances’, try ‘login to my bank account.’ When you’re paralysed, the goal isn’t progress, it’s just breaking the freeze. Once you’ve done that and you start to get into it, momentum tends to build on its own.
Why deadline culture isn’t helping
Something that I think is surprising is the effect the workplace culture has on procrastination. Is it making things worse?
Lots of businesses (or clients) have become addicted to artificial urgency. Everything’s a high priority, every email needs an immediate response, and there’s a really strange (not to mention unhealthy) badge of honour around pulling all-nighters to meet impossible deadlines.
The problem is that when everything’s urgent, nothing really is. Your brain learns to ignore the signals, because if you responded to every ‘urgent’ request straight away, you’d never get anything done! So instead, you develop a kind of urgency fatigue and tune out until something becomes genuinely critical, which then breaks through the fog.
Of course, I know there are plenty of people who work best under the pressure of a deadline, but is deadline culture rewarding them? That person who left everything until the last minute gets praised for their ability to work under pressure, with no one acknowledging that they pretty much created that pressure themselves.
If you’re in an environment that consistently rewards last-minute scrambling, it’s no wonder that you might procrastinate.
The accountability paradox
I often urge my coaching clients to share their goals or to work with an accountability buddy, and on the whole, I think this works brilliantly. But for some people, the pressure of being accountable (and of other peoples’ expectations) is exactly the thing that causes procrastination problems.
If you’re struggling to get going or make progress, whilst I still think telling people your goals is a great idea, it could be that you’re choosing the wrong type of accountability – like setting goals that are too rigid, or sharing them with someone who doesn’t necessarily understand the challenges involved.
At times like these working with peer networks and mentors can really help you get over a hump: getting support rather than judgement, from people who are already familiar with what you’re trying to achieve. Don’t set absolutes (“I’m going to do X, Y and Z by Friday”), but instead, commit to working on specific tasks for set amounts of time to make some progress. After all, something is always better than nothing!
Environmental triggers you might not notice
People rely on their physical and digital environment to send them signals about what’s important and what can wait. The problem is, loads of these signals are working against you.
Take a look at your desk. If it’s cluttered with half-finished projects, unopened mail, and other random crap, then your brain gets the message that nothing’s really important enough to focus on, it’s all just blended into a weird background noise.
Or consider your digital set up. Research shows that it takes around 20 minutes to regain your focus after you hear a notification ping, so if your phone buzzes every few minutes, or you hear emails coming in constantly, every interruption chips away at your concentration, and sends a subtle message that whatever you’re working on right now can wait.
You might think you’re procrastinating because you lack willpower, but actually, your environment is making it nearly impossible to concentrate.
Creating a procrastination-proof environment
It’s not a lost cause though: once you recognise how your environment influences your procrastination, you can start to change it.
Turn off your notifications and switch your phone to silent for a start, and pick a time to check your emails/texts, rather than dealing with them as you hear them come in. Mute people on your social feeds that make you feel anything other than motivated. Question deadlines that don’t seem realistic to find out if there’s wiggle room, or if you’re the one who usually leaves it till the last minute, explore ways of breaking that habit.
Be selective about who you share your goals with. Instead of broadcasting your intentions to everyone, choose one or two people you trust, and remember that progress is rarely linear, so if you do get obstacles, find ways to push through rather than distracting yourself to avoid the issue.
Not all of these changes are easy, so start with the low-hanging fruit and take it from there!
Getting a grip
The bottom line is that procrastination usually isn’t a willpower problem: it’s an environment problem. Change the conditions, and the behaviour tends to follow.
What’s one change you could make today that would make it easier to tackle that task you’ve been putting off?